Skylight Books Podcast Series

Fairy Tale Comics: Classic Tales Told By Extraordinary Cartoonists (First Second Books) Join us as Vanessa Davis ("Puss in Boots"), Gigi D.G. ("Little Red Riding Hood") and Bobby London ("Sweet Porridge") discuss their contributions to this fantastic guide to some of your favorite fairy tales. From favorites like "Puss in Boots" and "Goldilocks" to obscure gems like "The Boy Who Drew Cats," this v...

It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (Grove Press) Join us as Patricia Engel reads from her debut novel It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, a vibrant, wistful narrative about an American girl in Paris, who navigates the intoxicating and treacherous complexities of independence, friendship, and romance. Lita del Cielo, the daughter of two Colombian orphans who arrived in America with nothing and made a fortu...

Legacy (Event Horizon Press) Combining scintillating prose and poetry, Legacy examines the effects of war on soliders, their families and their communities and looks at the affirmation required for the human spirit to transcend despair. It is a book about the legacy of war for those who remain. Legacy is sure to remain with you long after you've closed the final page. Praise for Legacy: "Fuller pr...

The Friedkin Connection (Harper) With such seminal movies as The Exorcist and The French Connection, Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin earned his place in the pantheon of great filmmakers. A maverick from the start, Friedkin joined other young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich in ushering in Hollywood’s second Golden Age in the 1970s. His long-awaited memoi...

The Faraway Nearby (Viking Books) Rebecca Solnit is an award-winning author whose distinctive voice has earned her much praise; the San Francisco Chronicle described her as “who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan.” Her exquisite new book, THE FARAWAY NEARBY, is set in motion with a gift of one hundred pounds of ripening apricots, which come from a...

Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad  (Penguin Press)  A riveting and revealing look at the shows that helped cable television drama emerge as the signature art form of the twenty-first century. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks con...

I Wear The Black Hat (Scribner Book Company)  From New York Times bestselling author, "one of America's top cultural critics" (Entertainment Weekly), and "The Ethicist" for The New York Times Magazine, comes a new book of all original pieces on villains and villainy. Chuck Klosterman has walked into the darkness. As a boy, he related to the cultural figures who represented goodness--but as an adul...

The Unknowns (Reagan Arthur Books)    You will not want to miss this event! Gabriel Roth has delivered a debut novel that, to many, signals the arrival of the next New Big Thing. Eric Muller has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem for half his life. As a teenage geek, he discovered his gift for programming computers-but his attempts to understand women only confirm that he's better at writi...

TAIPEI (Vintage Books) From one of this generation's most talked about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal, powerful, and moving novel about family, relationships, accelerating drug use, and the lingering possibility of death. "Tao Lin [is] an excellent writer of avant-garde fiction. His new novel is his most mature work, and follows a young New York writer to Taipei, where he must recon...

The Lullaby of Polish Girls (Spiegel & Grau)  Inspired by her parents’ political history and her family’s immigrant story, Dominczyk has written THE LULLABY OF POLISH GIRLS, a beautiful debut novel that follows the friendship of three women — Anna, Justyna and Kamila — from their coming of age in a small Polish town in the 1980s to their complicated adult lives. When Anna and her parents emigrate...

On the eve of LGBT Pride Weekend, Skylight hosts its second annual "LGBT Writers Who Inspired Us."  Writers Bernard Cooper, Eduardo Santiago, Myriam Gurba, Alexis Fancher, Trebor Healy read the works of  LGBT literary giants Reynaldo Arenas, Susan Sontag, Tom Spanbauer and more! Curated by Noel Alumit. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JUNE 7, 2013.

KING OF GOOD INTENTIONS (Verse Chorus Press) Set in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, John Andrew Fredrick's debut novel chronicles the early days of an indie band as they meet, practice, make their first recordings, and get their first break/ big gig.  It's also the story of the flowering love affair between John and Jenny, the two charming but, let's say, troubled guitarists/singers in the band. ...

ODD DUCK (First Second) Prolific young adult author and longtime friend of Skylight Books Cecil Castellucci is BACK with a brand new graphic novel picture book for children and the young at heart.  Illustrated by the wonderful Sara Varon! (Robot Dreams) Theodora is a perfectly normal duck. She may swim with a teacup balanced on her head and stay north when the rest of the ducks fly south for the w...

Welcome to the first edition of the Shelf Talker podcast - where Skylight booksellers talk about books they love. It's an audio recommendation for your ears! This edition of the Shelf Talker features our graphic novel master - Dan Kusunoki. He talks about: The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon - http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781906838423 Hair Shirt by Patrick McEown  - http://www.skylightbooks.com/...

Pacific (Grove Press) Tom Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster.  His new novel, PACIFIC, marks a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago in the fictional Grouse County, Iowa, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Van...

Angel Baby (Mulholland Books) A woman goes on the run in this intense and cinematic thriller by an award-winning writer. To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan. Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, b...

The Accursed (Ecco Press) We couldn't be more excited to have legendary author Joyce Carol Oates coming to Skylight to read from and sign her new novel, The Accursed. The Washington Post calls The Accursed "spectacular. . . With its vast scope, its mingling of comic and tragic tones, its omnivorous gorging on American literature, and especially its complex reflection on the major themes of our his...

Gawky: Tales of an Extra Long Awkward Phase (Seal Press) Some tall girls grow up to have perfect posture and are later seen gracing the pages of magazines. Some are natural athletes with toned legs that mask their overlarge feet. Then there are "other" tall girls: the ones who are always tripping over themselves; who never look normal in any size of clothing; who literally don't fit in. Comedian M...

Odds Against Tomorrow (Farrar Straus Giroux) NEW YORK CITY, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are s...

A new nonprofit venture sponsored by PEN Center USA, Phoneme Media is an LA-based film and publishing house, published by Skylight's own Chris Heiser and founded by local poet and translator David Shook. Mario Bellatin, the leading experimental novelist in contemporary Latin America, introduces the neglected work of Shiki Nagaoka to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Bellatin’s highl...

The Mango Bride (New American Library) Two women, two cultures, and the fight to find a new life in America, despite the secrets of the past... Banished by her wealthy Filipino family in Manila, Amparo Guerrero travels to Oakland, California, to forge a new life. Although her mother labels her life in exile a diminished one, Amparo believes her struggles are a small price to pay for freedom. Like...

A Guide To Being Born (Riverhead Books) We are honored and excited to have Ramona Ausubel back for another book launch.  We hosted the launch for her stunning debut novel, NO ONE IS HERE EXCEPT ALL OF US, which was hailed by The New Yorker as "An absorbing and unpredictable novel . . . Ausubel’s original voice combines fresh, clear observation.”  Join us to hear stories from her new collection, wh...

MARBLE SEASON (Drawn & Quarterly) Join beloved cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez (LOVE & ROCKETS) as he launches his new D+Q http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781770460867

The Pink Hotel (Picador USA) We are very excited to have Anna Stothard and Davy Rothbart together in conversation at Skylight!  You know Rothbart as the founder of the book/magazine series FOUND.  Stothard's debut novel, THE PINK HOTEL, is generating a dizzying amount of buzz.  Catch them in conversation here at Skylight Books. "Startling....The Pink Hotel is a spellbinding story about identity an...

Follow Her Home (Minotaur Books) A stunning, edgy debut introducing Juniper Song, an amateur sleuth taking on the darkness in the veins of L.A. with razor-sharp wit and a breaking heart. Juniper Song knows secrets-how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend Luke asks her to in...