Skylight Books Podcast Series

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Lydia Fitzpatrick, "LIGHTS ALL NIGHT LONG" w/ Aja Gabel Apr 23, 2019

Show notes

Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new world--the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions--is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him.

But all is not right in Ilya's world: he's consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilya's dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown. The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their town's seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the town's usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison.

With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimir's innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimir's descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect him--a truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind.

A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lydia Fitzpatrick's Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other.

Fitzpatrick is in conversation with Aja Gabel, author of The Ensemble.

G. Willow Wilson, "THE BIRD KING" Apr 22, 2019

Show notes

It’s 1491 and a party representing the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrives to negotiate the terms of the sultan’s surrender, but Hassan has a secret—he can make maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality with his pen and paper. His magical gift, which has proven useful to the sultan’s armies in wartime and entertained a bored Fatima who has never stepped foot outside the palace walls, could now be seen as sorcery and a threat to the Christian Spanish rule. Fatima befriends one of the women, little realizing that her new friend Luz represents the Inquisition and soon Fatima must risk everything to save Hassan, and taste the freedom she has never known.

As Fatima and Hassan flee the forces of the Inquistion in search of safe harbor, they are helped along the way by a jinn who has taken a liking to them—Vikram the Vampire, who readers may remember from Alif the Unseen.

The Bird King is an epic adventure from an essential voice in American fiction. It is a jubilant story that challenges us to consider what true love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

William E. Jones, "I'M OPEN TO ANYTHING" Apr 02, 2019

Show notes

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones’s I’m Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book’s narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning.

Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I’m Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor.

Samira Ahmed, "INTERNMENT" w/ Brandy Colbert Apr 01, 2019

Show notes

Set in a horrifying “fifteen minutes in the future” United States, spitfire main character Layla Amin is forced into an internment camp for Muslim citizens with her family. With the help of newly-made friends also trapped within the internment camp, and her boyfriend on the outside, Layla manages to start a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against Islamophobia and complicit silence against the internment camp's Director and his guards. Samira Ahmed can recall incidents of Islamophobia in her own life as early as age eight. But rather than be deterred, she let it fuel her writing and she is a vocal proponent for changes that need to be made in our society to fight against bigotry. With recent marches and protests led by teen activists, Internment also has the potential to resonate strongly with teen leaders who fight to make the change they want to see in their own communities.

Ahmed is in conversation with Pointe author Brandy Colbert.

Aatif Rashid, "Portrait of Sebastian Khan" Mar 29, 2019

Show notes

For art-loving (and lady-loving) Sebastian Khan, does college really have to end?

Sebastian Khan is 380 days away from the end of college. An art history major with a fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites and a dislike of long-term commitments (romantic and otherwise), Sebastian starts dating Fatima, who’s determined to transition smoothly from campus life to a stable white-collar professional career. Sebastian’s membership in Model United Nations, though, takes him to colleges across North America, foisting upon him all manner of temptations and testing his commitment to Fatima and his readiness for adulthood.

Part satire of college life circa 2011 and part serious exploration of art’s fundamental unreality, Portrait of Sebastian Khan is a humorous coming-of-age novel about a charismatic but emotionally stunted Muslim American Don Draper, who wins as many hearts as he breaks.

Christopher Cantwell, "SHE COULD FLY" w/ Nick Dazé Mar 28, 2019

Show notes

No one knows who she was, how she flew, or why.

An unknown woman flying at fantastic speeds and spectacular heights suddenly explodes mid-air. Luna Brewster, a disturbed 15-year-old girl becomes obsessed with learning everything about her while rumors and conspiracy theories roil. But will cracking the secrets of the Flying Woman’s inner life lead to the liberation from her own troubled mind—or will it take her to the point of no return?

Author Christopher Cantwell discusses his graphic novel She Could Fly with author, technologist, and entrepreneur Nick Dazé.

Mark Doten, "TRUMP SKY ALPHA" w/ Nathan Deuel Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

Twice a week, the president pilots his ultraluxury airship Trump Sky Alpha between DC, NYC, and Mar-a-Lago, delivering a streaming YouTube address to the nation. In this speech he trumpets his successes and blasts his enemies, until one day his words plunge the world into nuclear war. One year later, with 90 percent of the world’s population destroyed, a journalist named Rachel has taken refuge in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone. Rachel accepts an assignment to document the final throes of humor on the internet in those moments before the war, hoping along the way to discover the final resting place of her wife and daughter.

What she uncovers in an archive of the internet’s remnants, hidden amid spiraling memes and Twitter jokes, are references to a little-known book that inspired a shadowy hacktivist group called the Aviary. Their role in the downfall of the internet, and the enigmatic presence of a figure known only as Birdcrash, take on immense and terrifying dimensions as Rachel ventures further into the ruins of the internet. Mark Doten, author of The Infernal, brilliantly details how the internet has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, laying the groundwork for the tumult of our current political moment and for the future headed our way.

Doten is in conversation with Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East.

Don Winslow, "The Border" Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

In Don Winslow’s explosive new novel, The Border, the highly anticipated conclusion to the epic Cartel trilogy (The Power of the Dog, 2005; The Cartel, 2015), the war has come home.

For over forty years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America’s longest conflict: The War on Drugs. His obsession to defeat the world’s most powerful, wealthy, and lethal kingpin―the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel, Adán Barrera―has left him bloody and scarred, cost him the people he loves, even taken a piece of his soul.

Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created thirty more that are wreaking even more chaos and suffering in his beloved Mexico. But not just there.

Barrera’s final legacy is the heroin epidemic scourging America. Throwing himself into the gap to stem the deadly flow, Keller finds himself surrounded by enemies―men who want to kill him, politicians who want to destroy him, and worse, the unimaginable―an incoming administration that’s in bed with the very drug traffickers that Keller is trying to bring down. Art Keller is at war with not only the cartels, but with his own government. And the long fight has taught him more than he ever imagined. Now, he learns the final lesson―there are no borders.

Ali Liebegott, "THE SUMMER OF DEAD THINGS" Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

how does a person dislodge the scenes that burn inside them like arsoned cars?

Ali Liebegott is reeling from a fresh, painful divorce. She wallows in grief and overassigns meaning to everyday circumstance, clinging to an aging Dalmatian and obsessing over dead birds. Going through the motions of teaching and walking her dog, she eventually decides to hit the road: Ali and Rorschach at the Center of the World.

This autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Things, is a chronicle of mourning and survival, documenting depression and picking apart failed intimacy. But Ali Liebegott’s poetry is laced with compassion, for herself and the reader and the world, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.

Liebegott is joined in conversation by Michelle Tea, the author of the young adult novels Mermaid in Chelsea Creek and Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as numerous books for grown-ups.

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, "CIRCLE" Mar 15, 2019

Show notes

This book is about Circle. This book is also about Circle’s friends, Triangle and Square. Also it is about a rule that Circle makes, and how she has to rescue Triangle when he breaks that rule. With their usual pitch-perfect pacing and subtle, sharp wit, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen come full circle in the third and final chapter of their clever shape trilogy.

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