Skylight Books Podcast Series

Lost Canyon (Akashic Books) Four people on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada find more adventure than they ever imagined. Each of them is drawn to the mountains for reasons as diverse as their own lives. Gwen Foster, a counselor for at-risk youth, is struggling with burnout from the demands of her job and with the loss of one of her teens. Real estate agent Oscar Barajas is adjusting to the...

Eileen (Penguin Press) A lonely young woman working in a boys' prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction. "So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind o...

Eileen (Penguin Press) A lonely young woman working in a boys' prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction. "So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind o...

You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (Touchstone Books)  From online entertainment mogul, actress, and "queen of the geeks" Felicia Day comes a funny, quirky, and inspiring memoir about her unusual upbringing, her rise to Internet-stardom, and embracing her individuality to find success in Hollywood.  The Internet isn't all cat videos. There's also Felicia Day--violinist, filmmaker, Interne...

The Dying Grass (Viking)  Over the last twenty-five years, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann has been working on what is arguably one of the most ambitious literary projects currently being undertaken by any living novelist – a seven volume sequence of novels called “Seven Dreams” that examine the repeated collisions between native Americans and European colonizers. This summer, Vikin...

Driving Hungry (Pantheon Books)  Please join us today for a delicious memoir that takes us from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin as the author, driven by wanderlust and an unrelenting appetite, finds purpose, passion, and unexpected flavor.  After leaving a tango club following a terrible turn on the dance floor, Layne Mosler impulsively asks her taxista to take her to his favorite restaurant. S...

Not Funny Ha-Ha (Fantagraphics)  Not Funny Ha-Ha is a bold, slightly wry graphic novel illustrating the lives of two young women from different cultural, family, and financial backgrounds who go through two different abortions (medical and surgical). It does not address the events leading up to the pregnancy, or even the decision-making before choosing abortion as an option. It simply shows what h...

Kitchens of the Great Midwest (Pamela Dorman Books) From one of our favorite local authors comes a hotly anticipated debut--about a young woman with a once-in-a-generation palate who becomes the iconic chef behind the country's most coveted dinner reservation.  When Lars Thorvald's wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine--and a dashing sommelier--he's left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He's...

Speak (Ecco Press)  A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence--illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding. In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different char...

To Live and Dine in L.A. (Angel City Press)  Note: This event was previously scheduled for Wed, July 8th, at 7:30 pm, and has now been moved to Friday, July 17th, at 7:30 pm. We apologize for any inconvenience.  Tonight's event features the book To Live and Dine in L.A. by USC Professor Josh Kun with a Foreword by Chef Roy Choi. To Live and Dine in LA is a huge project of The Library Foundation of...

Selected Tweets (Short Flight/Long Drive Books)  Selected Tweets—as the name suggests—is a book comprised of selected tweets from both Tao and Mira. The book operates as a sort of flip book, with Tao’s tweets on one side and Mira’s on the other. The tweets are organized by account (both writers have multiple), and then chronologically within each account, if that makes sense. SHEILA HETI: How do y...

The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury Publishing)  From an exhilarating new voice comes a stunning debut novel which Jonathan Safran Foer calls as "lyrical as a poem, psychologically rich as a thriller." In the beautiful, barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other. Their lives have been upended-Frances has fled heartb...

Valley Fever (Farrar Strauss Giroux)  A razor-sharp, cross-generational tragicomedy set in California's wine-soaked Central Valley.  Ingrid Palamede never returns to places she's lived in the past. For her, "whole neighborhoods, whole cities, can be ruined by the reasons you left." But when a breakup leaves her heartbroken and homeless, she's forced to return to her childhood home of Fresno, Calif...

The Subprimes (Harper)  A wickedly funny dystopian parody set in a financially apocalyptic future America, from the critically acclaimed author ofTriburbia.  In a future America that feels increasingly familiar, you are your credit score. Extreme wealth inequality has created a class of have-nothings: Subprimes. Their bad credit ratings make them unemployable. Jobless and without assets, they've w...

The Making of Zombie Wars (Farrar Strauss Giroux)  Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancee of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: " Love Trek."  Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achiev...

Let's Start a Riot: How a Young Drunk Punk Became a Hollywood Dad (Harper)  In his book, Let's Start a Riot: How a Young Drunk Punk Became a Hollywood Dad Bruce chronicles his journey from wild early days as a "young punk" in 1980s Alberta, to his flannel plaid days and futon nights in 1990s Toronto, to becoming a "pajama-clad dad" living in the Hollywood Hills. Taking us from scowling teenager to...

The Smartest Book in the World: A Lexicon of Literacy, a Rancorous Reportage, a Concise Curriculum of Cool (Touchstone Books)  From Greg Proops, the beloved star of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and the creator, voice, and general know-it-all behind The Smartest Man in the World podcast, comes a cultural dictionary as hilarious as the man himself, The Smartest Book in the World: A Lexicon of Literacy,...

Head Case: My Brain and Other Wonders (Henry Holt & Company)  A spirited, wry, and utterly original memoir about one woman's struggle to make her way and set up a life after doctors discover a hole the size of a lemon in her brain. The summer before she was set to head out-of-state to pursue her MFA, twenty-six-year-old Cole Cohen submitted herself to a battery of tests. For as long as she could r...

Jacob The Mutant (Phoneme Media)  Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Mario Bellatin's Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation--a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and the owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely, while the novella mutates i...

Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio)  From a rising star in the indie lit world comes a striking new Acid Western in the tradition of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff.  Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them between towns. The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of thei...

The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (Featherproof Books) Jessica Hopper's music criticism has earned her a reputation as one of the firebrands of the form, a keen observer and fearless critic not just of music, but the culture around it, revealing new truths that often challenge us to consider what it is to be a fan.  With this premiere volume, spanning from her punk f...

Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Farrar Strauss Giroux) Skylight Books is over the moon excited to welcome one of our favorite directors, writers and all-around cultural icons,John Waters for the launch of the paperback edition of Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America, his wild and wonderful memoir about what happened (and what might've happened) while hitchhiking across th...

The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (Dey Street Books)  Ask any millennial: electronic dance music (EDM) is this decade’s rock and roll. Rolling Stone has called EDM the “defining youth culture of the 2010s” but—like hippie culture in the 60s or punk rock in the 70s—it’s about more than music. In The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered...

Go Ahead & Like It (Ten Speed Press) An artistic, smart self-help book that prompts and inspires readers to write lists of things they like--a simple yet profound way to collect and remember the good in daily life.  This scrapbook-style art book is an invitation to write lists of things you like: small things that bring delight, intriguing things that excite, and meaningful things that make every...

Pleasantville (Harper)  One of Skylight Books' favorite local authors Attica Locke returns with her most ambitious novel to date, taking on business corruption, scheming local politicians and murder in Pleasantville, which brings back Black Water Rising’s morally conflicted environmental attorney Jay Porter. It’s now 1996, fifteen years since Black Water Rising, and Porter is struggling to cope wi...