Skylight Books Podcast Series

Mason Funk, "THE BOOK OF PRIDE"

The Book of Pride pays tribute to dozens of extraordinary and influential leaders who sparked the worldwide LGBTQ-rights movement. These courageous civil rights pioneers—nurses in Texas and chemists in Philadelphia; Muslims and Catholics; the loud and fearless marching in streets and the quiet and determined persevering in the face of persecution—are captured in richly detailed interviews accompanied by beautiful photographs. Mason Funk shines a spotlight on these individuals on the front lines of the fight for equality and acceptance and their stunning achievements in the 1960s and beyond.

Josh Levin, "THE QUEEN" w/ Julia Turner

Slate editor Josh Levin's masterful account of the life and crimes of America's original "welfare queen" is "an invaluable work of nonfiction" (David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon). 

On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship-after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody-not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan-seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery.

Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of the color of her skin. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. The Queen tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.

Levin is in conversation with Julia Turner, the deputy managing editor for arts and entertainment at the Los Angeles Times.

Malaka Gharib, "I WAS THEIR AMERICAN DREAM" w/ Michael Nailat

One part Mari Andrew, one part Marjane Satrapi, I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir is a triumphant tale of self-discovery, a celebration of a family's rich heritage, and a love letter to American immigrant freedom. Malaka Gharib's illustrations come alive with teenage antics and earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised.

Malaka's upbringing will look familiar to anyone who grew up in the pre-internet era, but her particular story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dream s themselves, Malaka navigates her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.

Gharib is in conversation with Michael Nairat, aka Producer Mike, aka DJ waxstyles, who has zero formal training in DJing or producing, but is somehow still allowed to do both. 

Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos, "ORIGINAL PLUMBING"

When Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos first launched Original Plumbing in 2009, they created a magazine the world desperately needed: a creative and celebratory biannual publication about trans men, by trans men. For ten years, OP was an inspired response to the lack of meaningful representation of trans lives and culture. Each issue was filled with gorgeous, moving, hilarious, and sexy narratives that pushed back against marginalizing stereotypes. Taken together, these stories met mainstream media’s violence with self-love, dismissal with determination, and repression with resistance.

Collecting the best of the magazine’s entire twenty-issue run, Original Plumbing: The Best of Ten Years of Trans Male Culture is a remarkable full-color archive that includes interviews with trailblazers like Janet Mock and Silas Howard; cutting-edge artwork and photography; meditations on love, relationships, and family; political essays and personal reflections; and much, much more.

Pat Thomas and Michael Heath, "MY WEEK BEATS YOUR YEAR"

My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed features 30+ interviews spanning his solo career, from the golden era of print rock-journalism, to the first online blogs. The compilation is one fan’s humble attempt to move beyond the Bangs canon, and delve deeper into the distance and intimacy, cactus and mercury, that constituted Lou’s post-Velvet Underground public media image.

This anthology will be an intimate portrait of Reed who, in addition to being notoriously prickly (to put it mildly), was also intelligent, articulate, and deeply passionate about what was important to him, both as a person and as a creative artist.

Sarah Pinsker, "SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA" w/ Rebecca Roanhorse

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is one of the most anticipated SF&F collections of recent years. Sarah Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula award wins.

The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present. The journey is the thing as Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.

Pinsker is in conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse, a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. 

Xuan Juliana Wang, "HOME REMEDIES" w/ Justin Torres

With evocative writing and impressive range, Xuan Juliana Wang captures the heartbeat of this generation, the Chinese millennial, in Home Remedies. Creative, ambitious, messy and often reckless, Wang’s unforgettable characters are on a quest for every kind of freedom—artistic, familial, individual, sexual, psychological. A pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics have trained together, living and moving as one body, for half their lives, only to discover themselves through divergence. A Chinese-American student in Paris unwittingly becomes the fashion world’s next “it” girl. An immigrant father attempts to understand his fully American daughter through the logic of algorithms. A group of artists drift through Beijing in search of something—meaning, their next muse, the next thrill.

These are stories of lives on the cusp of change: people who are testing the limits of who they are, who they wish they were, and who they will one day be; in a world that is as vast and changing as their ambitions. Above all, these are sharp stories about the brand new face of Chinese youth, around the world, from an exceptionally talented literary writer.

Wang is in conversation with Justin Torres, author of We the Animals.

Julie Orringer, "THE FLIGHT PORTFOLIO", w/ Sarah Manguso

In 1940, Varian Fry--a Harvard educated American journalist--traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally to Lisbon, where the refugees embarked for safer ports. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall. 

The Flight Portfolio opens at the Chagalls' ancient stone house in Gordes, France, as the novel's hero desperately tries to persuade them of the barbarism and tragedy descending on Europe. Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, impossible to put down, this is historical fiction of the very first order, and resounding confirmation of Julie Orringer's gifts as a novelist.

Orringer is in conversation with Sarah Manguso, the author, most recently, of 300 Arguments (2017), a work of aphoristic autobiography.

Sean Carswell, "DEAD EXTRA" w/ Steph Cha

The early forties have been a tough time for Jack Chesley. His plane was shot down over Germany and he spent two years in a brutal POW camp. During that time, his wife fell in the tub and died.

Prior to her death, the early forties were even tougher for Jack’s wife, Wilma. After Jack was mistakenly presumed dead, she went on a bender that ended with her wrongful commitment to the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital. While there, she took up with an alcoholic socialite, a junkie pianist, and a shady hospital employee who promised her a way out. Only that way out set her on the path to the end of her road.

Now Jack’s back in Los Angeles. His sister-in-law and Wilma’s twin, Gertie, hunts him down to tell him Wilma’s death was no accident: she was murdered. Gertie’s first efforts to find the truth earned her a bullet to the collarbone. But that doesn’t mean Gertie is ready to give up. She knows the right places to look and the right people to ask. She needs Jack, who was a cop for a short time before the war, to stick his nose into these places and ask these questions so that, together, they can figure out who killed Wilma, and why.

Dead Extra follows the parallel storylines of Wilma in the months before her murder in 1944 and Jack and Gertie’s search for the killer in 1946. Their adventures carry them through Hollywood’s second-tier studios, the Camarillo psychiatric hospital, Pasadena mansions, downtown jazz clubs, and one seriously sleazy motor court in Oxnard.

Author Sean Carswell is in conversation with Steph Cha,  author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough.

Chia-Chia Lin, "THE UNPASSING" w/ Jamel Brinkley

A searing debut novel that explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through an immigrant family in Alaska

In Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.

Routine takes over for the grieving family: the siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt ridden after Ruby’s death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in grave harm to a little boy. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges.

With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

Lin is in conversation with Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man: Stories.

Judith Teitelman, "GUESTHOUSE FOR GANESHA"

In 1923, seventeen-year-old “Esther Grünspan arrives in Köln with a hardened heart as her sole luggage.” Thus, she begins a twenty-two-year journey, woven against the backdrops of the European Holocaust and the Hindu Kali Yuga (the “Age of Darkness” when human civilization degenerates spiritually), in search of a place of sanctuary. Throughout her travails, using cunning and shrewdness, Esther relies on her masterful tailoring skills to help mask her Jewish heritage, navigate war-torn Europe, and emigrate to India.

Esther’s traveling companion and the novel’s narrator is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu God worshiped by millions for his abilities to destroy obstacles, bestow wishes, and avenge evils. Impressed by Esther’s fortitude and relentless determination, born of her deep―though unconscious―understanding of the meaning and purpose of love, Ganesha, with compassion, insight, and poetry, chooses to highlight her story because he recognizes it is all of our stories―for truth resides at the essence of its telling.

Weaving Eastern beliefs and perspectives with Western realities and pragmatism, Guesthouse for Ganesha is a tale of love, loss, and spirit reclaimed.

Julie Buxbaum, "HOPE AND OTHER PUNCHLINES" w/ Kayla Cagan

Abbi Hope Goldstein is like every other teenager, with a few smallish exceptions: her famous alter ego, Baby Hope, is the subject of internet memes, she has asthma, and sometimes people spontaneously burst into tears when they recognize her. Abbi has lived almost her entire life in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of September 11. On that fateful day, she was captured in what became an iconic photograph: in the picture, Abbi (aka "Baby Hope") wears a birthday crown and grasps a red balloon; just behind her, the South Tower of the World Trade Center is collapsing.

Now, fifteen years later, Abbi is desperate for anonymity and decides to spend the summer before her seventeenth birthday incognito as a counselor at Knights Day Camp two towns away. She's psyched for eight weeks in the company of four-year-olds, none of whom have ever heard of Baby Hope.

Too bad Noah Stern, whose own world was irrevocably shattered on that terrible day, has a similar summer plan. Noah believes his meeting Baby Hope is fate. Abbi is sure it's a disaster. Soon, though, the two team up to ask difficult questions about the history behind the Baby Hope photo. But is either of them ready to hear the answers?

Hope and Other Punchlines author Julie Buxbaum is in conversation with novelist and playright Kayla Cagan.

Antonio Gonzalez, "ARCHITECTS WHO BUILT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA"

In the early 1900s, the population of Southern California exploded, and the cities grew at such a rapid pace that builders could hardly keep up. Among those who settled in the area were ten architects looking to make their marks on the world. Claud Beelman, a man who never received a college degree, would go on to design the Elks Lodge in Los Angeles. Albert C. Martin, architect of Grauman's Million Dollar Theater, founded a company that is still going strong more than one hundred years later, and Julia Morgan, the first woman architect licensed in California, was hired by William Randolph Hearst to design the Examiner Building. Join author Antonio Gonzalez as he tells the stories of the Architects Who Built Southern California.

Exposition Review Vol IV: "WONDER" Launch Party & Reading

Join the Exposition Review editors as we celebrate our latest issue, Vol. IV: "Wonder" with our Launch Party & Reading! 

 Readers include Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, Mia Nakaji Monnier, Tim McAdams, Charles Duffie, and mentee alumni from Writegirl! 

Seth, "CLYDE FANS" w/ Scott Timberg

Join acclaimed cartoonist Seth for a discussion and book signing to launch Clyde Fans, his highly-anticipated masterpiece. Clyde Fans follows Abe and Simon Matchcard, two brothers whose lives are defined by their doomed family business, selling oscillating fans in a world switching to air conditioning. Seth’s incisive storytelling and gorgeous urban landscapes are showcased in this epic yet intimate time capsule of the mid-century capitalist dream. 

Seth is in conversation with Scott Timberg, a Los Angeles-based arts and culture journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times, Salon, The New York Times and The Guardian.