Skylight Books Podcast Series

Susanna Fogel, "NUCLEAR FAMILY"

“Your Grandma Rose Has Some Questions about Your Interracial Relationship”

So starts one of the letters in the dynamic debut novel Nuclear Family: A Tragicomic Novel in Letters by filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to Julie, a heroine we never meet, we get to know her and her increasingly unique family through their check-ins: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.

Tom Gauld, "BAKING WITH KAFKA"

In his inimitable style, British cartoonist Tom Gauld has opened comics to a crossover audience and challenged perceptions of what the medium can be. Noted as a "book-lover's cartoonist," Gauld's weekly strips in The Guardian, Britain's most well-regarded newspaper, stitch together the worlds of literary criticism and pop culture to create brilliantly executed, concise comics. Simultaneously silly and serious, Gauld adds an undeniable lightness to traditionally highbrow themes. From sarcastic panels about the health hazards of being a best-selling writer to a list of magical items for fantasy writers (such as the Amulet of Attraction, which summons mainstream acceptance, Hollywood money, and fresh coffee), Gauld's cartoons are timely and droll--his trademark British humour, impeccable timing, and distinctive visual style sets him apart from the rest. In Baking with Kafka, he proves this with one witty, sly, ridiculous comic after another.

Gauld is in conversation with Mark Frauenfelder, a research director at the Institute for the Future, founding editor of Wired.com, and the author of eight books.

Fran Krause, "THE CREEPS"

Illustrator, animator, teacher, and comic artist Fran Krause has touched a collective nerve with his wildly popular web comic series–and subsequent New York Times best-selling book–Deep Dark Fears. In follow-up The Creeps he brings readers more of the creepy, funny, and idiosyncratic fears they love illustrated in comic form–such as the fear that your pets will tell other animals all your embarrassing secrets, or that someone uses your house while you’re not home–as well as two longer comic short-stories about ghosts.

Santiago Gamboa, "RETURN TO THE DARK VALLEY"

Return to the Dark Valley travels between European cities scarred by terrorism that have turned increasingly xenophobic and Latin American landscapes that carry their own sense of danger enveloped in “new world” promise. 

Written in the sparkling prose and with the masterful suspense that have made Santiago Gamboa an international literary sensation, Return to the Dark Valley is a richly imagined portrait of a turbulent world where liberation is found in perpetual movement and determined exploration.

Scott Esposito, "THE DOUBLES"

Part memoir-through-film, part inquiry into the effect art has on our lives, Scott Esposito's The Doubles is a passionate, exquisitely written examination of 14 films that have made him.

Retelling one film per year, and covering 20 years of Esposito's life from 1996 - 2016, The Doubles shows the development via film of a critical intelligence and a maturing human being. From classic cinema like A Clockwork Orange to cosmological documentaries like A Brief History of Time to offbeat works like Koyaanisqatsi and major contemporary fare like Boyhood, Esposito's book inquires into the possibilities of a medium that has made us all.

Esposito is in conversation with Rebekah Weikel, a writer and editor living in LA.

Karl Geary, "MONTPELIER PARADE"

Montpelier Parade is just across town, but to Sonny it might as well be a different world. Working with his father in the garden of one of its handsome homes one Saturday, he sees a back door easing open and a beautiful woman coming down the path toward him. This is Vera, the sort of person who seems destined to remain forever out of his reach. Hoping to cast off his loneliness and a restless sense of not belonging--at high school, in his part-time job at the butcher shop, and in the increasingly suffocating company of his own family--Sonny drifts into dreams of a different kind of life. A series of intoxicating encounters with Vera lead him to feel he has fallen in love for the first time, but why does her past seem as unknowable as her future? Unfolding over a bright, rain-soaked Dublin spring, Karl Geary's Montpelier Parade is a rich, devastating debut novel about desire, grief, ambition, art, and the choices we must make alone.

Geary is in conversation with JT Petty, an American film director, author, and video game writer.

Clara Parkes, "A STASH OF ONE'S OWN"

A Stash of One’s Own: Knitters on Loving, Living With, and Letting Go of Yarn is an addictive-to-read anthology that celebrates yarn—specifically, the knitter’s reputation for acquiring it in large quantities and storing it away in what’s lovingly referred to as a “stash.”

The stories in Clara Parke's A Stash of One’s Own represent and provide validation for knitters’ wildly varying perspectives on yarn, from holding zero stash, to stash-busting, to stockpiling masses of it—and even including it in estate plans. These tales are for all fiber artists, spinners, dyers, crafters, crocheters, sheep farmers, shop owners, beginning knitters to yarn experts, and everyone who has ever loved a skein too hard to let it go.

Robin Sloan, "SOURDOUGH"

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.

Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.

Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, while taking on even more satisfying challenges, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer.

Augustus Rose, "THE READYMADE THIEF"

Lee Cuddy is seventeen years old and on the run, alone on the streets of Philadelphia. After taking the fall for a rich friend, Lee reluctantly accepts refuge in the Crystal Castle--a cooperative of homeless kids squatting in an austere, derelict building. But homeless kids are disappearing from the streets in suspicious numbers, and Lee quickly discovers that the secret society's charitable facade is too good to be true. She finds an unexpected ally in Tomi, a young artist and hacker whose knowledge of the Internet's black market is rivaled only by his ability to break into and out of buildings. From abandoned aquariums to highly patrolled museums to the homes of vacationing Philadelphians, Tomi and Lee can always chart a way to the next, perfect hide-out. 

But the harder Lee tries to escape into the unmapped corners of the city, the closer she unwittingly gets to uncovering the disturbing agenda of the very men who pull the strings of the secret society she's hoped to elude, a group of fanatics obsessed with the secrets encoded in the work of early-twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp. What these men want is more twisted than anything Lee could've imagined, and they believe Lee holds the key to it all. Augustus Rose's The Readymade Thief heralds the arrival of an astoundingly imaginative and propulsive new voice in fiction for fans of Marisha Pessl and Ernest Cline.

Rose is in conversation with Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travel Among the Tombs of the Twelve.

Eleanor Henderson, "THE TWELVE-MILE STRAIGHT"

Eleanor Henderson’s bestselling debut novel Ten Thousand Saints was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. It was deemed “fierce, devoted and elegiac,” and Ann Patchett said, “Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination.” In her forthcoming novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight, Henderson boldly returns to the page with a story inspired by those she heard about the small town in South Georgia her father grew up in, and combines the emotional acuity of her earlier work with a fresh take on big, important themes.

Henderson is joined by Edan Lepucki, author of the novels California and Woman No. 17.

Daniel Sweren-Becker, "THE EQUALS"

What happens when your own government turns against you? The Equality Team continues to round up and subject The Ones—the 1% of the American population who were genetically engineered in vitro—to a vaccine that will level the playing field. Desperate to save her boyfriend James from this fate, Cody flees into the wild to seek
assistance from a shadowy rebel group dedicated to equal rights for the Ones at any cost.

But when she grows closer to a radical named Kai, she's brought deeper into the fold, only to realize the group's leader has a secret plan more dangerous than Cody could have imagined—something that could change the course of the Ones' future. 

In The Equals, themes of justice, discrimination and terrorism mix with actual science to create a frightening version of our near future in Daniel Sweren-Becker's action-packed sequel to The Ones.

Alistair McCartney, "THE DISINTEGRATIONS"

“I know nothing about death, absolutely nothing,” asserts the narrator of Alistair McCartney's inventive autobiographical novel. Yet he can’t stop thinking about it. Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, he researches death on the Internet; mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and “natural deaths”; and wanders about LA’s Holy Cross Cemetery. He’s looking for answers, all the while formulating his own disquieting philosophies.

Within this dizzying investigation into the mystery of death is another mystery: who is the companion igniting these memories? This enigmatic novel blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, story and eulogy, poetry and obituary. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.

Mr. McCartney is joined by David Francis, author of Agapanthus Tango, Stray Dog Winter, and Wedding Bush Road.

Demetri Martin, "IF IT'S NOT FUNNY, IT'S ART"

Demetri Martin, comedian and New York Times bestselling author of This Is a Book and Point Your Face at This, is back with another collection of hilarious drawings and jokes.

Packed with hundreds of new illustrations and one-liners, If It's Not Funny, It's Art is a peek into the ingenious mind of author/comedian/filmmaker Demetri Martin. Exploring the meaning of art, life, death, ennui and the elegant fart joke with a sensibility all its own, this collection is a perfect gift for word lovers, art appreciators and fans of Demetri's unique brand of comedy. Sure to make you laugh out loud, and if it doesn't, then you know it's art. 

Tod Goldberg, "GANGSTER NATION"

It’s been two years since the events of Gangsterland, when legendary Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Las Vegas Rabbi David Cohen. Now, in September of 2001, everything’s coming up gold for David—but Sal wants out. He only needs to make it through the High Holidays, and he’ll have enough money to slip away, grab his wife and kid, and start fresh.

Across the country, former FBI agent Matthew Drew is now running security for an Indian Casino outside of Milwaukee, spending his off-time stalking members of The Family, looking for vengeance for the murder of his former partner. So when Sal’s cousin stumbles into the casino one night, Matthew takes the law into his own hands— again—touching off a series of events that will have Rabbi Cohen running for his life, trapped in Las Vegas, with the law, society, and the post-9/11 world closing in around him.

With the wit and gritty glamour that defines his writing, Tod Goldberg traces how the things we most value in our lives—home, health, even our spiritual lives—have been built on the enterprises of criminals.

Mr. Goldberg is joined by David L. Ulin, author of Ear to the Ground.

Matthew Zapruder, "WHY POETRY"

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry--and poetry alone--can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.

Mr. Zapruder is joined by David L. Ulin, author of the novel Ear to the Ground.