Skylight Books Podcast Series

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Alison B. Hart, ”THE WORK WIFE” w/ Julia Phillips

Zanne Klein never planned to be a personal assistant to Hollywood royalty Ted and Holly Stabler. But a decade in at thirty-eight, that's exactly how she spends her days, earning six figures to make sure the movie mogul and his family have everything they could ever dream of and more.

However, today is no ordinary day at the Stabler estate. Tonight, everyone who's anyone will be there for the Hollywood event of the season, and if the party's a success, that chief of staff job Zanne's been chasing may soon be hers. Which means she can buy a house, give her girlfriend the life she deserves, pay off her student loans.

Nothing's going to get in Zanne's way--not disgruntled staff, not a nosy reporter, not even a runaway hostess. But when Ted's former business partner, Phoebe Lee, unexpectedly shows up right before go time, Zanne suddenly has a catastrophe unfolding before her--one with explosive consequences. As the truth comes out and Zanne realizes how deeply entangled she's become in the Stablers' world, she must decide if the sacrifices she's made for the job are worth the moral price she has to pay.

Told over the course of a single day and from three fierce perspectives, The Work Wife is a richly observed novel about female ambition, complicity, privilege and what happens when the brightest of stars aren't allowed to shine.

 

Join us for this conversation between author Alison B. Hart and Julia Phillips, moderated by Nat Freeman, recorded live on our Crowdcast channel on Thursday, July 21.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Madhushree Ghosh, ”KHABAAR” w/ Guy Branum

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country? These questions are integral to the author’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food.

 

Author Madhushree Ghosh is in conversation with Guy Branum. The conversation is moderated by Mike Jeffries.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Elizabeth Kilcoyne, ”WAKE THE BONES”

The sleepy little farm that Laurel Early grew up on has awakened. The woods are shifting, the soil is dead under her hands, and her bone pile just stood up and walked away.

After dropping out of college, all she wanted was to resume her life as a tobacco hand and taxidermist and try not to think about the boy she can’t help but love. Instead, a devil from her past has returned to court her, as he did her late mother years earlier. Now, Laurel must unravel her mother’s terrifying legacy and tap into her own innate magic before her future and the fate of everyone she loves is doomed.

Elizabeth Kilcoyne’s Wake the Bones is a dark, atmospheric debut about the complicated feelings that arise when the place you call home becomes hostile.

 

Kilcoyne is in conversation with Nat Freeman.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

CROWDCAST: Jamila Rowser & Robyn Smith, ”WASH DAY DIARIES”

Wash Day Diaries tells the story of four best friends—Kim, Tanisha, Davene, and Cookie—through five connected short story comics that follow these young women through the ups and downs of their daily lives in the Bronx.

The book takes its title from the wash day experience shared by Black women everywhere of setting aside all plans and responsibilities for a full day of washing, conditioning, and nourishing their hair. Each short story uses hair routines as a window into these four characters' everyday lives and how they care for each other.

Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith originally kickstarted their critically acclaimed, award-winning slice of life mini comic, Wash Day, inspired by Rowser's own wash day ritual and their shared desire to see more comics featuring the daily lived experiences of young Black women. Wash Day Diaries includes an updated, full color version of this original comic—which follows Kim, a 26-year-old woman living in the Bronx—as the book's first chapter and expands into a graphic novel with short stories about these vibrant and relatable new characters.

 

Moderated by Nat Freeman, recorded live on our Crowdcast channel on Tuesday, July 12.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

Lit Angeles, Ep. 4: ”THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE” w/ Steph Cha

In the season finale of LIT ANGELES, Emily and Alena tackle Paul Beatty's classic novel The White Boy Shuffle. They discuss Beatty's poetry background and the book's consistent dark comedy, then invite esteemed novelist Steph Cha for further discussion. 

 

Cha talks about the importance of LA in the 90s for people of color, how difficult it is for POC writers to pull off something as weird as White Boy Shuffle, and her own personal connection to the novel and Skylight Books itself.

 

You're not going to want to miss this season-capper!

 

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Produced by Emily VanKoughnett, Alena Saunders & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Ashley Hutson, ”ONE’S COMPANY” w/ Sara Levine

Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the voice that reminds her of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company.

When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision—to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity—takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate binge-watch.

 

Join us for this conversation between One's Company author Ashley Hutson and fellow writer Sara Levine, recorded live on our Crowdcast on June 16, 2022.

 

Moderated by Nat Freeman.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Imogen Binnie, ”NEVADA” w/ Michelle Tea & Brontez Purnell

Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn’t inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she’s trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James’s savior—or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist—and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author—Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.

 

Join us for this conversation between Binnie and fellow writers Michelle Tea and Brontez Purnell, recorded live on our Crowdcast on June 15, 2022.

 

Moderated by Nat Freeman.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

SKYLIT: Paul Tremblay, ”THE PALLBEARERS CLUB”

What if the coolest girl you’ve ever met decided to be your friend?

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Okay, that part was a little weird.

So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things – terrifying things – that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right?

Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts.

Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship.

 

Author Paul Tremblay is in conversation with Halley Perry.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Becky Chambers, ”A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY”

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.

They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.

Becky Chambers's new Monk & Robot series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?

 

Chambers discusses her new entry in the series, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, with Nat Freeman.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Ross Melnick, ”HOLLYWOOD’S EMBASSIES”

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially "American" experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way.

 

In Hollywood's Embassies, a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood's marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood's global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood's Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

LIT ANGELES, Ep. 3: ”THE REVOLT OF THE COCKROACH PEOPLE” w/ Sesshu Foster & Arturo Romo

Emily and Alena take a break from the glitz of Hollywood to explore Oscar Zeta Acosta's Los Angeles in The Revolt of the Cockroach People. Acosta, a friend and contemporary of Hunter S. Thompson, takes us behind the front lines of the militant Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, a movement he served both in the courtroom and on the barricades.

 

Emily and Alena discuss the Chicano/Anglo conflict and have an illuminating conversation with Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo, authors of Eladatl: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, about Acosta's mysterious disappearance and lasting legacy.

 

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Produced by Emily VanKoughnett, Alena Saunders & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Sina Grace, ”ROCKSTAR & SOFTBOY”

Sina Grace returns to writing and drawing for the first time in five years to deliver a frenzied story about two best friends and their antics in Hollyweird, CA.

 

Rockstar plans the greatest house party ever as a means of lifting roommate Softboy's spirits, but things take a gnarly turn when the dreaded PARTY ANIMAL shows up to make a mess of things... and dredge up long held secrets between two BFFs who seemingly share everything

 

Join us for this conversation with Grace on Rockstar & Softboy, hosted by Lance Morgan.
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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

SKYLIT: Angeline Jackson, ”FUNNY GYAL”

When Angeline Jackson was a child, she wondered if there was something wrong with her for wanting to kiss the other girls. But as her sexuality blossomed in her teens, she knew she wouldn't "grow out of it" and that her attraction to girls wasn't against God. In fact, she discovered that same-sex relationships were depicted in the Bible, which she read devoutly, even if the tight-knit evangelical Christian community she grew up in believed any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and woman was a sin, and her society, Jamaica, criminalized homosexual sex.

Angeline's story begins with her traumatic experience of "corrective rape" when she is lured by an online predator, then traces her childhood through her sexual and spiritual awakening as a teen -- falling in love, breaking up, coming out, and then being forced into conversion therapy.

Sometimes dark, always threadbare and honest, Funny Gyal chronicles how Angeline's faith deepens as a teenager, despite her parents' conservative values and the strict Christian Jamaican society in which she lives, giving her the courage to challenge gender violence, rape culture, and oppression.

 

Join us for this conversation, hosted by Lance Morgan.
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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Lit Angeles, Ep. 2: ”L.A. WOMAN” w/ Molly Lambert

For the second episode of Lit Angeles, Emily and Alena dive deep into the the City of Angels painted by Eve Babitz in her 1982 classic L.A. Woman. They discuss what makes the novel so special from a stylistic standpoint. Later, they're joined by Molly Lambert, writer and host of the new podcast HeidiWorld, to talk how writing about L.A.'s party culture from a woman's perspective makes a huge difference, the cultural peculiarities of Los Angeles, and most importantly: what is an L.A. Woman??? 

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Produced by Emily VanKoughnett, Alena Saunders & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

LIVE ON CROWDCAST: Paul Tran, ”ALL THE FLOWERS KNEELING” w/ Hieu Minh Nguyen & Fatimah Asghar

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

 

Join us for this conversation between Tran and fellow poets Hieu Minh Nguyen and Fatimah Asghar, recorded live on our Crowdcast on February 24, 2022.

 

Moderated by Halley Parry.

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Produced by Nat Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski.

Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.