Skylight Books Podcast Series

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates with her young family from Russia to America, at her husband's frantic insistence, and her...

The best parenting advice that Hillary Frank receives doesn’t come from parenting gurus, but from friends and podcast listeners who use their creativity to flee moments of desperation. In Hillary’s book, one mother threatens to sing in public anytime her daughters argue. Another mom allows her daughter to play with tampons to get a few minutes on the toilet alone. These are just a few of the gems...

Please join us for an evening with UC Irvine MFA students Mason Boyles, Justine Yan, Katherine Damm, and Daniel Levin as they read from their work. 

From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century—nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person—Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as do...

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifti...

From Hugo and Nebula-Award winning author of the critically-acclaimed All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders, comes an all-new work of thought-provoking and entertaining speculative fiction set on a distant planet, divided into permanent day and night. The City in the Middle of the Night will satisfy Anders’ many fans as well as expand her audience as she crafts a wondrous new world in a ha...

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking--recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According...

From Laurels Award Fellowship recipient Sophia Shalmiyev comes the exquisite Mother Winter, a haunting and deeply personal story of fleeing the Soviet Union, where Shalmiyev was forced to abandon her mother, and her subsequent years of searching for surrogate mothers—whether in books, art, lovers, or other lost souls. Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an ar...

Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of internati...

Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing, and Creating Comics shows students how to critically examine the craft and storytelling elements found inside a graphic novel or comic and spotlights groundbreaking work by comics creators and scholars from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds. This accessible, introductory guide to comics discusses how a comic is made and introduces...

Famous for her pasta parties, Noodlephant is shocked when the law-loving kangaroos decide noodles are only for them! Noodlephant won’t let this stand—Noodlephants can’t survive on sticks and branches, after all. Determined to do something to push back against an unjust law, she and her friends invent a machine that transforms pens into penne, pillows into ravioli, and radiators into radiatori. Wit...

In this debut work of autofiction, high school junior Nikki Darling roams the uncanny suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. Nikki is ambivalent about her grades and even about showing up for class, instead flitting between a series of irresponsible and nominally illegal adolescent experiences. Left to her own devices by absent parents, she flings herself into punk music and counterculture, ho...

The year is 2015. Jonas might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age twenty-eight, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like, visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student—and a diffi...

Whiting Award-winning author Brontez Purnell’s first children’s book tells the story of a child charged with caring for his baby brother when his mom is out at night. In The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett, 11-year-old Jacuzzi is an introspective and imaginative child who loves taking care of his 11-month-old baby brother. When their mom goes out for a date with her boyfriend, he watches his sibling...

When Sophie Swankowski surfaces from the freezing waters in Michelle Tea's Castle on the River Vistula, she finds herself in an ancient castle in Poland—and in the center of an ages-old battle. Even with her magic powers, the strength and wisdom she learns from her companions in Warsaw, and the help of her gruff mermaid guardian, Syrena, how can one thirteen-year-old from scrappy Chelsea Massachus...

In Emily Jungmin Yoon's arresting and urgently relevant debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, she confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called “comfort women,” the majority of whom were Korean and who were forced into sexual labor to serve the Japanese Imperial Army in the Pacific theater of World War II. In wrenching language, A Cruel...

In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses...

An elegant, epic debut from a tremendous new talent and Pushcart Prize-winner, Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows one young woman’s search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that carries her from cosmopolitan Bangalore in Southern India to the mountains of Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.  In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a priv...

Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish reading each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, loneliness, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession who makes nightmares come to life through...

The map may not be the territory, and the word may not be the thing, but An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles is as close as it gets. Originally authored over fifty years ago by renowned architectural historians Robert Winter—described by Los Angeles Magazine as both the “spiritual godfather” and “father” of L.A. architecture—and the late, great David Gebhard, this seminal vade mecum of Los A...

On Hell transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romant...

The year is 1979. The Iranian Revolution is just around the corner, as is a once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse. Meanwhile, in the northeastern city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, run an ancient orchard, growing apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, and looking after several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and a...

TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publica...

Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.  When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's g...

The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous pe...