Skylight Books Podcast Series

Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers (Or Books)   When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright...

The Refugees (Grove Press) Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction but also the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book A...

The Prison School (UC Press) Public schools across the nation have turned to the criminal justice system as a gold standard of discipline. As public schools and offices of justice have become collaborators in punishment, rates of African American suspension and expulsion have soared, dropout rates have accelerated, and prison populations have exploded. Nowhere, perhaps, has the War on Crime been m...

If You Are There (Counterpoint Press) Set in the early 1900s, If You Are There follows young Lucia Rutkowski who, thanks to the influence of her beloved grandmother, escapes the Warsaw ghetto to work as a kitchen maid in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the bustling city of Paris. Too talented for her lowly position, Lucia is thrown out on the street. Her only recourse is to take a job worki...

Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 2 (Cleis Press) Join us for a night of readings from the Best Women's Erotica of  the Year series, featuring contributors from volumes 1 & 2.  "America's favorite erotica writer takes the helm of the top-selling erotica series!"  Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 2 gives us fierce female passion, timeless love, and lustful encounters that are guarant...

SCRATCH: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living (Simon & Schuster) Based on the online magazine of the same name, SCRATCH: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living is a collection of honest and informative essays and interviews, addressing the relationships between writing and money, work and life, literature and commerce. In the literary world, we romanticize the image of the strugg...

Nineveh (Unnamed Press)                     In Plain View (Unnamed Press) Join Skylight Books and Unnamed Press for a celebration of another year of fantastic independent literature and new novels by Henrietta Rose-Innes and Julie Shigekuni Known throughout the world as one of the new voices of South African writing, Henrietta Rose-Innes is presenting her US debut, Nineveh, alongside Julie Shigeku...

Sing the Song (Future Tense Books) After steadily garnering attention and gaining fans with her appearances in various magazines and websites, Meredith Alling comes out with her debut collection of stories, Sing the Song. For fans of writers like Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Amelia Gray, Alling’s debut will signal the arrival of a new unique voice in fiction. Featuring...

Please join us this afternoon as students in the University of California, Riverside Master of Fine Arts writing program will read from their work. Readers include Samantha Reid Avina, Kate Burns, Chloe Cole, Joshua Rigsby, Jason Schachat and Miranda Tsang Samantha Reid Aviña is pursuing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at UCR. Her writing is influenced by life, love, family, food, and secrets. Kate...

Wedding Bush Road (Counterpoint)  When he learns of his mother’s ailing health, Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel half a world away to the family’s horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their history: long divorced, his mother still maintains the farm having put out her cheating, rakish husba...

How to Win At Feminism: The Definitive Guide to Having It All—And Then Some! (HarperOne) Feminism is all about demanding equality and learning to love yourself. But not too much – men hate that! From the writers of Reductress, the subversive, satirical women’s magazine read by over 2.5 million visitors a month, comes How to Win At Feminism: The Definitive Guide to Having It All—And Then Some! This...

Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds (Yale University Press) Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for revealing the complex and constantly shifting history behind seemingly unchanging ideas of fame, war, and masculinity. Continuing his interest in th...

I Blame Dennis Hopper: And Other Stories From A Life Lived In and Out of the Movies (Flatiron Books) From award-winning actress Illeana Douglas comes a memoir about learning to survive in Hollywood while staying true to her quirky vision of the world. In 1969 Illeana Douglas' parents saw the film Easy Rider and were transformed. Taking Dennis Hopper's words, "That's what it's all about man" to hea...

Return of the Continuums (Turner Publishing) One thousand years after a cataclysmic event leaves humanity on the brink of extinction, the descendants of the chosen survivors take refuge in thirteen contingency shelters buried deep underground, at the bottom of the ocean, and in the far reaches of outer space. In the underwater 13th Continuum, sixteen-year-old Myra Jackson has heard rumors and whis...

Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanism) Book of Endless Sleepovers (Civil Coping Mechanism) CCM is pleased to announce Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz, the author of the critically acclaimed Excavation: A Memoir and Hollywood Notebook. With Bruja, Ortiz continues to upend and reinvent the memoir in inventive and deeply emotional ways to better fit the terms and trajectory of her exploration.  Behold the “dreamoir”...

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...

Queer & Trans Artists of Color Vol 2 A celebration of queer and trans black and brown genius...building on the groundbreaking first volume, Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, Nia King is back with a second archive of interviews from her podcast We Want the Airwaves. She maintains her signature frankness as an interviewer while seeking advice on surviving capitalism fro...

The Stranger Game (Balzer & Bray/HarperTeen) The Stranger Game is a dark, suspenseful, and twisty novel that is Gone Girl for teens. Perfect for fans of Lauren Oliver and E. Lockhart. When Nico Morris's older sister mysteriously disappears, her parents, family, and friends are devastated. But Nico can never admit what she herself feels: relief at finally being free of Sarah's daily cruelties. Then...

Exploded View (Sky Horse Publishing) It's 2050, and LAPD Detective Terri Pastuzka has drawn the short straw with her first assignment of the new decade. Someone has executed one of the city's countless immigrants, and no one (besides the usual besieged advocacy groups) seems to much care. Even Terri herself is already looking ahead to her next case before an unexpected development reveals there s...

The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press) Skylight Books and Villa Aurora are proud to present Laurence A. Rickels, reading from his newest book The Psycho Records. The Psycho Records follows the influence of the primal shower scene within subsequent slasher and splatter films. American soldiers returning from World War II were called “psychos” if they exhibited mental illness. Robert Bloch and Alfred...

I'm Bored (Hat & Beard Press) Jess Rotter: I'm Bored is a Gary-Larson-meets-The Muppets variety show, a terrific trip composed of drawings filled with recurring characters--ranging from walruses to wizards to life warriors, who are all, like the rest of us, seeking their daily salvation. A wizard paddles on a lonely sea, his flag proclaiming "I'm trying." An ostrich hitchhikes in the desert, holdi...

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...

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...

What Books Press is proud to present two new books of LA poetry-- Mirage Industry, by Carolie Parker and The " She" Series: A Venice Correspondence, which is a braided collaboration of poems by Sarah Maclay and Holaday Mason.  Mirage Industry Mirage Industry is a collection of poems suggested by the social landscape of Los Angeles. A fairly reckless experiment in rearranging the natural world to s...

The Emotionary: A Dictionary of Words That Don't Exist for Feelings That Do (Razorbill) Feeling guilty about wanting to just stay home and see no one? Guiltroversion. Are you ever introduced to someone, and immediately forget their name, seconds after they’ve told you? Namenesia. If you have ever struggled for the perfect word to describe a feeling or situation you were experiencing, The Emotionar...