Skylight Books Podcast Series

UC RIVERSIDE: Students and Professors

Join us as professors and students from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts MFA read from their work. Readers include: Allison Benis White, Steve Erickson, Nora Woolley, Aleksandra Krzywicka, Kate Burns, Carissa Atallah, Carley Besl.

Jeff Sweat, "MAYFLY"

Jemma has spent her life scavenging tools and supplies for her tribe in the their small enclave outside what used to be a big city. Now she’s a teen, and old enough to become a Mama. Making babies is how her people survive—in Jemma’s world, life ends at age seventeen.

Survival has eclipsed love ever since the Parents died of a mysterious plague. But Jemma’s connection to a boy named Apple is stronger than her duty as a Mama. Forced to leave, Jemma and Apple are joined in exile by a mysterious boy who claims to know what is causing them to die. The world is crumbling around them, and their time is running out. Life is short. Can they outlive it?

 

Mayfly author James Sweat is joined in conversation by Story Worthy Media producer Christine Blackburn.

Francisca Lia Block, "THE THORN NECKLACE"

In this long-anticipated guide to the craft of writing, Francisca Lia Block offers an intimate glimpse of an artist at work and a detailed guide to help readers channel their own experiences and creative energy. Sharing visceral insights and powerful exercises, she gently guides us down the write-to-heal path, revealing at each turn the intrinsic value of channeling our experiences onto the page.

Named for the painting by Frida Kahlo, who famously transformed her own personal suffering into art, The Thorn Necklace offers lessons on life, love, and the creative process.

Block is in conversation with Elgin James,a writer and director best known for the film Little Birds.

Sheila Heti, "MOTHERHOOD"

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Heti is in conversation with Sarah Manguso, author of four book-length essays, a story collection, and two poetry collections.

Hallie Bateman and Suzy Hopkins, "WHAT TO DO WHEN I'M GONE"

What to Do when I'm Gone is an instruction manual for getting through life without a mom. The death of one’s mother, is one of life’s key turning points. Combining Suzy Hopkin's wit and heartfelt advice with Hallie Bateman's quirky and colorful style, What to Do when I'm Gone is the illustrated instruction manual for getting through life without one's mom. It's also a poignant look at loss, love, and taking things one moment at a time. By turns whimsical, funny, touching, and above all pragmatic, it will leave readers laughing and teary-eyed. And it will spur conversations that enrich family members' understanding of one another.

MariNaomi, "LOSING THE GIRL"

In Losing the Girl, the first book in the Life on Earth trilogy, Eisner-nominated cartoonist MariNaomi looks at life through the eyes of four suburban teenagers: early romance, fraying friendships, and the traces of a mysterious—maybe otherworldly—disappearance. Different chapters focus on different characters, each with a unique visual approach.

Jamel Brinkley, "A LUCKY MAN"

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members, and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. This stunning debut by Jamel Brinkley reflects the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

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

Melissa Broder, "THE PISCES"

The Pisces is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have. With The Pisces, Melissa Broder combines hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, emotional complexity, and stark vulnerability. Underneath her addictively wry and unpretentious voice hums the unexpected truth of womanhood, bodies, trauma, and heartbreak in a debut that swells with grace, levity, and humanity.

Broder is in conversation with Mish Barber-Way, a writer and musician based in Los Angeles, CA.

Poets at Work, NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Members of Poets At Work read new and enticing poems and will discuss the formal structures that shape them.

Independent Bookstore Day, featuring THE EXPOSITION REVIEW

The Exposition Review editors celebrate the launch of Vol. III: “Orbit” to help commemorate Independent Bookstore Day.

Robert Gordon, "MEMPHIS RENT PARTY"

Memphis: the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, soul music capital, and home of the blues, this fabled city has played a major role in American music history. In his new book Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown, celebrated writer and documentary filmmaker Robert Gordon taps into the lesser-known characters of Memphis who have inspired and influenced popular music, from the 1970s into the present.

With interwoven stories and profiles, Memphis Rent Party begins where the greatest hits end. Gordon charts his own musical coming-of-age as he befriends blues legend Furry Lewis, Rolling Stones’ accompanist Jim Dickinson, and the high priest of indie rock, Alex Chilton. He mulls the tragedy of Jeff Buckley’s fatal swim, chronicles the power struggle to profit off singer-songwriter Robert Johnson’s legacy after his mysterious early death, and sips homemade whiskey at revolutionary blues guitarist Junior Kimbrough’s churning house parties. Gordon’s march through the city’s famed recording studios and juke joints captures the spirit of Memphis and illuminates its musical legacy that lives on today.

As with the rent parties from which the book takes its name—people gathering to hear live music, dance, and chip in to help a friend in hard times—Memphis Rent Party offers moments of celebration in the face of tragedy, optimism when the wolf is at the door. Gordon finds inspiration in life’s bleakness, art in the shadows of society, and revels in the individualism of these music legends.

Alex S. Vitale, "THE END OF POLICING"

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression--most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. "Broken windows" practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police's role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back.

The End of Policing attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice--even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

Sloane Crosley, "LOOK ALIVE OUT THERE"

Exactly ten years after her debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, introduced a strikingly original, genre-resuscitating voice to the world, the bestselling author Sloane Crosley returns to the personal essay right when we need her most. Look Alive Out There is a collection of sixteen new essays, each one brimming with Crosley’s trademark wit and observation. 

Leslie Jamison, "THE RECOVERING"

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction--both her own and others'--and examines what we want these stories to do, and what happens when they fail us. 
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace, and Denis Johnson, as well as brilliant figures lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.

For the power of her striking language and the sharpness of her piercing observations, Leslie Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Michelle Dean, "SHARP"

Women in media must still, unfortunately, fight for their due and today they call out mansplainers on Twitter, wield power on the opinion pages, and start a movement with a single hashtag. But before that, there were women writers who shouted down the prevailing narrative of sexism and nepotism by taking to the printed page alone. Acclaimed literary and cultural critic Michelle Dean has expertly rendered a portrait of ten such revolutionary writers from the 1920s to the 1990s in her debut work, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. We all know their names: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm. These women are united by what Dean terms as “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit, a claiming of power through writing rather than position.

Sharp is a vibrant and rich depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slanging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books as well as a considered portrayal of how these women came to be so influential in a climate where women were treated with derision by the critical establishment. Dean traces the lives of these extraordinary women as they intertwine and cut through the cultural and intellectual history of America, recounting friendships and rivalries, absent fathers and fractured families, professional triumphs and personal disappointments. Dean notes the essays and books that made their names, how their styles changed over the course of their careers, and how their work was received by their contemporaries.

Dean is joined in conversation by Carina Chocano, frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Elle.