Skylight Books Podcast Series

G. Willow Wilson, "THE BIRD KING"

It’s 1491 and a party representing the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrives to negotiate the terms of the sultan’s surrender, but Hassan has a secret—he can make maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality with his pen and paper. His magical gift, which has proven useful to the sultan’s armies in wartime and entertained a bored Fatima who has never stepped foot outside the palace walls, could now be seen as sorcery and a threat to the Christian Spanish rule. Fatima befriends one of the women, little realizing that her new friend Luz represents the Inquisition and soon Fatima must risk everything to save Hassan, and taste the freedom she has never known.

As Fatima and Hassan flee the forces of the Inquistion in search of safe harbor, they are helped along the way by a jinn who has taken a liking to them—Vikram the Vampire, who readers may remember from Alif the Unseen.

The Bird King is an epic adventure from an essential voice in American fiction. It is a jubilant story that challenges us to consider what true love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

William E. Jones, "I'M OPEN TO ANYTHING"

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones’s I’m Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book’s narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning.

Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I’m Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor.

Samira Ahmed, "INTERNMENT" w/ Brandy Colbert

Set in a horrifying “fifteen minutes in the future” United States, spitfire main character Layla Amin is forced into an internment camp for Muslim citizens with her family. With the help of newly-made friends also trapped within the internment camp, and her boyfriend on the outside, Layla manages to start a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against Islamophobia and complicit silence against the internment camp's Director and his guards. Samira Ahmed can recall incidents of Islamophobia in her own life as early as age eight. But rather than be deterred, she let it fuel her writing and she is a vocal proponent for changes that need to be made in our society to fight against bigotry. With recent marches and protests led by teen activists, Internment also has the potential to resonate strongly with teen leaders who fight to make the change they want to see in their own communities.

Ahmed is in conversation with Pointe author Brandy Colbert.

Aatif Rashid, "Portrait of Sebastian Khan"

For art-loving (and lady-loving) Sebastian Khan, does college really have to end?

Sebastian Khan is 380 days away from the end of college. An art history major with a fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites and a dislike of long-term commitments (romantic and otherwise), Sebastian starts dating Fatima, who’s determined to transition smoothly from campus life to a stable white-collar professional career. Sebastian’s membership in Model United Nations, though, takes him to colleges across North America, foisting upon him all manner of temptations and testing his commitment to Fatima and his readiness for adulthood.

Part satire of college life circa 2011 and part serious exploration of art’s fundamental unreality, Portrait of Sebastian Khan is a humorous coming-of-age novel about a charismatic but emotionally stunted Muslim American Don Draper, who wins as many hearts as he breaks.

Christopher Cantwell, "SHE COULD FLY" w/ Nick Dazé

No one knows who she was, how she flew, or why.

An unknown woman flying at fantastic speeds and spectacular heights suddenly explodes mid-air. Luna Brewster, a disturbed 15-year-old girl becomes obsessed with learning everything about her while rumors and conspiracy theories roil. But will cracking the secrets of the Flying Woman’s inner life lead to the liberation from her own troubled mind—or will it take her to the point of no return?

Author Christopher Cantwell discusses his graphic novel She Could Fly with author, technologist, and entrepreneur Nick Dazé.

Mark Doten, "TRUMP SKY ALPHA" w/ Nathan Deuel

Twice a week, the president pilots his ultraluxury airship Trump Sky Alpha between DC, NYC, and Mar-a-Lago, delivering a streaming YouTube address to the nation. In this speech he trumpets his successes and blasts his enemies, until one day his words plunge the world into nuclear war. One year later, with 90 percent of the world’s population destroyed, a journalist named Rachel has taken refuge in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone. Rachel accepts an assignment to document the final throes of humor on the internet in those moments before the war, hoping along the way to discover the final resting place of her wife and daughter.

What she uncovers in an archive of the internet’s remnants, hidden amid spiraling memes and Twitter jokes, are references to a little-known book that inspired a shadowy hacktivist group called the Aviary. Their role in the downfall of the internet, and the enigmatic presence of a figure known only as Birdcrash, take on immense and terrifying dimensions as Rachel ventures further into the ruins of the internet. Mark Doten, author of The Infernal, brilliantly details how the internet has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, laying the groundwork for the tumult of our current political moment and for the future headed our way.

Doten is in conversation with Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East.

Don Winslow, "The Border"

In Don Winslow’s explosive new novel, The Border, the highly anticipated conclusion to the epic Cartel trilogy (The Power of the Dog, 2005; The Cartel, 2015), the war has come home.

For over forty years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America’s longest conflict: The War on Drugs. His obsession to defeat the world’s most powerful, wealthy, and lethal kingpin―the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel, Adán Barrera―has left him bloody and scarred, cost him the people he loves, even taken a piece of his soul.

Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created thirty more that are wreaking even more chaos and suffering in his beloved Mexico. But not just there.

Barrera’s final legacy is the heroin epidemic scourging America. Throwing himself into the gap to stem the deadly flow, Keller finds himself surrounded by enemies―men who want to kill him, politicians who want to destroy him, and worse, the unimaginable―an incoming administration that’s in bed with the very drug traffickers that Keller is trying to bring down. Art Keller is at war with not only the cartels, but with his own government. And the long fight has taught him more than he ever imagined. Now, he learns the final lesson―there are no borders.

Ali Liebegott, "THE SUMMER OF DEAD THINGS"

how does a person dislodge the scenes
that burn inside them like arsoned cars?

Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the road: Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World.

This autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Things, is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life. 

Liebegott is joined in conversation by Michelle Tea, the author of the young adult novels Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as numerous books for grown-ups.

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, "CIRCLE"

This book is about Circle. This book is also about Circle’s friends, Triangle and Square. Also it is about a rule that Circle makes, and how she has to rescue Triangle when he breaks that rule. With their usual pitch-perfect pacing and subtle, sharp wit, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen come full circle in the third and final chapter of their clever shape trilogy.

Geoff Dyer, "BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY BOY"

Geoff Dyer has loved Where Eagles Dare since childhood. It is both a thrillingly realized Alpine World War II adventure with tough, compelling acting from its two great stars, Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, and a flippant travesty, reducing the central disaster in Europe’s modern history to a series of huge explosions and peopled by campy SS officers.

As he did in Zona–which took on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker–in Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, Dyer gives us a scene-by-scene reaction to and reading of the film. And perhaps as only he can, the author both extols and denigrates–lovingly and entertainingly no matter which way he falls–this acme of the late ’60s action movie.

Dyer is in discussion with Joanathan Lethem, author of eleven novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Girl in Landscape.

 

Chris Cander, "THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO"

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates with her young family from Russia to America, at her husband's frantic insistence, and her piano is lost in the shuffle.

In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, which is complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a fire that burned their house down: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Orphaned, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who in his car-repair shop trained her to become a first-rate mechanic, much to the surprise of her subsequent customers. But this work, her true mainstay in a scattered life, is put on hold when her hand gets broken while the piano's being moved--and in sudden frustration she chooses to sell it. And what becomes crucial is who the most interested party turns out to be...

 

Hillary Frank, "WEIRD PARENTING WINS" w/ Jane Marie

The best parenting advice that Hillary Frank receives doesn’t come from parenting gurus, but from friends and podcast listeners who use their creativity to flee moments of desperation. In Hillary’s book, one mother threatens to sing in public anytime her daughters argue. Another mom allows her daughter to play with tampons to get a few minutes on the toilet alone.

These are just a few of the gems available in Weird Parenting Wins: Bathtub Dining, Family Screams, and Other Hacks from the Parenting Trenches, a collection of unusual techniques parents use in stressful situations to calm their children and themselves. These “weird parenting wins” work for parents with children of all ages. From using The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song to lull a colicky infant to convincing her kids that Toys ‘R’ Us is a membership only club, parents in Hillary’s book are as ingenious as they are eccentric. They use their tricks to foster fun, inspire their kids to diversify their appetites, stop sibling rivalry, cultivate independence, develop manners, and open up. Not only does Hillary focus on kids’ needs, she also intersperses anecdotes to help moms and dads keep their cool, find time for intimacy, and enjoy the insane, heartwarming journey.

Frank is in conversation with Jane Marie, a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist and former producer of This American Life.

UC Irvine MFA Student Reading 2019

Please join us for an evening with UC Irvine MFA students Mason Boyles, Justine Yan, Katherine Damm, and Daniel Levin as they read from their work. 

Elizabeth McCracken, "BOWLAWAY" w/ Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century—nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person—Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark—with Bertha its most notable resident.

When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha’s defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills.

In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family’s myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.  

McCracken is joined in conversation by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest.

Marlon James, "BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF"

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.