Skylight Books Podcast Series

Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give (W.W. Norton & Company) In July of 2015, the New York Times “Modern Love” column published Ada Calhoun’s essay “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” a strikingly honest rumination on the true challenges—and joys—of marriage. The essay was wildly popular: it stayed in the most-emailed list for a week, inspired hundreds of comments, and became one of the top 50 stories...

My Future Ex-Girlfriend (Viking Books for Young Readers) In Me and Miranda Mullaly, three eighth-grade boys struggled to win the affections of one girl. In My Future Ex-Girlfriend, the same three boys have landed their perfect matches. Follow Sam (the class clown), Duke (the intellectual), and Chollie (the athlete) as they fumble their way through boyfriend territory for the very first time. With...

The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 (PM Press) As the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love floods the media with debates and celebrations of music, political movements, “flower power,” “acid rock,” and “hippies”; The Explosion of Deferred Dreams offers a critical re-examination of the interwoven political and musical happeni...

Hostage (Drawn + Quarterly)  Join award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle (Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles) for the launch of his highly anticipated, non-fiction page-turner: Hostage. Set in the Caucasus region in 1997, Hostage tells the true story of Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe Andre who was held captive for over three months. Recounting his day-to-day survival...

The Protester Has Been Released (C&R Press) Populated by wise animals and hapless humans, Protester brilliantly evokes an end-of-the-world feeling that is equal parts dread and hilarity. In nine precisely rendered stories and a novella featuring the American president’s daughter, Sarbanes takes on the big questions with gallows humor: What is freedom? What is love? What is art? And what does it ma...

Eartha (Fantagraphics) Eartha is Cathy Malkasian’s fourth graphic novel — a metaphorical fable that resonates with contemporary themes. For a thousand years the unfinished dreams from the City Across the Sea came to Echo Fjord to live out their lives. Sex fantasies, murder plots, wishful thinking, and all manner of secrets once found sanctuary in Echo Fjord. Emerging from the soil, they took bodil...

Join us as students from the  Otis College of Art and Design MFA  Writing Class of 2017 read their work.  Readers will include:  George Fekaris grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and has an M.A. in English, from Cal State Northridge. Aside from her fascination with the human body, Esther S. Lee is an MFA candidate in Otis College’s Graduate Writing Program. She is currently working on a collectio...

Startup (Little Brown and Company) Doree Shafrir’s hilarious, smart debut Startup is set in the heart of New York City’s tech industry, where 36 is considered past your prime and a pole-dancing workshop is an acceptable Thursday evening activity with your co-workers. A veteran online journalist, Doree has written a hilarious and sharply observed novel about the difficulties of real-life connection...

Void Star (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) A riveting, beautifully written, fugue-like novel of AIs, memory, violence, and mortality, Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial...

The Lights (Rare Bird Books) A broken love letter to an ex-boyfriend, The Lights navigates the self-destruction and hopeful redemption of a writer who relocates to Austin, TX, for an MFA program. While there, she immerses herself into a new obsession: Jason, a younger MFA student with dreams of Hollywood screenwriting and the intended audience to the narrator’s twelve steps of AA. Grappling with m...

Eat Only When You're Hungry (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) A father searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts) Achingly funny and full of feeling, Eat Only When You’re Hungry follows fifty-eight-year-old Greg as he searches for his son, GJ, an addict who has been missing for three weeks. Greg is bored, demoralized, obese, and as dubious of GJ’s...

Writers At Work--20th Anniversary Reading, Celebrating National Poetry Month featuring Poets At Work and alumnae. MEMBERS OF POETS AT WORK READ NEW AND PROVOCATIVE POEMS Yvonne M. Estrada Dylan Gailey Brett Guitar Hofer Ann Pibel Helen Yeoman Terry Wolverton MEMBERS AND ALUMNAE CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF THEIR POETRY COLLECTIONS Kim Dower — Last Train to the Missing Planet Eric Howard – Taliban...

Soupy Leaves Home (Dark Horse Books) Two misfits with no place to call home take a train-hopping journey from the cold heartbreak of their Eastern homes to the sunny promise of California in this Depression-era coming-of- age tale. When Pearl runs away from her abusive father, she has nowhere to go—until she stumbles upon a disguise that gives her the key to a new identity. Reborn as a boy named S...

Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon Books) When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and, not long after his funeral, the sight of an abandoned mining town marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined place...

Selfish Issue Five: Void of Course True to its name, “void of course” leaves the familiar for the uncertain, the inconclusive, the esoteric. featuring the work of twenty three contributors, our fifth issue explores the shadow realm, the twelfth house, and the rays of light in between.  Join us for a panel discussing the importance of feminist art, followed by a good ol’ fashioned party celebrating...

Is God Is, Brief Chronicle (Books 6-8) (3 Hole Press) 3 Hole Press is a small press bringing new audiences to new plays in printed formats. To celebrate the publications of its two newest books, 3 Hole Press presents short readings from each play, followed by a conversation with the authors. Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award from the American Playwriting Foundation, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is is...

Join us for NEXTWORDS, the annual reading series organized, curated by and featuring graduating MFA students of CalArts' Creative Writing Program. Erik Alessandro Mondrian is a writer, artist, and scholar who makes work about place, belonging, love, longing, and madness. He holds an MA in Mass Communication & Media Studies from San Diego State University, focusing on virtual worlds as new media, a...

Wherever You Go, There They Are (Blue Rider Press) There’s an old adage: You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family. But is that true in the world we live in now? New York Times bestselling author Annabelle Gurwitch, asks this question in her latest collection of essays, Wherever You Go, There They Are, where she writes about her own family of bootleggers, gamblers, and philande...

BigCity (Stalking Horse Press) Scot Sothern’s profane western satire, BigCity, is a novel with an unforgettable cast, including the wild and lethal Bitch Bantam, pulp writer Slab Pettibone, and his sidekick FuzzyWuzzy the bear, in a tale as moving as it is scandalous. In postbellum America, BigCity nutures the birth of feminism, robber barons, media stardom, and motion pictures. Tall-Tale characte...

The Girl from Rawblood (Sourcebooks Landmark) For generations the Villarcas have died mysteriously, and young. Now Iris and her father will finally understand why... At the turn of England's century, as the wind whistles in the lonely halls of Rawblood, young Iris Villarca is the last of her family's line. They are haunted, through the generations, by "her," a curse passed down through ancient blo...

More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers (Melville House Publishing) A collection of bestselling, NBCC prize-winning author Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on the subject of writers and writing. A readerly wake-up call from one of America’s finest and most acclaimed working writers. Picking up where his NBCC Award finalist collection The Ecstasy of Influence left off, More Alive and Less...

Cake Time (Red Hen Press) Daring yet aimless, smart but slightly strange, Cake Time’s young female protagonist keeps making slippery choices, sliding into the dangerous space where curiosity melds with fear and desires turn into dirty messes. In “How Not to Have an Abortion,” the teenaged narrator looks for a ride from the clinic between her AP exams. In “Easy Target,” the now-college-grad agrees...

The Scarlett Letters: My Secret Year of Men in an L.A. Dungeon (St. Martins Press) Jenny Nordbak takes us to a place that few have seen, but millions have fantasized about, revealing how she transformed herself from a USC grad lacking in confidence into an elite professional dominatrix who finds her own voice, power and compassion for others. On an unorthodox quest to understand her hidden fantasi...

Cartoon Utopia and What Parsifal Saw (Fantagraphics Books) Join surreal cartoonist Ron Rege Jr. (The Cartoon Utopia) and author Maja D'Aoust (The Secret Source) as they discuss alchemy, spirituality, and the blending of magic and science for modern audiences. They will read from The Cartoon Utopia as well as his new graphic novel, What Parsifal Saw, both of which include texts written by D'Aoust a...

John Ronald's Dragons: The Story of J.R. R. Tolkien (MacMillan Children's Publishing Group) A captivating picture book biography of a boy who imagined a world full of dragons and grew up to be beloved author J. R. R. Tolkien. John Ronald loved dragons. He liked to imagine dragons when he was alone, and with his friends, and especially when life got hard or sad. After his mother died and he had to...