Skylight Books Podcast Series

Us Kids Know (Razorbill) We all knew about Cullen Hickson.  Siblings Bri and Ray O'Dell are lost. Anxious. Restless. Ray—bullied at his Catholic school for being small and timid—wants to be someone people respect or, even better, someone people fear. Meanwhile, Bri knows that something is off about her friendship with the shiny, happy, sophisticated blond girls on her field hockey team. They don't...

The Deaths of Henry King (Uncivilized Books) In The Deaths of Henry King, the hapless Henry King, as advertised, dies. Not just once or even twice, but seven dozen times, each death making way for a new demise, moving from the comic to the grim to the absurd to the transcendent and back again. With text by Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson complimented by Lilli Carre's macabre, gravestone-rubbing-style...

Periods Gone Public (Arcade Publishing) The first book to explore menstruation in the current cultural and political landscape and to investigate the new wave of period activism taking the world by storm. After millennia of being shrouded in taboo and stigma, periods have gone mainstream. A new, high-profile movement has emerged—one dedicated to bold activism, creative product innovation, and smar...

Miraculum Monstrum (Red Hen Press) Miraculum Monstrum is a hybrid narrative about fictitious female artist Tristia Vogel, who experiences a radical physical transformation, beginning with the excrescence of apparent wings. Though her affliction is possibly an anomalous mutation resulting from worldwide ecological upheaval, the bird/woman is co-opted by a religious cult and written as the central f...

Real American: A Memoir (Henry Holt & Company) Julie Lythcott-Haims, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, has written a different kind of book this time out – a deeply personal, biting and affecting account of her life growing up as a biracial black woman in America in Real American: A Memoir Bringing a brisk, poetic sensibility to her prose, Lythcott-Haims stirringly ev...

Freeman's: The Future of New Writing (Grove Press) Please join us for an evening with John Freeman and Hector Tobar and two contributors to the new issue of Freeman’s, drawing on recommendations from book editors, critics, translators, and authors from across the globe, Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing includes pieces from a select list of poets, fiction writers, and essayists whose work boldl...

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Company) In recent years, many Americans have had to face tough new realities in the midst of massive changes in the economy and a widening wealth gap. One particularly hard-hit demographic is senior citizens, a proportion of whom saw their stable middle-class lives disappear in the wake of the Great Recession and suddenly, in...

Dead Girls and Other Stories (Dzanc Books) With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from...

The Consequences (DoppelHouse Press) Dutch author Niña Weijers took the world of European literature by storm in 2014 with her debut novel The Consequences, which has sold over 30,000 copies in Holland and garnered critical praise for its maturity and ambition. Using deft and captivating prose, Weijers tells the story of Minnie Panis, a young and talented conceptual artist, as she navigates love a...

Afterglow (a dog memoir) (Grove Press) Prolific and widely renowned poet, novelist, and essayist Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match” (New York Review of Books). Afterglow (a dog memoir), Myles’ first foray into memoir, paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit...

Becoming Ms. Burton (New Press) Becoming Ms. Burton is one woman's remarkable odyssey from tragedy to prison to recovery--and recognition as a leading figure in the national justice reform movement  Susan Burton's world changed in an instant when her five-year-old son was killed by a van driving down their street. Consumed by grief and without access to professional help, Susan self-medicated, bec...

Modern Tarot (HarperElixir) Literary icon Michelle Tea offers fresh new take on tarot that encourages self-love, personal growth and self-discovery. With her trademark wisdom and sharp sense of humor, author Michelle Tea shows how tarot offers moments of deep connection during a time when connection is ubiquitous but rarely delves beneath the surface. Based on over 25 years of experience and a dee...

PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship Meet and Greet Los Angeles Join Emerging Voices Fellows, Alumni, and Mentors in Conversation for the 2018 Application Cycle at Skylight Books. PEN Center USA presents summer cocktails, short readings, a fellowship overview and audience Q&A.  Featuring: Patrick O’Neil, Jian Huang, Mike Padilla, Peter H.Z. Hsu, Kirin Khan and Soleil David

Weird in a World That's Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures (HarperBusiness) Are you “awkward?” Do you often feel like a spiky misfit at work? Does overthinking, anxiety and crippling self-doubt stand between you and the path to success? Have you taken so many wrong turns that it feels like you’ll never find the way forward, towards a truly rewarding career? Weird in a World Tha...

The Conspiracy (Phoneme Media) When leftist revolutionary Sergio's sniper shot misses the President of Venezuela, he's thrown into a sudden tailspin. As he attempts to escape the increasingly militarized regime, he winds up taking residence in a bohemian beachside commune, where he keeps a low profile until Lourdes, his former comrade, the object of his desire, and his possible betrayer, turns up...

Fly Me (Little Brown & Company) The year is 1972 and Suzy Whitman arrives in Sela del Mar, a debaucherous beach town in the shadows of LAX, lured across the country by the desire for danger and acceptance, and the possibility of escaping her past. Full of startling psychological insight, Daniel Riley’s debut novel, Fly Me is a haunting tour de force. Richly evoking the sights and sounds of the era...

The Pox Lover: An Activist's Decade in New York and Paris (University of Wisconsin Press) www.thepoxlover.com The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-christine d'Adesky remembers "the poxed g...

Turf (Counterpoint Press) Blazing through states, cities, towns, continents, Crane fearlessly pivots from micro to macro, humor to tragedy, past to present, mixing an off-kilter sensibility with a heartbreaking reality, guiding us into the fringed and often fantastical lives of her characters. And that has never been truer than in her new collection, Turf. The end of the world as seen through a yo...

Two and Two (Little, Brown and Company) McSorley’s Old Ale House is not just a bar—it’s a home to all walks of life that has stood the test of time. For over 160 years, since 1854, the saloon has been a safe haven for regulars and tourists, workingmen and businessmen, writers and artists, old-timers and barely legal college drinkers. It has witnessed the Civil War, two world wars, the Great Depres...

Large Animals (Catapult) Jess Arndt's striking debut collection confronts what it means to have a body. Boldly straddling the line between the imagined and the real, the masculine and the feminine, the knowable and the impossible, these twelve stories are an exhilarating and profoundly original expression of voice. In "Jeff," Lily Tomlin confuses Jess for Jeff, instigating a dark and hilarious ide...

Please join us as students from the MFA Program at UC Irvine read from their work.  Readers include:  Jack Foraker is from Davis, California.  Corinna Rosendahl is most recently from Seattle and Portland and Corvallis. William Hawkins grew up in Louisiana. He is a third year in fiction in the MFA program at UC Irvine. Megan Grant grew up in Reedley, California. She went on to get her BA in Literat...

  Nature Poem (Tin House Books) Nature Poem follows Teebs―a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet―who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchline...

To Have and to Hold (Fantagraphics Books) Couched in the traditional trappings of a noir heist thriller, Graham Chaffee’s To Have and To Hold is a hard-boiled disquisition on the darker regions of married life and the American Dream. Set in October 1962, while the world holds its collective breath awaiting the possibly apocalyptic climax of the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis, the banality of every...

City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (University of North Carolina Press) Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two cen...

Spells (Counterpoint Press) Acclaimed author Peter Rock’s interest in using images for storytelling began while working as a security guard in an art museum. Twenty years later, reminded of the stories he created from the photographs and images he saw on the job, he began to envision a similar project—a project for which he received a Guggenheim scholarship, and which eventually became Spells: A N...