Skylight Books Podcast Series

A brilliant and utterly engaging novel--Emma set in modern Asia--about a young woman's rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism. On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh--We...

Relationship (Prestel Publishing) Male becomes female. Female becomes male. Life becomes art. Private becomes public. A major feature of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, this series of photographs that the New York Times called “extremely provocative” explores ideas of transformation both physical and psychological. It’s the story of two people in love, in a culture where the notion of gender has become...

Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy (Harper) In Unlatched, Grayson transcends today’s “mommy wars” to offer the first incisive look at the many cultural, corporate, political, and technological factors that have transformed an essential human function into one of the most controversial thrive-and- survive issues of our time.  Today, in our age of social media,...

So Much For That Winter (Graywolf Press/A Public Space) Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first-century romances. In "Days," a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days--one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the...

But What If We're Wrong? (Blue Rider Press) We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of cou...

The Girls (Random House) Selected as one of 2016’s Must Read Books by Entertainment Weekly, Flavorwire & The Millions, Skylight Books is proud to welcome one of the most exciting debuts in recent memory.   The Girls is the story of Evie, a woman who is haunted by the summer of 1969 in California when she was a lonely fourteen-year-old. One day she sees a girl at a park, a girl with a gang of other...

The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin Press) From an award-winning journalist, a brave and necessary immersion into the everyday struggles of Palestinian life. Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has writt...

Kanye West Owes Me $300: And Other True Stories from A White Rapper Who Almost Made it Big (Crown) After Vanilla Ice, but before Eminem, there was "Hot Karl," the Jewish kid from the L.A. suburbs who became a rap battling legend and then almost became a star.  When 12-year old Karp got his first taste of rapping for crowds at his friend's bar mitzvah in 1991, little did he know that he was taking...

Hot Dog Taste Test (Drawn + Quarterly) Hot Dog Taste Test serves up Lisa Hanawalt's devastatingly funny comics, saliva­-stimulating art, and deliciously screwball lists as she skewers the pomposities of foodie subculture. Join the James Beard Award­-winning cartoonist and production designer/producer of Bojack Horseman as she presents a selection of food­-related excerpts from Hot Dog Taste Test....

Blood, Bone and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews (University of Georgia Press) On what would have been Harry Crews' 81st birthday, we celebrate the lasting literary legacy of one of the most singular voices in American letters. In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biog...

Trekonomics (Piper Text) Star Trek is set in an amazing utopian universe of faster-than-light travel, of “beam me up, Scotty,” and Vulcan salutes. It’s also a universe where war and poverty have been eradicated, money doesn’t exist, and work is indistinguishable from leisure.  In this ground-breaking book, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek’s first episode, Manu Saadia ta...

Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (Catapult) In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, meditate on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. With contributions from Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and many more, Watch...

Border Music (Talisman House) Border Music is Paul Vangelisti’s thirty-third book of poetry, bringing together work from the last ten years, in sundry forms from the personal lyric, to alphabet poems, to longer collage and hybrid projects, to musically inspired acrostics. Some of these poems first appeared in limited editions here and abroad, and are now made available in one volume. Border Music ...

Black Sheep Boy (Rare Bird Books) Meet a wild-hearted boy from the bayou land of Louisiana. Misfit, outcast, loner. Call him anything but a victim. Sissy, fairy, Jenny Woman. Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father. In a series of tender and tough stories, he encounters gender outlaws, drag queen renegades, and a rogues gallery of sex-starved priests, perverted teac...

Before the Fall (Grand Central Publishing) From the Emmy, PEN, Peabody, Critics' Choice, and Golden Globe Award-winning creator of the TV show "Fargo" comes "the" thriller of the year. On a foggy summer night, eleven people--ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter--depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges...

Prostitute Laundry  In the winter of 2014, writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane sent out her confessional letter to a small but devoted mailing list. In the months that followed, readership grew to over 5,000 subscribers who followed her candid, unstinting, sometimes heartbreaking meditations. Word spread quickly, garnering the project recognition from outlets such as The Washington Post and NPR....

The Stardom Affair (Five Star Publishing) Newspaper columnist Neil Gulliver and his ex-wife, "Sex Queen of the Soaps" Stevie Marriner, are back. It's decades ago, when the internet was in its infancy. Neil is summoned to the apartment of actor Roddy Donaldson, leader of the "Diapered Dozen" gang of teenage movie stars, by condo manager Sharon Glenn. Roddy is in bed clinging to life alongside two d...

The Alaskan Laundry (Mariner Books) A fresh debut novel about a lost, fierce young woman who finds her way to Alaska and finds herself through the hard work of fishing, as far as the icy Bering Sea  Tara Marconi has made her way to The Rock, a remote island in Alaska governed by the seasons and the demands of the world of commercial fishing. She hasn't felt at home in a long while. Her mother's de...

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press) All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both natio...

Turning Japanese (2D Cloud) In 1995, 22-year-old Mari has just exited a long-term relationship, moving from Mill Valley to San Jose, California. Soon enough she falls in love, then finds employment at an illegal hostess bar for Japanese expats, where she is determined to learn the Japanese language and culture. She hopes to finally connect with her Japanese relatives without her mother as a transl...

Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso) Riots are coming, they are already here, more are on the way. They deserve an adequate theory. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. In recent decades we have returned to an “age of riots” as the prominent form of struggle against the abuses of capitalism. This theoretical and historical account by award-winning poet Joshua Clover expl...

The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press) A woman is buried so a church will rise. Nicelle Davis’ The Walled Wife unearths from the long-standing text “The Ballad of the Walled-up Wife,” a host of issues that continue to plague women in the contemporary world: the woman’s body as sacrifice; the woman’s body as tender or currency; the woman’s body as disposable; the woman’s body as property; the woman’s body...

The Regional Office is Under Attack! (Riverhead Books) In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization the Regional Office and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation. At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its do...

True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (We Heard You Like Books) A World War II veteran from the Great Plains, Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) had the makings of a successful career in the 1950s—an education at Harvard, jobs at Time/Life and IBM—but things didn’t turn out as planned. After 20 years of resentful conformity and worsening alcoholism, McDonald dried out, pawned all...

The New Guy and Other Senior Year Distractions (Poppy Books) Senior-class competitions and hunky heartthrobs meet in this hilarious high school story, narrated by a hilariously relatable girl, who exemplifies what it’s like to be a high schooler today. Neurotic over-achiever Jules McCallister Morgan has her senior year all planned out: get into Brown, keep up her community service hours and become...