Skylight Books Podcast Series

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.

Rebecca Serle, "THE DINNER LIST" w/ Gabrielle Zevin

Pick five people - dead or alive - to have dinner with for just one night. For Sabrina Nielsen, the five people she chose years ago for such a game just happen to show up at her birthday dinner.

Sabrina’s ex-boyfriend, estranged father, best friend, favorite college professor and Audrey Heburn are all guests on The Dinner List.

Through Rebecca Serle’s enchanting writing, this delicious novel combines the whimsy of first love with an exploration into what it takes to make a relationship work. With a romance impossible to resist and a vivid group of dining guests, Serle’s novel asks what really matters when it comes to love.

Serle is joined in conversation by Gabrielle Zevin, author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Young Jane Young, as well as the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women.

Zenobia Neil, "THE JINNI'S LAST WISH"

In Zenobia Neil's The Jinni's Last Wish, a eunuch in the Ottoman Imperial Harem has already lost his home, his freedom, and his manhood. His only wish is for a painless death, until he meets Dark Star, a beautiful odalisque who promises to give him his deepest desire. He refuses to believe her claim to possess a jinni in a bottle. But when Dark Star is accused of witchcraft, Olin rubs the bottle in desperation and discovers she’s told the truth. Olin becomes the jinni’s master to save Dark Star, but it's not enough. In the complex world of the Topkapi Palace, where silk pillows conceal knives, sherbets contain poison, and jewels buy loyalty, no one is safe. With each wish, Olin must choose between becoming like the masters he detests or risk his life, his body, and his sanity to break the bonds that tie them all. 

Gabriella Herstick, "INNER WITCH"

This isn’t your great-great-great-great grandmother’s guide to witchcraft. Inner Witch: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Craft, by Nylon’s Ask A Witch columnist Gabriela Herstik, invites everyone into the coven, modernizing the ancient craft and creating a space for all to come and express their sacred self.

As uncertainty rages across the globe, many have a turned to the sacred, ancient crafts—witchcraft, astrology, crystals, and similar practices—to find balance, especially young women. Inner Witch grants practitioners from all walks of the life the freedom to assume their place in the universe while connecting with a force far greater than themselves.

Clementine Ford, "FIGHT LIKE A GIRL" w/ Alexandra Tweten

Through a mixture of memoir, opinion and investigative journalism, Clementine Ford exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. An incendiary debut taking the world by storm, Fight Like a Girl will make you laugh, cry and scream — but above all it will open your eyes to a way forward, a brighter future, and a society where both men and women can flourish equally– something worth fighting for.

Claudia Dey, "HEARTBREAKER"

Pony Darlene Fontaine is 15 years old, on the phone with her best friend watching Teen Psychic when her mother, Billie Jean Fontaine, leaves her bedroom for the first time in months. Billie Jean walks out of the front door, gets in her truck, and vanishes. The Territory, population 400, is a settlement founded decades ago by a charismatic cult leader, and it has been cut off from the world ever since. The residents of this strange town think the year is 1985. They crimp their hair, wear shoulder pads, listen to Whitesnake on their Walkmans, and have no contact with anyone from the outside world. Except for Billie Jean, the first stranger they took in as their own. And now, Pony fears, Billie Jean has become the first resident to leave.

Heartbreaker is a novel about the deeply moving relationship between a mother and a daughter—and about the dark secrets they kept from one another. When Billie Jean disappears, Pony and her father frantically try to piece together memories from the months leading up to her disappearance and make sense of her actions. The search for Billie Jean takes us on a high-voltage ride through the complex impulses of the human heart.

Told through three unforgettable points of view––Billie Jean’s daughter, her killer dog, and her mysterious friend––Claudia Day's novel is as devastating as it is touching and funny. With electrifying prose, it gradually reveals a portrait of a woman who must keep secrets and reinvent herself in order to survive, and a daughter who will do whatever it takes to untangle those mysteries to find her beloved mother.

Elaine Mokhtefi, "THIRD WORLD CAPITAL"

Following the Algerian war for independence and the defeat of France in 1962, Algiers became the liberation capital of the Third World. Here, Elaine Mokhtefi, who as a young American woman had worked with leaders of the Algerian Revolution, including Frantz Fanon, found a home. As a journalist and translator, she lived among guerrillas, revolutionaries, exiles and visionaries and was even present in the making of the groundbreaking film The Battle of Algiers.

Mokhtefi crossed paths with some of the era’s brightest stars: Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Ahmed Ben Bella, Jomo Kenyatta and Eldridge Cleaver. She was instrumental in the establishment of the International Section of the Black Panther Party in Algiers and was close at hand as the group became involved in intrigue, murder and international hijackings. She traveled with the Panthers and organised Cleaver’s clandestine departure for France. Algiers, Third World Capital is an unforgettable story of an era of passion and promise. 

Leah Dieterich, "VANISHING TWINS"

 

“It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?”

As long as she can remember, Leah Dieterich has had the mysterious feeling that she’s been searching for a twin—that she belongs as one of an intimate pair. It begins with friends, dance partners, and her own reflection in the mirror as she studies ballet growing up; continues with physical and emotional attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, whom she moves across the country for, and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions she can’t answer about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage.

How does a young couple make room for their individual desires, their evolving selfhoods, and their artistic ambitions while building a life together? Can they pursue other sexual partners, even live in separate cities, and keep their original passionate bond alive? Vanishing Twins looks for answers in psychology, science, pop culture, art, architecture, Greek mythology, dance, and language to create a lucid, suspenseful portrait of a woman testing the limits and fluidities of love.

Dieterich is joined in conversation by Sarah Manguso, author of seven books, including 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay.

 

Ben Marcus, "NOTES FROM THE FOG"

With the thirteen transfixing stories of Notes From the Fog, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world--cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

In "The Grow-Light Blues," a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer's newest nutrition supplement--the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son's precocity has turned sinister in the chilling "Cold Little Bird." In "Blueprints for St. Louis," two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment--a memorial to a terrorist attack. 

In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus's fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor. Blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.

David Ulin, "THE LOST ART OF READING"

The new introduction and afterword bring fresh relevance to this insightful rumination on the act of reading--as a path to critical thinking, individual and political identity, civic engagement, and resistance.

Former LA Times book critic David Ulin expands his short book The Lost Art of Reading, rich in ideas, on the consequence of reading to include the considerations of fake news, siloed information, and the connections between critical thinking as the key component of engaged citizenship and resistance. Here is the case for reading as a political act in both public and private gestures, and for the ways it enlarges the world and our frames of reference, all the while keeping us engaged.

Thomas Page McBee, "AMATEUR" w/ Ann Friedman

In Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, Thomas Page McBee, the first transgender man to ever box in Madison Square Garden, explores his relationship to violence as experienced in a man’s body, while wrestling with the larger issue of what healthy masculinity might look like in our society.

From every incident of gun violence, to every instance of publicized sexual harassment and assault, to the conversation around our most recent presidential election, it’s clear that we are at a potential turning point in our understanding of men’s roles in the world. In 2015, while training for a charity boxing match, McBee embarked on a mission to uncover how to live as a man while remaining conscious of his privilege, supportive of the women in his life, and aligned with his most authentic self. Interweaving research and analysis with the story of his training, McBee traces the relationship between masculinity and violence and explores how we can move, together, toward a healthier idea of what it means to be a man.

McBee is in conversation with Ann Friedman, a freelance journalist who writes about gender, media, technology, and culture. She also co-hosts a podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, with Aminatou Sow.

Adam Cayton-Holland, "TRAGEDY PLUS TIME"

From Adam Cayton-Holland, one of Variety’s “10 Comics to Watch,” comes a “heartfelt and brilliant” (Patton Oswalt) memoir—Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir about the author’s beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking relationship with his younger sister and the depression that took her life.

Both a moving tribute to a lost sibling and an inspiring meditation on mental illness, grief, and recovery, Tragedy Plus Time is an unsentimental, unexpectedly funny, and incredibly honest love letter to every family that has ever felt messy, complicated, or (even momentarily) magnificent. In the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Truth & Beauty, this memoir offers a tender look at the bonds that hold a family together and the difficult truth that you can’t always save the person you love.

Laura van den Berg, "THE THIRD HOTEL" w/ Aja Gabel

In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death—and the truth about their marriage—in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery.

Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

Van den Berg is joined in conversation by Aja Gabel, whose writing has appeared in BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere.