Skylight Books Podcast Series

So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead Books)  From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces. Now in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Ronson investigates the world of public shaming, where social media has made everyone a vigilante and where a poorly phrased tweet or comment can catapult a...

Sur La Route (Quale Press)  Please welcome back to Skylight Books, local poet Cecilia Woloch! Sur la Route is a novella in postcard-like vignettes — a series of brief, vivid, poetic episodes that trace the path of a disaffected American woman “on the road” in France and western Europe. It’s the winter of 1994 and she’s fled the blandness of Los Angeles for Paris, carrying with her only a list of t...

The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows (St. Martin's Griffin)  From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with “The Sand-man,” E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1817 tale of...

PIT To LAX: My Story Worthy Life (Story Worthy Publishing)  For Christine Blackburn, the youngest of six kids growing up in Pittsburgh, the idea of living in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment industry seemed like a dream (or at least something you only saw on television). Instead she took a circuitous route—first as a flight attendant, then in the Peace Corps—with some unforeseen setbac...

World Gone By (William Morrow & Company)  Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of The Given Day and Live by Night, returns with a psychologically and morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present. Ten years have passed since Joe Cou...

Aquarium (Grove Press)  Please welcome back to Skylight Books one of our favorite authors, David Vann!  Twelve-year-old Caitlin lives alone with her mother—a docker at the local container port—in subsidized housing next to an airport in Seattle. Each day, while she waits to be picked up after school, Caitlin visits the local aquarium to study the fish. Gazing at the creatures within the watery dep...

Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press)  Rapid change is part of life in the twenty-first century, and we must all adjust to an evolving world. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it nearly impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artis...

Ongoingness: The End of A Diary (Graywolf Press)  In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might...

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories (Counterpoint) Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow-up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connec...

Turtleface and Beyond: Stories (Farrar Straus Giroux) Please welcome back to Skylight Books, one of our favorite short story writers, Arthur Bradford!  Paddling down a remote, meandering river, Georgie's friend Otto decides to do something both spectacular and stupid: He scales a sandy cliff that rises from the water and runs down its steep face, preparing for a triumphant running dive. As his fri...

There's Something I Want You To Do: Stories (Pantheon Books) From one of the great masters of the contemporary short story, here is an astonishing collection that showcases Charles Baxter'sunique ability to unveil the remarkable in the seemingly inconsequential moments of an eerie yet familiar life. Penetrating and prophetic, the ten inter-related stories in There's Something I Want You to Do are...

Stone in the Sky (Roaring Brook Press) The Baseball Player and the Walrus (Dial Books) Please join us tonight as we celebrate the launch of Cecil Castellucci's Stone in the Sky, as well as the paperback release of Tin Star and the 10th anniversary of the release of Boy Proof, which was just named as one of the top 100 best YA Books of All Time by Time Magazine! For today's event Cecil will be join...

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories (Doubleday Books) The incomparable Jonathan Lethem returns with nine brilliant stories that prove he is a master of the short form as well as the novel. Jonathan Lethem stretches new literary muscles in this scintillating new collection of stories. Some of these tales--such as "Pending Vegan," which wonderfully captures a parental ache and anguish during a family visi...

Kaufman's Hill (Bancroft Press) A profound and intensely moving boyhood memoir, Kaufman's Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by the Creely...

Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio) Join us tonight at Skylight Books for the brilliant debut from a rising "star" (couldn't help it)  of fiction, Sarah Gerard! The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Sarah Gerard’s debut novel Binary Star is an impassioned...

Sweet Nothing: Stories (Mulholland Books) Richard Lange is one of our most highly acclaimed literary mystery writers. He has been hailed as a “natural-born storyteller” and compared to great masters like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson. His debut, Dead Boys, was called “one of the best short story collections of the past 50 years” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and it put his name on the literar...

Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum) Please welcome to Skylight Books the author Roberto Bolaño calls "Mexico's best woman writer" Carmen Boullosa! A writer in the tradition of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cesar Aira, Carmen Boullosa shows herself to be at the height of her powers with her latest book. Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, Texas: The G...

Silver Screen Fiend (Scribner) Skylight Books welcomes back one of our favorite comedic minds --Patton Oswalt -- for a reading and signing of his new book,Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From An Addiction to Film. NOTE: As with all Skylight Books events, this reading is free and open to the public (first come, first served).  But because we're expecting a large crowd at this event, we'll...

In recognition of Black History Month, join us as we remember the contributions of Black Queer writers past and present. Frederick L. Smith (Play It Forward) Sheree L. Greer (Let The Lover Be), Rebekah Weatherspoon (Treasure), and Fiona Zedde (Desire at Dawn) discuss their current novels--courtesy of Bold Stroke Books--as well as the past, present, and future of Black LGBTQ literature. Originally...

Bon Appetempt: A Coming of Age Story (with Recipes!) Grand Central Publishing When Amelia Morris found a beautiful chocolate cake in Bon Appétit and took the recipe home to recreate it for a Christmas day brunch, it collapsed into a terrible (but delicious) mess that had to be served in an oversized bowl. It also paralleled the never-quite-predictable situations she's gotten herself into throughou...

The Plum in Mr Blum's Pudding (Penny Ante Editions) “My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.” - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels The...

TEX (Penny Ante Books) Skylight Books' very own Beau Rice joins us for the release of his documentary novel, Tex! An experiment between the epistolary and the ectype, Tex is a performance act in print. Featuring walk-ons by various interlocutors, this archival outpour demonstrates the potentiality of relationships in the digital age. Metonymic displacements, grammatical violations and verbal spill...

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (Farrar Straus Giroux) A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life. For tonight's event Meghan Daum will be joined by Bernard Cooper! In her celebrated 2001 collection, My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum offered a bold, witty, defining account of the artistic ambitions, financial anxieties,...

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Picador) Adelle Waldman, whose novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. has been on our bestseller list for months, discusses her book with film director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider-Man). A debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the romantic life of a brilliant young man. Writer Nate Piven's star is rising. After several lean and striving...

Dissident Gardens (Vintage Books) Mermaids in Paradise (W.W. Norton & Company) Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the MacArthur Fellowship whose writing has been called "as ambitious as [Norman] Mailer, as funny as Philip Roth, and as stinging as Bob Dylan" ("Los Angeles Times"), returns with an epic yet intimate family saga. Rose Zimmer, the aptly ni...