Skylight Books Podcast Series

Katie Orphan, "READ ME, LOS ANGELES" w/ Liska Jacobs

Read Me, Los Angeles is a colorful, lively, and informed celebration of all things bookish in L.A. past and present, including interviews with current L.A. writers; day trips in search of favorite fictional characters, from Marlowe to Weetzie Bat; author quotes galore; curated lists of the must-read L.A. books, from fiction to history to poetry; a look at where writers have lived and worked in the City of Angels; and insight into the city’s literary festivals, bookstores, publishers, literacy nonprofits, libraries, and more. Rich with photographs, book images, and vintage maps.

Author Katie Orphan is in conversation with Liska Jacobs, the author of Catalina.

Neda Disney, "PLANTING WOLVES"

A writer in a purgatory bar, an art collecting housewife who time travels, a movie Production Assistant with stigmata, a codependent AA sponsor, a sex addict, a movie star with issues, a two-time liver transplant recipient and an abusive TV costumer who gets what’s coming to her. All connected to one another but completely and utterly alone.

MariNaomi, "DISTANT STARS" w/ Myriam Gurba

In the final volume of the Life on Earth trilogy, celebrated cartoonist MariNaomi concludes her tale of growing up, falling in and out of love, and possible alien interventions. Shy, self-deprecating Paula Navarro is coming into her own—and it's making her new girlfriend, Johanna, a little nervous. Paula's former friend Emily Baker is learning to look inward. Brett Hathaway, Emily and Paula's mutual ex-hook-up, is torn about reconnecting with his estranged dad. And Nigel Jones is smitten with his tutor, Claudia—whose disappearance and reappearance remains a mystery to everyone around her. As Claudia and her guardians put the final plan in motion, they'll reveal the truth that links everyone's fate.

MariNaomi is in conversation with Myriam Gurba, a writer, a spoken-word artist, and a visual artist.

Bernice Steinhardt, "MEMORIES OF SURVIVAL"

This stunning collection of fabric and embroidered panels depicts Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s remarkable journey of living through the Holocaust in Poland. At the age of fifteen, she and her thirteen-year-old sister separated from their family and went into hiding, assuming the identities of Catholic farmgirls. Though untrained as an artist but a skilled seamstress, Esther picked up needle and thread forty years later to retell her childhood memories. At once naïve and infinitely complex, these images reveal both the extreme horrors of war, and the cherished family memories shared before the war began. Told in Esther’s own words, with commentary written by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt, this is an unforgettable look back to a time and events that must never be forgotten.

 

Steffie Nelson, "SLOUCHING TOWARDS LOS ANGELES" w/ Contributors

In The White Album, Joan Didion wrote that “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively…loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” Cruising the freeways in her Daytona yellow Corvette, taking it all in behind dark glasses, Joan Didion claimed California for all time. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us. This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation—Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five—while bringing together some of the finest voices of today’s Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, coloring our own journeys in the process.

This evening's event will feature contributors DAN CRANE, JESSICA HUNDLEY, TRACY MCMILLAN, CAROLINE RYDER and MARGARET WAPPLER along with editor STEFFIE NELSON reading and discussing the book and Joan Didion's life and work.

Sarah Gailey, "WHEN WE WERE MAGIC", & Mallory O'Meara, "THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON"

A moving, darkly funny novel about six teens whose magic goes wildly awry from Magic for Liars author Sarah Gailey, who Chuck Wendig calls an "author to watch."

Keeping your magic a secret is hard. Being in love with your best friend is harder.

Alexis has always been able to rely on two things: her best friends, and the magic powers they all share. Their secret is what brought them together, and their love for each other is unshakeable--even when that love is complicated. Complicated by problems like jealousy, or insecurity, or lust. Or love.

That unshakeable, complicated love is one of the only things that doesn't change on prom night.

When accidental magic goes sideways and a boy winds up dead, Alexis and her friends come together to try to right a terrible wrong. Their first attempt fails--and their second attempt fails even harder. Left with the remains of their failed spells and more consequences than anyone could have predicted, each of them must find a way to live with their part of the story.

Mallory O’Meara is the bestselling author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon, along with being a screenwriter and film producer.

Emily Beyda, "THE BODY DOUBLE" w/ Ivy Pochoda

From a refreshingly honest new voice in fiction, Emily Beyda, comes The Body Double. Taking cues from both David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, The Body Double is a cinematic and fabulously plotted noir that follows a young woman plucked from obscurity by a charming stranger to impersonate reclusive starlet, Rosanna Feld. 

At first alluring and exciting, our narrator’s new life as a body double quickly turns sour. Locked up in a small apartment in the hills, she studies footage of Rosanna, eats her favorite foods, wears her clothes, and endures punishing exercises to obtain Rosanna’s “perfect” body. She takes on Rosanna’s public persona and gains entry to her inner circle, but her sense of self deteriorates and doubts start to arise. 

The Body Double is a stunning exploration of fame, beauty, and the hidden cost of keeping up appearances. Equal parts engrossing and unnerving, Beyda’s debut novel offers a sharply observed portrayal of the dark side of Hollywood. Growing up in LA, Beyda worked for the family of a famous Hollywood star and her intimate knowledge of that world informs every detail on the page.

Erin Khar, "STRUNG OUT" w/ Jen Pastiloff

Growing up in Los Angeles as the only child of divorced parents, Erin Khar, often consumed with loneliness, looked for an escape from the pervasive belief that she wasn't enough—not enough to keep her parents together or her mother from depression—and yet, she never shared with anyone this private sadness. Instead, she hid behind the façade of a perfect childhood filled with good grades, a popular group of friends, and horseback riding. By the time she was thirteen, the act becoming too difficult to keep up, and she started experimenting with her grandmother's expired valium, quickly followed by heroin. The drug allowed her to feel the calm she was missing from her life and suppress all the heavy feelings she couldn't understand. Heroin, while keeping her from other forms of self-harm, became the addiction that destroyed her.

Khar is in conversation with Jen Pastiloff, who travels the world with her unique workshop On Being Human, a hybrid of yoga-related movement, writing, sharing aloud, letting the snot fly, and the occasional dance party.

Porsha Olayiwola, "I SHIMMER SOMETIMES, TOO"

Porsha Olayiwola is from the future! Black, poet, queer-dyke, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.

Her debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care--the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.

Megan Fernandes, "GOOD BOYS" w/ Catherine Pond & Callie Siskel

In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes's Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging-just barely-on the trains and bridges and barstools of New York City. A child of the Indian ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the "hydrogen fruit" of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.

Fernandes is in conversation with Catherine Pond and Callie Siskel.

April Davila, "142 OSTRICHES" w/ Amy Meyerson

Set against the unexpected splendor of an ostrich ranch in the California desert, April Dávila’s beautifully written debut conjures an absorbing and compelling heroine in a story of courage, family and forgiveness.

When Tallulah Jones was thirteen, her grandmother plucked her from the dank Oakland apartment she shared with her unreliable mom and brought her to the family ostrich ranch in the Mojave Desert. After eleven years caring for the curious, graceful birds, Tallulah accepts a job in Montana and prepares to leave home. But when Grandma Helen dies under strange circumstances, Tallulah inherits everything—just days before the birds inexplicably stop laying eggs.  

Guarding the secret of the suddenly barren birds, Tallulah endeavors to force through a sale of the ranch, a task that is complicated by the arrival of her extended family. Their designs on the property, and deeply rooted dysfunction, threaten Tallulah’s ambitions and eventually her life.

With no options left, Tallulah must pull her head out of the sand and face the fifty-year legacy of a family in turmoil: the reality of her grandmother's death, her mother's alcoholism, her uncle's covetous anger, and the 142 Ostriches whose lives are in her hands.

Davila is in conversation with Amy Meyerson, the bestselling author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays.

Brandon Taylor, "REAL LIFE" w/ Miles Klee

Taking place over the course of a single summer weekend, Real Life chronicles the life of Wallace, a young black graduate student studying biochemistry at a Midwest university. While navigating racial, class, and sexual tensions in his lab—as well as his friend community, with whom he feels both love and alienation—Wallace questions whether he should leave his program. When a tentative friendship transforms into a deeper connection, however, Wallace finds himself confronting the horrific trauma of his past, and wrestling with the challenge of building a new life while carrying such painful wounds. Told in poignant, heart-stopping sentences, the novel vividly immerses the reader into the insular world of graduate school—full of competitive lab sessions, sexually tense dinner parties, and complicated love triangles.

Like André Aciman or Alan Hollinghurst, Brandon Taylor depicts a story of sexual turmoil with beautiful intensity and rawness. Wallace’s story is one that is at times agonizingly intimate, and yet so fully human and resonant. Through absorbing narrative and richly drawn characters, Taylor forces readers to face the legacy of trauma, how it connects and isolates us from one another; to sit with uncomfortable but necessary questions around race, privilege and white fragility; and the differences that radically affect our experience in the world. As the title suggests, Real Life also reexamines the conventional metrics of success in America, asking how one is meant to live in a system designed to suppress. How are we to rescue one another from suffering, to heal from damage, without forsaking our identities? And is it truly possible to live a life that is honest and dignified—that coexists with pain and love, productivity and pleasure, community and self-realization—a life, in other words, that is real?

Taylor is in conversation with Miles Klee, MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert.

Katharine Coldiron, "CEREMONIALS" w/ Christopher Higgs

Ceremonials is a twelve-part lyric novella inspired by Florence + the Machine’s 2011 album of the same name. It’s the story of two girls, Amelia and Corisande, who fall in love at a boarding school. Corisande dies suddenly on the eve of graduation, but Amelia cannot shake her ghost. A narrative about obsession, the Minotaur, and the veil between life and death, Ceremonials is a poem in prose, a keening in words, and a song etched in ink.

Author Katharine Coldiron is in conversation with Christopher Higgs, a published author who teaches narrative theory and technique at California State University Northridge.

Ebony Flowers, "HOT COMB" w/ Taneka Stotts

Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers is one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of 2019, receiving nominations from the YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens and Alex Awards, as well as the NAACP Image Awards. The book offers a poignant glimpse into Black women’s anxieties, support networks, and coming of age stories. Hot Comb is insightful and empathetic about the imperfections of identity, a propitious display of talent from a vital new voice.

Flowers will be joined in conversation by TV and comics writer Taneka Stotts. 

Jenn Shapland, "MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS" w/

While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life: she wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at McCullers’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives McCullers’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees how McCullers’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.

In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

Shapland is in conversation with Andy Campbell, PhD, an art historian, critic, and curator.