Skylight Books Podcast Series

Latest Episodes:

EMMA RATHBONE READS FROM HER NEW NOVEL LOSING IT Aug 11, 2016

Show notes

Losing It (Riverhead Books)

Losing It is the story of Julia Greenfield, a former collegiate swimming star who finds herself at age 26, stuck in a dead-end job, living in a city she hates, and, oh yeah, still a virgin. Determined to re-route herself from her stalled life – and lose that pesky V-card once and for all – Julia travels to spend the summer with her mysterious aunt Vivienne in a small town in North Carolina. Much to her dismay, she soon finds out that Vivienne, age 58, is a virgin, too. In a summer populated by an unforgettable cast of colorful characters, Julia attempts to solve the riddle of her aunt, all while trying to avoid the same fate. Let’s just say…hijinks ensue.

Losing It brilliantly explores the sort of madness that grows out of a single-minded obsession and the all-too-relatable feeling of looking up and realizing that life has moved forward – or hasn’t – in ways you hadn’t anticipated. Rathbone effortlessly captures the unique vernacular particular to women of her generation and to anyone exploring the differences between sex and love. Alongside the wry, subtle humor is a poignant look at the messiness of becoming a human adult.

“A slightly neurotic and wholly hilarious meditation on the difference between love and lust, The One and close enough, Losing It is about so much more than a quest for sex: It's a confrontational narrative about all the other stuff that goes along with it, and the intimate decisions we make that shape our lives for better — and worse.”— Refinery29 “20 Books Perfect for Your Summer Vacay”

“A hilarious story…Rathbone’s novel is a wry look at relationships.”— Purewow “The Ultimate 2016 Summer Books Guide”

“A charming, truthful story about a lovably imperfect young woman whose virginity has overstayed its welcome; a witty and insightful novel about the mysteries of human connection.”—Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements and Astonish Me

“Every single page of Emma Rathbone’s Losing It contains a line so funny, so awkward, so perfect, that you do not want this momentous summer to end. Rathbone’s writing feels effortless, but it detonates in such wonderful ways. An amazing book.”—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“[A] charming second novel… [Losing It’s] distinct delight is the nimble dance its author plays with the somewhat frivolous conceit, embracing its pulpiness to entertain, and pushing it to surprising places.”—Publishers Weekly

“Amusing but also smart about people and unexpectedly sweet.”—Kirkus Reviews

Emma Rathbone is the author of the novel The Patterns of Paper Monsters. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Grant in Fiction, and her work can also be seen in the New Yorker and Virginia Quarterly Review . A graduate of the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, she lives in Los Angeles and is on the writing staff for the forthcoming Jenji Kohan produced Netflix comedy series Glow.

ZYZZYVA ISSUE NO. 106 LAUNCH EVENT Aug 07, 2016

Show notes

Please welcome ZYZZYVA's Southern California All-Stars!

Though a San Francisco publication, ZYZZYVA has championed writers, poets, and artists from the Southland since its founding in 1985. Come hear recent contributors Lou Mathews, Melissa Yancy, Jim Gavin, David Hernandez, and special guest Dana Johnson read from their work, and find out whyZYZZYVA is considered one of the country's finest literary journals. Emceed by ZYZZYVA Contributing Editor David L. Ulin.

Issue No. 106 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art.

Jim Gavin is the author of Middle Men, published by Simon & Schuster. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope,Esquire, The Mississippi Review, and ZYZZYVA.

Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark forthcoming from Counterpoint in August 2016. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Callaloo, and the Iowa Review, among others. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

David Hernadez's most recent book of poetry is Dear, Sincerely. His other collections include Hoodwinked, Always Danger and A House Waiting for Music. He has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Best American Poetry. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel Ear to the Ground, written with Paul Kolsby. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, his other books includeSidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time; and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.

Melissa Yancy is the recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature Fellowship, and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press for her short fiction collection Dog Years, which will be published in late 2016. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, One Story,Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and works as a fundraiser for health care causes.

Lou Mathews has received a Pushcart Prize, a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Commission fellowships in fiction. His stories have been published in Black Clock, Tin House, New England Review, 40+ other literary magazines, ten fiction anthologies and several textbooks. His first novel, L.A. Breakdown was an L.A. Times Best book. This is his first appearance in ZYZZYVA.

MARGARET WAPPLER READS FROM HER DEBUT NOVEL NEON GREEN WITH GUY BRANUM Aug 07, 2016

Show notes

Neon Green (Unnamed Press)

It's the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago: Forrest Gump is in theaters, teens are reeling from the death of Kurt Cobain, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. Welcome to Margaret Wappler's slightly altered 90s. Everything's pretty much the way you remember it, except for the aliens.

When a flying saucer lands in the Allens' backyard, family patriarch and environmental activist Ernest is up in arms. According to the company facilitating the visits, the spaceship is 100 percent non-toxic, but as Ernest's panic increases, so do his questions: What are the effects of longterm exposure to the saucer and why is it really here?

The family starts logging the spaceship’s daily fits and starts but it doesn't get them any closer to figuring out the spaceship's comically erratic behavior. Ernest’s wife Cynthia and their children, Alison and Gabe, are less concerned with the saucer, and more worried about their father’s growing paranoia (not to mention their mundane, suburban existences). Set before the arrival of the internet, Neon Green will stun, unnerve, and charm readers with its loving depiction of a suburban family living on the cusp of the future.

Praise for Neon Green

“Part historical novel, part alternative history, Neon Green captures the suburban-American experience at the cusp of the Internet Age, and asks its readers to consider what unites—and what threatens—a family. Strange yet accessible, goofy yet also, somehow, heartbreaking, a debut to be reckoned with.”— Edan Lepucki

"Deeply moving, unsentimentally nostalgic, surreal, and hilarious, Wappler’s alternate 1990s unravels the curiosities and sufferings that reveal our character and transform our souls." —J. Ryan Stradal

"Neon Green is an extraordinary, inventive literary triumph. Evoking the imaginative pleasures of Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Don DeLillo, Neon Green depicts family life, environmentalism, marriage, illness, and spaceships with ingenuity and sophistication." — Joe Meno

Margaret Wappler has written about the arts and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, Cosmo, New York Times, and several other publications. Neon Green is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles and can be heard weekly on the pop culture podcast, Pop Rocket.

Guy Branum is a writer and comedian best known for serving as “Staff Homosexual” on Chelsea Lately and his performance as Natalie Portman’s sassy gay friend in No Strings Attached. Noticing a trend? He’s appeared on E!, MTV, G4, CurrentTV and lots of other channels you’d need to upgrade your cable to watch. He’s written for Punk’d on MTV and Fashion Police on E!. That means he’s watched the Grammys at Joan Rivers’s house. Jealous? Guy also writes for the “Gay Voices” section of The Huffington Post and occasionally makes web vidoes where he dances around without his shirt on. But mostly, Guy is very, very beautiful and good at having sex.

CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN READS FROM HER NEW BOOK SARONG PARTY GIRLS WITH HILLARY JORDAN Aug 07, 2016

Show notes

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--Western expat--husbands with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. Razor-sharp, spunky, and vulgarly brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a determined woman who doesn't lose.

As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore's glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centers. Moving through her colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams. Desperate to move up in Asia's financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?

Vividly told in Singlish--a colorful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang--Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based journalist and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, InStyle magazine, and theBaltimore Sun.

Photo by James Veall

Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke and the digital short “Aftermirth”, all published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The two novels have been translated into ten languages. Mudbound won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for socially conscious fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association. It is currently being made into a major motion picture, which is expected to be released in 2017. Hillary has a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia. She's currently at work on a sequel to Mudbound called Fatherlands. She in lives in Brooklyn, NY, along with half the writers in America.

ZACKARY DRUCKER AND RHYS ERNST DISCUSS THEIR BOOK RELATIONSHIP WITH JACK HALBERSTAM Jul 31, 2016

Show notes

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 more fluid and at a time when trans people have never been more accepted. As both subjects and creators of these images, Drucker and Ernst, both of whom transitioned gender, represent themselves in the midst of shifting subjectivities and identities. Collectively, these photographs, which have been compared to the work of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Cindy Sherman, document the story of their romantic and creative collaboration over a period of six years. Simultaneously narrative and documentary, they touch on a host of dynamics, offering autobiography as ambiguity and unraveling identity as a construction.

Praise for Relationship

Documenting a six-year relationship with photos, video stills, letters and ephemera, this book is a stunning, intimate, and wholly original visual narrative by two rising artists who “put[s] queer consciousness on the front burner.” -The New York Times

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-seriesThis Is Me, as well as a Co-Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winningTransparent. She is a cast member on the E! docu-series I Am Cait.

Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and artist. His work investigates transgender identity in the context of larger narratives, and seeks to develop and expand the portrayal of trans lives in media. He is a Co-Producer of Amazon’s Transparent and created the title sequence for the series.

Ernst was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for directing and producing the webseries Transparent: This Is Me, and in 2016 he teamed up with Focus Features to create the online series We've Been Around, a collection of short films on transgender pioneers.

In addition to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Ernst has shown work at Sundance, Oberhausen, and The Hammer Museum; he has won awards at Outfest, Chicago International Film Festival and the LA Transgender Film Festival; he was a Point Scholar, a Project Involve Fellow, and was awarded with the 2015 Point Foundation Horizon Award for his work on transgender representation in the media.

Jack Halberstam is Visiting Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book for Duke UP titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, and a short book on transgenderism titled Trans* for UC Press.

JENNIFER GRAYSON DISCUSSES HER NEW BOOK UNLATCHED Jul 22, 2016

Show notes

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, the debate—vocal and contentious—is everywhere. In her book, Grayson contends that nearly daily, another breastfeeding blowup finds its way into the headlines: “Facebook Removes Photos of Women Breastfeeding, Citing Content as ‘Offensive’! Michelle Obama and Michele Bachmann Come to Blows on the Politics of Breast Pumps! Gisele Bündchen Reveals Breastfeeding Selfie on Instagram!” Says Grayson, “Even the release of scientific breastfeeding studies sent thousands of commenters running to the message boards, as women proclaimed themselves either ‘lactivists’ or proud bottle-feeders, each camp pointing fingers at the other.”

Yet as a new mother herself, Grayson had grappled with her own nursing decisions. “Breast is best may have been deposited into our national consciousness, and it may finally have become consensus in the medical establishment, yet still, we all felt pretty conflicted, even queasy about breastfeeding,” she relates. It wasn’t even until Grayson became a mother that she, admittedly a child of the Great Formula Age, began to consider the constellation of impacts of having missed out on this profound connection. Breastfeeding her own children and finding herself drawn into the larger story, she set off on a worldwide search for answers about the first, most fundamental experience of life. She discovered that the issues involved were momentous. Determined to present the full story about the connection of breastfeeding to the health and well-being of our children, in Unlatched Grayson weaves a meticulously reported and riveting journey through our breastfeeding history—from biblical times to eighteenth century France, from modern-day Mongolia to inner-city Los Angeles. Along the way, she takes readers behind the scenes at a human milk research laboratory, interviews controversial breastfeeding figures, and shares stories about nursing mothers around the world, including her own experience extended breastfeeding her two daughters.

Fascinating, far-reaching and yet intimate, Unlatched is essential reading not just for American parents and parents-to- be, but for anyone interested in the endurance of our species.

Praise for Unlatched:

"Unlatched is an intelligent, often funny, deftly written page-turner. Honestly, I'm surprised at how enthusiastically I find myself recommending a book about breastfeeding. Perfect not just for new parents, but for anyone who loves a good read. ---Anne Hathaway

"Grayson's book beautifully explains how we got to the breastfeeding brouhaha that exists in America today. This book is recommended reading for anyone who has breasts or loves them. ---Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein

"I'm hearing more and more that the root of much evil in our bad health is formula-feeding instead of breastfeeding, and with terrific investigative chops Jennifer Grayson nails the most insidious part of this: the government's role in hocking formula to the most vulnerable among us. ---Michael Moss, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Salt, Sugar, Fat

"Unlatched is a deeply engaging, highly personal, well researched, and thoughtfully balanced account of how modern society has denormalized breastfeeding."---Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of, among other books,What to Eat.

"Unlatched is an essential book, not only for every parent to-be, but for physicians as well. Jennifer Grayson asks all the right questions, and it is clear that we must stop letting politics, money, and societal expectations trump good science." ---Dr. Lauren Streicher, renowned women's health expert, clinical associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and author of Sex Rx: Hormones, Health, and Your Best Sex Ever

Jennifer Grayson is an environmental journalist and Huffington Post columnist whose work has appeared in publications including USA Today, The Washington Post, and American Baby, for which she appeared on the cover. She is a frequently interviewed expert on environmental issues, and is regularly consulted and featured by media outlets including MSNBC, WGN, McClatchy and Entrepreneur. Jennifer’s personal experiences as a new mother struggling with to-breastfeed-or- not-to breastfeed issues, coupled with her lifelong fascination with our vanishing connection to the natural world, led to her work on Unlatched. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young daughters.

DORTHE NORS DISCUSSES HER NEW BOOK SO MUCH FOR THAT WINTER, WITH JARETT KOBEK Jul 14, 2016

Show notes

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 floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life. In "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space," a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach, and reads Ingmar Bergman, then decamps to an island near Sweden, "well suited to mental catharsis."

A cheeky nod to the listicles and bulletins we scroll through on a daily basis, So Much for That Winter explores how we shape and understand experience, and the disconnection and dislocation that define our twenty-first-century lives, with Nors's unique wit and humor.

Praise for So Much for that Winter

“How often can we honestly say that a book is unlike anything else? Yet here it is, unique in form and effect.”—The Guardian

"[So Much For That Winter presents] an edgy evocation of contemporary life. Nors is a creator of small spaces; her fiction is relentless, edgy, brief."—Kirkus Reviews

“Uniquely composed, yet eminently readable. Nors's experimental style permits a sidelong glance, not only into perhaps the scaffolding upon which stories are built, but also the spaces between things—much as a painting or song reveals itself in the interims between brushstrokes or notes.”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s

Dorthe Nors received the 2014 Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize for Karate Chop, which Publishers Weekly named one of the best books of 2014. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker and A Public Space.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called “highly interesting,” by the Times Literary Supplement, has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing, and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His most recent book is I Hate the Internet. Presently, he's working on a book about Ol' Dirty Bastard's first album for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series.

ADITI KHORANA READS FROM HER NOVEL MIRROR IN THE SKY Jul 14, 2016

Show notes

Mirror in the Sky (Razorbill)

For Tara Krishnan, navigating Brierly, the academically rigorous prep school she attends on scholarship, feels overwhelming and impossible. Her junior year begins in the wake of a startling discovery: A message from an alternate Earth, light years away, is intercepted by NASA. This means that on this mirror planet, there is another version of Tara, a Tara who could be living better, burning brighter, because of tiny differences in her choices. As the world lights up with the knowledge of Terra Nova, the mirror planet, Tara's life on Earth begins to change. At first, small shifts happen, like attention from Nick Osterman, the most popular guy at Brierly, and her mother playing hooky from work to watch the news all day. But eventually those small shifts swell, the discovery of Terra Nova like a black hole, bending all the light around it. Nothing on Earth—and for Tara—will ever be the same again.

In addition to its science fiction themes, Mirror in the Sky thoughtfully and acutely addresses issues of race, class, and gender through its Indian-American protagonist. “There’s a reason Tara is brown, poor and a woman in a world where privilege is equated with whiteness, wealth and masculinity,” said Khorana. “This is the modern world we live in, and Brierly is merely a microcosm of it. But Tara’s source of power is her narrative, her ability to see the world and the people she encounters through her own eyes, to tell a story in her own voice.”

The We Need Diverse Books organization listed Mirror in the Sky as one of its 2016 Must-Reads, with member and author Sona Charaipotra writing, “As a child, I longed to see myself in the pages of the books I loved so dearly—not just as a sidekick, but as the hero of the story. In Mirror in the Sky, scholarship kid Tara Krishnan gets to do just that: take charge, make change, and control her destiny—or at least try to.”

Praise for Mirror in the Sky

"From its first word, this book captivated me. Khorana weaves a story with nail-biting tension, mind-bending mystery, and stunning complexity. Rarely have I found myself so attached to such deeply flawed characters or so in love with those I once hated. Chilling, powerful, and real, Mirror in the Sky will have you thinking about all the tiny decisions that have shaped you and thrumming with the question, What if?"--Emily Henry, author of The Love That Split the World

"In her thought-provoking debut, Aditi Khorana brilliantly blends the speculative with the contemporary. What results is a story full of layers, and rich with characters so engaging and complex I continued to think about them long after I turned the final page."--Stephanie Garber, author of Carava

Aditi Khorana spent part of her childhood in India, Denmark and New England. She has a BA in International Relations from Brown University and an MA in Global Media and Communications from the Annenberg School for Communication. She has worked as a journalist at ABC News, CNN, and PBS, and most recently as a marketing executive consulting for various Hollywood studios including FOX, Paramount and SONY.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN READS FROM HIS NEW BOOK BUT WHAT IF WE'RE WRONG? Jul 11, 2016

Show notes

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 course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure—until, of course, they don’t.

But What If We’re Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who will conceive of it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge?

Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We’re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of six other nonfiction books (most notably Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and I Wear the Black Hat) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist forThe New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and co-created Grantland with Bill Simmons. Klosterman is a native of North Dakota and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Entertainment Weekly TV critic Melissa Maerz.

RAMONA AUSUBEL READS FROM HER NEW NOVEL SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF EASE AND PLENTY Jul 11, 2016

Show notes

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Riverhead Books)

Ramona Ausubel burst onto the literary scene in 2012 with her debut novelNo One is Here Except All of Us, earning the love of critics with her inimitable voice and imaginative style, and winning the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award, as well as being named a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Next came A Guide To Being Born, an enthralling story collection that Aimee Bender declared “fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly.”

Now, already named a most-anticipated book of the year by The Millions,Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty opens on Labor Day 1976 on Martha's Vineyard. Summering at the family beach house, Fern and Edgar—married with three children—learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money. More specifically, there's no more money in the estate that had allowed them to live this charmed and comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals. Quickly unraveling, they are tempted away on separate adventures—unknowingly abandoning their three young children, who set about devising a kind of Netherland for themselves.

Fresh and vital, Ausubel’s magnetic work is chock-full of humanity and wisdom, imbued with humor and bite and a vivid sense of where we find meaning and sustenance. A story of American wealth, class and mobility,Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty explores with Ausubel’s characteristic whimsy and profundity the complicated legacies and strength of family love.

Ausubel’s uncanny ability to simultaneously transport, entertain, mesmerize and inspire, makes Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty a deeply satisfying read that will linger with you in powerful ways.

Praise for Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“Fortunes and hearts are lost and found in a modern fairy tale set in the 1960s and '70s. . .Ausubel's magical, engrossing prose style perfectly fits this magical, engrossing story."—KIRKUS, starred review 

"This is the book about class and love that I’ve been waiting for. A riches-to-rags story with all the twists and unraveling you could want, embroidered divine in the wizardy mind of Ramona Ausubel, whose imagination and music are simply peerless. A gorgeous and moving must-read!"—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold, Fame, Citrus and Battleborn

"Ramona Ausubel has given us a brilliantly imagined novel about family and fortune and the hidden knots between. You're holding a book brimming with life by an author bursting with talent." —Maggie Shipstead, author ofSeating Arrangements and Astonish Me

Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award, and finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of the story collection A Guide to Being Born, and has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, and Best American Fantasy.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Skylight Books Podcast Series

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected