Skylight Books Podcast Series

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Eileen Myles, "FOR NOW" w/ Adam Fitzgerald

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.
 
For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

 

Myles is in conversation with Adam Fitzgerald, professor of creative writing at Rutgers University.

 

This episode was recorded on Monday, October 19 during a live Crowdcast event hosted by Skylight Books. Visit us at www.crowdcast.io/skylightbooks to RSVP for future events.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, "THE MOON BOOK" w/ Pam Grossman

We all know the moon. We all have a relationship with it. The earliest people obeyed her orbit, timed their months and holidays and celebrations and agriculture to the moon; the echoes of that system are still visible today, though the connection to the moon is often forgotten.

Sarah Faith Gottesdiener is the leader of a movement to remind us of that lineage, guiding our rhythms and our sleep, our energy and our emotions, reminding us of our humanity and our magic. In her self-published Many Moons Workbooks and Lunar Journals, as well as her sold-out classes, she has guided over 60,000 folks to a deeper relationship with the moon, and through it, with themselves.

The Moon Book will be an informative and comprehensive guide to lunar living, incorporating radical, self-empowering, and magical tools and resources for the beginner and experienced lunar-follower alike. Depending on where we are in our lives, depending on what we are feeling or what is happening around us, the moon allows us a space to invite ritual into our daily lives. The Moon Book will provide a framework on how to utilize the entire lunar cycle holistically, while offering ways for the reader to develop a personal relationship with their own cycles—energetic, personal, and emotional—through the lens of the moon’s phases.

 

Gottesdiener is in conversation with Pam Grossman, a writer, curator, and teacher of magical practice and history.

 

This episode was recorded on Monday, December 14 during a live Crowdcast event hosted by Skylight Books. Visit us at www.crowdcast.io/skylightbooks to RSVP for future events.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Betto Arcos, "MUSIC STORIES FROM THE COSMIC BARRIO"

Music Stories from the Cosmic Barrios is a collection of 150 stories about music from all over Latin America, including music from Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, as well as music from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The stories were originally broadcast on public radio programs including NPR, The World, BCC, KPCC and Latino USA. The book contains 12 chapters, each chapter follows a specific narrative: music and identity; education, community building, immigration, women's empowerment, adversity, social unrest and violence, instruments, producers, place and nation; the music of Brazil, Cuba music and the diaspora. The book's main focus is Latin American music from across the continent, with an emphasis on the music of Latinos and other ethnic groups in Los Angeles. The book also tells a personal story: the author's constant, tireless search for stories that help explain how complex and diverse humans are and how we share something so special that brings us together: music. This is a 380 page book, each story is accompanied by a black and white photo of the artist - many of the photos by author Betto Arcos.

Arcos is joined in conversation by NPR's Mandalit Del Barco.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: David Leo Rice, "A ROOM IN DODGE CITY, VOL. 2" w/ Brian Evenson

The first book in the Room in Dodge City trilogy brought us a nameless drifter arriving in a bizarre Western town that might encompass all of reality. Now, our drifter considers what happens when drifting on is no longer an option. Focusing on the mysterious workings of The Dodge City Film Industry and the personality cult surrounding Blut Branson, its most legendary director, David Leo Rice's Volume 2 asks hard questions about the nature of art, fame, competition and, ultimately, the ongoing struggle to be born. A mystical inquiry into the sacred and the profane, it expands the universe of the first volume, while exploring yet-stranger territory and laying the foundation for the trilogy’s apocalyptic finale.

Rice is in conversation with fellow writer Brian Evenson.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Chelsea G. Summers, "A CERTAIN ANGER" w/ Laurie Penny

Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about.

Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority. 

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.

Summers is in conversation with award-winning author, columnist, journalist, and screenwriter Laurie Penny.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Bryan Washington, "MEMORIAL" w/ Lance Morgan

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years—good years—but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.

 

Author Bryan Washington discusses his novel Memorial with Skylight's own Lance Morgan.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Jim Gauer, "NOVEL EXPLOSIVES" w/ Greg Gerke

It's an otherwise ordinary week in April, the week after Easter, 2009. Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact, but with no memory of who he is, or how he came to live in Guanajuato. Early in the week, a venture capitalist sits at his desk in an office tower in Los Angeles, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. And in the middle of the week, just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso.

Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a fiendishly funny search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and the latest innovations in thermobaric weaponry, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets. At the palpitating heart of the novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way the U.S behaves in the world, a project that grows more urgent by the day.

 

Author Jim Gauer is in conversation with writer Greg Gerke.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Lory Bedikian, "THE BOOK OF LAMENTING" & Dorianne Laux, "ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG"

Lory Bedikian’s first collection The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writerschose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Additionally, her poetry was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, 2015 and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Bedikian’s newer work has been published in Miramar, has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body”; series, is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House and appears in recent issues of The Los Angeles Review and MORIA, as well as on Poets.org. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the recently released anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Knopf, 2020. Also, her poem “On the Way to Oshagan,” will be featured by Pádraig Ó Tuama in a forthcoming Poetry Unbound podcast.

 

Dorianne Laux's sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.

SKYLIT: Mauro Gatti, "THE HAPPY BROADCAST" w/ Evan Spiridellis

The Happy Broadcast: How to Stay Positive, Take Action & Make the World a Better Place is filled with stories of people doing good, as well as prompts, tips, and how-tos for taking action to make good things happen in your own community. From drone delivered medical supplies, to a cuddle club uniting senior dogs with senior people, to a man who planted a tree every day for thirty-five years and created a forest larger than Central Park, the stories collected in The Happy Broadcast are surprising, diverse, and empowering, featuring Mauro Gatti's charming and humorous illustrations.

 

Packed with ideas and inspiration to make a difference, this book will remind you that no action is too small, and that every person (yes, that's you ) counts.

 

Gatti is in conversation with Evan Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab Media, Inc.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Mark de Silva, "POINTS OF ATTACK" w/ Rachel Allen

In this collage of critical reflections, written in the tradition of the short essay running through Francis Bacon and Roland Barthes, the novelist, philosopher, and former New York Times Opinion staffer Mark de Silva looks into matters of both common curiosity and special concern in America today: technological evolution, virtuality, terrorism, the future of the self, the individual's place in a globalized society, the species' place in the natural world, the state of the arts, and the animadversions of the sciences. Above all, Points of Attack is a handbook of the ways of the good life in bad times, and an inoculation against presumption in an era when the axioms of liberal democratic life have come undone and the end of history once again appears a long way off.

de Silva is in conversation with Rachel Allen.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Rebecca Fishow, "THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE" w/ John Colasacco

Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow's debut collection, THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A young woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life's curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths. 

Fishow is in conversation with writer John Colasacco.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Nathan Elias, "THE REINCARNATIONS" w/ Alex Thurnher

These loosely connected stories are laced with the familiar and the uncanny, the real and the surreal, the ordinary and the fabulistic. A documentary filmmaker refuses to give up on finding his daughter who mysteriously disappears by the river. A small-time real estate agent recovers from a brief psychotic episode upon discovering his fianc e's affair. An actress struggles to grasp reality when the recordings of lucid dreams are used in movies instead of live performances. An eccentric teenager recounts his first romance from beyond the grave.

Spanning the boundaries of literary and speculative fiction, The Reincarnations revolves around multiple forms of Zenlike rebirth. Equal parts raw emotion and wild imagination, Nathan Elias's debut story collection ushers in an electrifying yet tender new voice in fiction.

Elias is in conversation with writer Alex Thurnher.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Susan Buttenwieser, "WE WERE LUCKY WITH THE RAIN" w/ Lyman Clayborn

Susan Buttenwieser’s writing has appeared in numerous publications. We Were Lucky with the Rain is her first book. She teaches creative writing in New York City public schools and to incarcerated women.

Buttenwieser is in conversation with Lyman Clayborn.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Abdellah Taïa, "A COUNTRY FOR DYING" w/ Colm Toíbín

Paris, Summer 2010.

Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Abdellah Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future."

 

Taïa is in conversation with renowned writer Colm Toíbín.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Ruth Gilligan, "THE BUTCHERS' BLESSING" w/ Amber Starks

Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter. 

The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. For Úna, being a Butcher’s daughter means a life of tangled ambition and incredible loneliness. For her mother, Grá, it’s a life of faith and longing, of performing a promise that she may or may not be able to keep. For nonbeliever Fionn, the Butchers represent a dated and complicated reality, though for his son, Davey, they represent an entirely new world—and potentially new love. For photographer Ronan, the Butchers are ideal subjects: representatives of an older, more folkloric Ireland whose survival is now being tested. As he moves through the countryside, Ronan captures this world image by image—a lake, a cottage, and his most striking photo: a man, hung upside down in a pose of unspeakable violence.

Author Ruth Gilligan is in conversation with writer Amber Sparks.

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Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.