Skylight Books Podcast Series

When Mountain Lions are Neighbors: People and Wildlife Working It Out In California (Heydey Books) Did you know that a mountain lion, known as P-22, lives in the middle of Los Angeles, that on the Facebook campus in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg and his staff have provided a home for an endearing family of wild gray foxes, or that wolves have returned to California after a ninety-year absence, l...

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

So Famous and So Gay: The Fabulous Potency of Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein (University of Minnesota Press) How and why, in a time of homophobia and closeted sexuality, did two openly gay writers become mass-market celebrities? Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Truman Capote (1924–1984) should not have been famous. They made their names between the Oscar Wilde trial and Stonewall, when homosexuali...

The Fifth Wall (Black Sparrow Books) In this debut novel by Rachel Nagelberg, conceptual artist Sheila B. Ackerman heeds a mysterious urge to return to her estranged family home and arrives at the exact moment of her mother’s suicide. In an attempt to cope with and understand her own self destructive tendencies, Sheila plants a camera on the lawn outside the house to film 24/7 while workers decons...

Coconut Versus (Floricanto Press) This powerful and tempestuous coming-of- age novel follows a young man on the outside looking in, an interloper wherever he goes. Everyone calls Miguel Reyes a coconut, brown on the outside and white on the inside. Among his family in central California, he’s the too soft city-boy. In Arizona, he’s a brown boy in an upper-class, white neighborhood, with no real fr...

PEN USA presents YA Resists: Young Adult Authors Read Out  Join PEN Center USA and Skylight Books as we host 12 young adult authors reading about resistance and hope in troubled times. They will each read from books for young people that highlight, protest, suggest action and resistance.   Guests will include: Cecil Castellucci  Cherry Cheva  Brandy Colbert  Cylin Busby Lilliam Rivera Maureen Goo...

Temporary People (Restless Books) In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Some ride their luck to good fortune. Others suffer different fates. Until now, the humanitarian...

Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing (Simon & Schuster) Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve is a playful and informative look at what the numbers have to say about our favorite authors and their classic books. It’s How Fiction Works or Eats, Shoots & Leaves meets Nate Silver. There’s a famous piece of writing advice—offered by...

The Wanderers (G.P. Putnam's Sons) Brilliantly imagined and wholly original, The Wanderers follows three astronauts as they audition for the first-ever mission to Mars, an experience that will push the boundary between real and unreal, test their relationships, and leave each of them—and their families—changed forever. Inspired by real-life experiments designed to test the psychological and physio...

Join us for an evening with authors from Kaya Press, the group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas, with special guest Abeer Hoque. The Secret Room In Kazim Ali's wildly inventive novel The Secret Room, written as musical...

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's Books) Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, child-less, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why...

Los Angeles-based authors Alex Espinoza, Dan Lopez, Wendy C. Ortiz, and Martin Pousson discuss the ways they found homes for their unique voices and the independent literary communities that champion them, from publishers to bookstores and publications, in LA and beyond. Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico. He came to the United States with his family at the age of two and grew up in suburba...

ILL WILL (Ballentine Books) Have you ever thought to yourself, “did that really happen, or did I just imagine that to be true?” In Ill Will Dan Chaon explores two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—both linked by one man’s memory and self-deception. A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he learns that his adopted brother,...

Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (Simon & Schuster)  From the standoff at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the voices of grassroots leaders; from Black Lives Matter activists to the stories of those fighting for peace, climate justice, migrant rights, and LGBTQ equality; from uncovering government surveillance to fighting attacks on freedom of t...

The Fearless Travelers' Guide to Wicked Places (Capstone Young Readers) Twelve-year-old Nell Perkins knows there is magic at work that she can't yet understand. Her mother has been taken by witches and turned into a bird. Nell must journey to get her mother back, even if it takes her deep into the Wicked Places the frightening and dangerous realm where Nightmares resides. There Nell somehow must b...

Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World (NYU Press) In Whose Global Village?, Ramesh Srinivasan explores how new technologies often reinforce the inequalities of globalization because developers rarely take into account communities outside the Western world. By sharing stories of collaboration with Native Americans in California and New Mexico, revolutionaries in Egypt, an...

300 Arguments (Graywolf Press) A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts ofcompression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a grou...

Universal Harvester (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa a small town in the center of the state, the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and while the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It s good enough for Jeremy: It s a job, quiet and predicta...

History of Wolves (Grove Atlantic) History of Wolves is the story of fourteen-year- old Linda, who lives with her parents in an abandoned commune in the icy woods of Northern Minnesota. Isolated at home and at school, Linda finds unusual company in her beautiful classmate, Lily, and her charismatic History teacher, Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is accused of possessing child pornography, Linda’s...

Spaniel Rage (Drawn & Quarterly) Join Los Angeles-based cartoonist Vanessa Davis as she presents her latest release Spaniel Rage: a collection of frank, intimate pencil drawings created over the course of one year to chronicle her life as a single woman in New York. Filled with self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties, intimate moments between friends and lovers, and mingling general observa...

Running for Trap Doors (Sibling Rivalry Press) In her debut full-length poetry collection, Joanna Hoffman navigates family dynamics, lesbian bars, religion, emoticons, and inner demons. Along the way, she begins to see her world and the characters in it in a new light and gradually learns how to get out of her own way. Praise for Running for Trap Doors  "What I love most about Joanna Hoffman’s poe...

Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk: And Other Truths About Being Creative (Chronicle Books) This book is duct tape for the mouth of every artist's inner critic. Silencing that stifling voice once and for all, this salve for creatives introduces ten truths they must face in order to defeat self-doubt. Each encouraging chapter deconstructs a pivotal moment on the path to success fear of the blank page,...

Shadowbahn (Blue Rider Press) In Granta Jonathan Lethem called Steve Erickson’s forthcoming novel Shadowbahn "Jaw-dropping … Erickson weaves a playlist for the dying American century with his usual lucid-dreaming prose. I've read every novel he's ever written and I'll still never know how he does it: A tour-de-forcer's tour de force." A prescient book about a divided USA, Shadowbahn is a winding a...

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America (Riverhead Books) Today's Americans are looking to escape: faced with drastic increases in climate change, the rise of the One Percent, and a suffocating 24/7 work culture that seems to be keeping an entire population chained to their smart phones, it comes as no surprise that we are now, more than ever, yearning for "the simple life."...

Join us as professors and students from UC Riverside’s Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts MFA read from their work. Readers include: Tom Lutz, Charmaine Craig, Katie Ford, Robin Russin, Bernardita Garcia, Ashanti Anderson, Alicia Mosely, Lorelei Baughman, and Emily Margaret Wells. Tom Lutz is the author, most recently, of And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life of Tr...