Skylight Books Podcast Series

A Spare Life (Two Lines Press) It is 1984, and 12-year- old twins Zlata and Srebra live in communist Yugoslavia. In many ways their lives are like that of young girls anywhere, except for one immense difference: Zlata’s and Srebra’s bodies are conjoined at their heads. A Spare Life tells the story of their emergence from girls to young adults, from their desperately poor, provincial childhoods to...

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (Dey Street Books) Following the musical innovations and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, rock music in the 1970s was in the doldrums: airwaves were dominated by mellow country-rock, earnest singer-songwriters, earth-toned hippie jam bands, and samey-sounding boogie outfits. Then flaring up against the drab den...

Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe (Crown Archetype) Mike Massimino’s childhood fascination with space was born the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but his journey to actually becoming an astronaut was as unlikely as it is compelling. He grew up in a blue-collar Long Island town where going to college was a big deal; going to space was unthinka...

Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Books) In this powerful debut collection, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none. From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal, to an obedient daughter turned Stanford...

With the launch of her first young adult novel, Diana Wagman along with Francesca Lia Block will discuss crossover between the YA genre and adult fiction. Extraordinary October (Ig Publishing) October is an ordinary girl. From her plain looks to her average grades, there seems to be nothing special about her. Then, three days before her eighteenth birthday, she develops a strange itch that won t g...

We Found a Hat (Candlewick Press) Hold on to your hats for the conclusion of the celebrated hat trilogy by Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen. Two turtles have found a hat. The hat looks good on both of them. But there are two turtles, and there is only one hat. . . . Evoking hilarity and sympathy, the shifting yes tell the tale in this brilliantly paced story in three parts, highlighting Jon Klassen’...

Dog Years (University of Pittsburgh Press) Many of these richly layered stories juxtapose the miracles of modern medicine against the inescapable frustrations of everyday life: awkward first dates, the indignities of air travel, and overwhelming megastore cereal aisles. In “Go Forth,” an aging couple attends a kidney transplant reunion, where donors and recipients collide with unexpected results;...

You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain (Plume Books) A keenly observed, humorous essay collection from celebrated stand-up comedian and WNYC podcaster (2 Dope Queens) Phoebe Robinson, in which she discusses what it's like to be the black friend, how to cope with others who have white guilt, and, of course, why you can't touch her hair. NOTE: As with all Skylight Books ev...

What Becomes Us (Outpost 19) In What Becomes Us, the new novel by Micah Perks, twin fetuses tell the story of their mild-mannered mother who abandons her controlling husband to start fresh in a small town in upstate New York. But her seemingly ideal neighbors are violently divided by the history Evie is teaching at the high school—the captivity and restoration of colonist Mary Rowlandson, a waters...

“All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press) “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans critically deconstructs persistent myths about American Indians that have taken hold in the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture (“Indians Are Naturally Pr...

Rad Women Worldwide: Artists and Athletes, Pirates And Punks, And  other revolutionaries who shaped history (Ten Speed Press) From the authors of the New York Times bestselling book Rad American Women A-Z, comes a bold new collection of 40 biographical profiles, each accompanied by a striking illustrated portrait, showcasing extraordinary women from around the world. In Rad Women Worldwide, writer...

Shelter in Place (Europa Editions)   Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place, by one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors, is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love. Joseph March, a twenty-one year-old...

Cannibals in Love (FSG Originals) It’s strange to even think about, but an entire generation came of age in the world of George W. Bush and his administration. For a decade and a half, tens of millions of young Americans watched their country go to war, slide up to the brink of a depression, and navigate seismic shifts in race, gender, and sexual identity politics…all while trying to go to college...

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...

Homesick for Another World (Penguin Press) Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. But as many crit...

TV (The Book) Two Experts Pick The Greatest American Shows of All Time (Grand Central Publishing) Is The Wire better than Breaking Bad? Is Cheers better than Seinfeld? What's the best high school show ever made? Why did Moonlighting really fall apart? Was the Arrested Development Netflix season brilliant or terrible?  For twenty years-since they shared a TV column at Tony Soprano's hometown newspa...

Night of Silenced Voices: A Banned Books Week Celebration Join us as we—together with the Banned Books Week Coalition and partner bookstores around the country—celebrate banned books, with a special focus on diversity.  Join the Skylight staff, as well as special guests, forBanned Books Week Open Mic, take part in our Blind Date with A Banned Book sale (15% off) and keep an eye out for Skylight Bo...

Reputations (Riverhead Books) Winner of several of the world’s most prestigious fiction prizes, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Spain’s Alfaguara Novel Prize, France’s Roger Caillois Award, and Italy’s Premio von Rezzori, and published in twenty-six countries and counting, Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most celebrated writers alive today. With the support of Anne McLe...

Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul (University of Arizona Press) Two brothers bury a statue of Saint Jude for their grieving nana. A Griffith Park astronomer makes his own discovery at an East L.A. wedding. A young man springs his Cherokee-obsessed grandfather from the confines of senility. The common thread? Each is weaving their way through the challenging field of play that is living and loving in...

Birth of a Dream Weaver (New Press) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s powerful new memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, chronicles the period in early 1960s East Africa when he found his voice as a writer and an activist.  Against the vivid backdrop of late-colonial Africa, Ngũgĩ details—with an immediacy both shocking and beautiful—the experience of coming of age in a homeland wounded by white settlerdom.  A herds...

Loner (Simon & Schuster) From the award-winning author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a propulsive novel about a meek Harvard freshman who becomes dangerously infatuated with a classmate.  David Federman has never felt appreciated. An academically gifted yet painfully forgettable member of his New Jersey high school class, the withdrawn, mild-mannered freshman arrives at Harvard fully expect...

Hoopty Time Machines: fairy tales for grown ups (Atticus Books) Who Knew Godzilla Had a Poetic Side? Hoopty Time Machines. It’s fun to say, isn’t it? Fanciful. Downright playful. Go ahead, try it. Say it out loud. Let it tumble off your tongue: “Hoopty Time Machines.” Just mouthing the words takes you to another time, a time when everything still seems possible, a time when you can stay up late wi...

Christodora (Grove/Atlantic) In Christodora, Tim Murphy follows the lives of a diverse cast of characters who reside in and around an iconic apartment building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. Constructed in the 1920s, the Christodora has stood through New York City’s various cultural shifts, from the AIDS epidemic to the Tompkins Square Riots of the 1980s, from the destructive effect...

In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When...

A Song to Take the World Apart (Knopf) Hanging out with Chris was supposed to make Lorelei’s life normal. He’s cooler, he’s older, and he’s in a band, which means he can teach her about the music that was forbidden in her house growing up. Her grandmother told her when she was little that she was never allowed to sing, but listening to someone else do it is probably harmless—right? The more she li...