Skylight Books Podcast Series

Peter Gadol, "THE STRANGER GAME"

The word ‘follow’ seems to have lost its meaning in the digital age. Now, when someone is following you on Instagram or Twitter, it’s hardly cause for alarm. But Peter Gadol begs an eerie question in his sixth novel, The Stranger Game: What if those ‘following’ you on social media brought back the literal meaning of the word… What if they started following you in real life?

In the age of social media, humanity is, at large, lonely. This includes Rebecca and her boyfriend, Ezra, a fan of the viral sensation “the stranger game"; The games, in which players literally follow strangers in their day-to-day lives has swept the nation and disappearances – including Ezra’s – are reported as players drift aimlessly from subject to subject. Hoping to find him, Rebecca tried the game and meets Carey. As their relationship and game play deepen, Rebecca uncovers an unsettling subculture that has infiltrated her world. Playing the stranger game may lead her closer to Ezra, but also further from the life she once lived.

Riddled with Patricia Highsmith-like anxiety and the alienation of Paul Auster, The Stranger Game is a haunting tale of literary suspense about a viral game spinning perilously – and criminally – out of control.

WNBA/LA: National Reading Group Month

WNBA/LA celebrates National Reading Group Month with a special Women in Media panel, featuring Gretchen Bonaduce (Surviving Agent Orange), Laura Dave (Hello Sunshin), and Robinne Lee (The Idea of You), with moderator Ezina Le Blanc.

Heather Havrilesky, "WHAT IF THIS WERE ENOUGH?" w/ Ann Friedman

Why do our modern lives feel more difficult despite the world’s promises of limitless opportunity? When things go wrong, why do we always blame ourselves? We live in a time of extreme delusion, disorientation, and dishonestly — yet despite our uncertainties, anxieties, and resentments, we’re nevertheless instructed to sweep all hesitations or doubts under the rug and continue to fearlessly conquer the future.

How did we get here? And more importantly — can we imagine a different way of living?

In What if this Were Enough?, Heather Havrilesky examines just how we’ve landed in this bewildering spot in our collective history — how traditions of forced cheer and optimism, along with our fixation on success and constant improvement have been ingested and metabolized to become a warped filter through which we see ourselves and others.

Havrilesky is in conversation with journalist and cultural critic Ann Friedman.

Anne-Marie Kinney, "COLDWATER CANYON" w/ Anthony Miller

Shep has been dealt a bad hand in life. Halfheartedly raised by a cold grandmother and chronically ill following his deployment in Desert Storm, he self-medicates with alcohol and daydreams of salvation at the hands of women—ultimately landing on one woman in particular: Lila, the young actress he believes is his daughter despite all evidence to the contrary. As Shep navigates the mystically rendered streets and strip malls of the San Fernando Valley with his only companion, his dog Lionel, he takes increasingly desperate measures to insinuate himself into her life. Anne-Marie Kinney’s precise and considered prose examines the insistence on reshaping the past through the lens of one’s own trauma and conceived desires as a means of moving forward. Why do we so often look for solace and redemption through others, pushing ourselves to do anything for them, even when it harms everyone involved?

Kinney is in conversation with writer, critic, and independent scholar Anthony Miller.

LAMBDA Litfest: "Queer Writing"

Young queer writers yearn for queer teachers for a variety of reasons: to be seen and acknowledged, to find role models, to work in spaces that include their voices. On this panel, queer writing teachers from UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program will read excerpts from their recent work, and then discuss how queerness factors into their teaching of both straight and queer students.

The teachers included in the panel: Noel Alumit, Antonia Crane, Seth Fischer, Charles Jensen, and Mathew Rodriguez.

LAMBDA Litfest: "Trumpocalypse"

Four writers and a renowned book editor discuss the role of books and those who write them in such desperate times as these. Is it worth writing books? If so, what kinds of books? If not, what shall we writers do with ourselves for the duration?

Panelists include: Melissa Chadburn, Dan Smentanka, Cindy Chupack, Natashia Deon, moderated by Meredith Maran.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, "THE SHAPE OF THE RUINS"

The Shape of the Ruins is Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s highly anticipated, deeply personal masterpiece that is being heralded as the most ambitious novel of his career. For the first time Vásquez puts himself at the center of the story—the narrator is a novelist also named Juan Gabriel Vásquez—one that unspools a tangled mystery of political conspiracy, brutal assassinations, and dangerous secrets lost to memory.

Diana Arterian and Allie Rowbottom

Playing Monster :: Seiche is a book-length poem by Diana Arterian that incessantly dodges between two narratives: the speaker's childhood experiences with an abusive father and, as an adult, increasingly aggressive acts made toward her mother by strange men. It is a piece of noir poetics. It is also memoir and documentary. Through tight, spare poems, Arterian's unflinching descriptions of difficult life experiences fight aestheticization, engaging directly with the events as through the poetry of witness.

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story.

Bonnie Chau, "ALL ROADS LEAD TO BLOOD"

Unflinching and compelling portrayals of desire fill All Roads Lead to Blood, an award-winning story collection by Bonnie Chau. Chau explores the lives of young women, focusing on love, heritage, and memory, presenting fresh perspectives of second-generation Chinese-Americans.

Moving back and forth between California and New York, and ranging as far away as Paris, Chau’s exquisitely written stories are bold, highly imaginative, and haunting, featuring unique characters who defiantly exert their individuality.

Grady Chambers, "NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS" w/ Elizabeth Metzger

Max Ritvo Poetry Prize winner Grady Chambers brings us North American Stadiums, an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.

A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

Chambers is joined in conversation by Elizabeth Metzger, Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.

Jessica Hopper, "NIGHT MOVES" w/ Josh Kun

Written in taut, mesmerizing, often hilarious scenes drawn from 2004 through 2009, Night Moves captures the fierce friendships and small moments that form us all. Drawing on her personal journals from the aughts, Jessica Hopper chronicles her time as a DJ, living in decrepit punk houses, biking to bad loft parties with her friends, exploring Chicago deep into the night. And, along the way, she creates an homage to vibrant corners of the city that have been muted by sleek development. A book birthed in the amber glow of Chicago streetlamps, Night Moves is about a transformative moment of cultural history—and how a raw, rebellious writer found her voice.

Hopper is joined in conversation by Josh Kun, author and winner of a 2018 Berlin Prize.

Jeanne McCulloch, "ALL HAPPY FAMILIES" w/ Laurie Winer

A lifetime in the making, All Happy Families is Jeanne McCulloch’s entry into the other side of the literary process. As a former managing editor of the Paris Review and an editor at Tin House, she’s nurtured the early careers of an all-star roster of writers including David Foster Wallace, Ann Patchett, Jeffrey Eugenides, among others. Now she is ready to share her clear-eyed account of her struggle to find her own voice and finally tell her own story. Impressionistic, lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All Happy Families is an unforgettable look at a world where all that glitters on the surface is not gold, and each unhappy family is ultimately unhappy in its own unique way.

McCulloch is in conversation Laurie Winer, founding editor of the L.A. Review of Books.

Yumi Sakugawa, "FASHION FORECAST"

Yumi Sakugawa explores the possibilities of a not-so-distant future where fashion can be intergenerational, Asian American, divine feminine, environmentally conscious, community building, ancestor worshipping, and possibly bring you closer to enlightenment. Originally printed as a limited edition zine for an art installation of the same name at CrossLines, a culture lab curated by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Center in the historical Smithsonian Arts & Industries building in 2016, Fashion Forecasts also includes photographs from the exhibition, new fashion forecast drawings, fashion advice, and a comic essay on the cosmic meaning of fashion in the cycle of birth and death. 

Aminder Dhaliwal, "WOMAN WORLD" W/ Megan Nicole Dong

Join internet sensation and Disney TV animator Aminder Dhaliwal as she launches her debut graphic novel Woman World. The book, first serialized on Instagram to an audience of over 150,000, is a delightful imagining of a world where men have gone extinct. With incomparable wit, Woman World is an entertaining read for people of all genders and one of 2018’s most anticipated releases.

Dhaliwal is joined in conversation by Megan Nicole Dong, known for her Sketchshark comics.

Katya Apekina, "THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH" w/ Michelle Huneven

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish is a bold epistolary novel tracking two teenage girls in the wake of their mother’s failed suicide attempt, when they are sent to live with their estranged father, a celebrated writer, in New York City. With a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of Edie and Mae as they each crave the attention of a parent they can’t—and shouldn’t—have to themselves.

Moving from the Louisiana countryside to the sidewalks of New York City, the Civil Rights era to the trendy art scene of the ’90s, Katya Apekina crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession, and in so doing heralds her arrival as a fierce and fresh new literary talent.

Apekina is joined in conversation by Michelle Huneven, author of four novels, including Blame and Off Course.