Skylight Books Podcast Series

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 achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: " The Righteous Love."  Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: " Singin' in the Brain." Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is "Zombie Wars." When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy. It's domestic bliss for a moment, but Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence. Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, andThe Book of My Lives. When he lives, he lives in Chicago.

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 father of two, this biting, funny collection of personal stories, peppered with moments of surprising poignancy, proves that although this infamous Kid may be all grown up, his singular brand of humor and signature wit remain firmly intact. Bruce McCulloch is a Canadian actor, writer, comedian and film director. He is known for his work as a member of the Kids in the Hall, the popular comedy troupe, and as a writer for Saturday Night Live. He directed the films Dog Park,Stealing Harvard and Superstar, and has made two acclaimed comedy/music albums, Shame-based Man and Drunk Baby Project. McCulloch has also recently acted in episodes of Workaholics and the new season of Arrested Development. McCulloch recently returned to TV with the series Death Comes to Town. He currently lives in the Hollywood Hills with his family and tours solo and with KITH for sold-out shows.

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, a Rancorous Reportage, a Concise Curriculum of Cool. Greg Proops brings his “gift of gab” (Rolling Stone) and his “bold, never boring voice” (New York Times) to the printed word with this electrifying compendium of essential wisdom and obscure knowledge, ancient rulers and overlooked feminists, and more than one fantasy baseball team.   The Smartest Book in the World unleashes Proops’s fascinating and far-reaching knowledge, and plenty of laughs too. He offers up a cultural guide to the must-see and must-have albums, riffs on the merits of poetry and proper punctuation, and jaunts through lessons on everything from the history of baseball to how to steal precious art. Filtered through his distinctive voice and Proopsian panache, the exploits of the Roman Emperors read like a gossip column and entire novels fly by in a single sentence. Illustrations throughout by Proops’s wife, the artist Jennifer Canaga, bring inspired visuals to his riotous writing. Spanning genres and generations, Greg Proops gives readers a rollicking reference guide guaranteed to make anyone the smartest person in the room. This book is the perfect companion to The Smartest Man in the World and an uproarious introduction for the uninitiated. Greg Proops is a revered stand-up comic from San Francisco, and he records his chart-topping podcast “The Smartest Man in the World” from live shows around the World as well as Cleveland. Mr. Proops has been a voice actor in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and played Bob in Bob the Builder. He has been a guest on @Midnight on Comedy Central; Red Eye; The Late, Late Show; and Chelsea Lately. He lives in Hollywood.

The Little Free Library Book (Coffee House Press)  "Take a book. Return a book." In 2009, Todd Bol built the first Little Free Library as a memorial to his mom. Five years later, this simple idea to promote literacy and encourage community has become a movement. Little Free Libraries--freestanding front-yard book exchanges--now number twenty thousand in seventy countries. The Little Free Library Booktells the history of these charming libraries, gathers quirky and poignant firsthand stories from owners, provides a resource guide for how to best use your Little Free Library, and delights readers with color images of the most creative and inspired LFLs around. Praise for The Little Free Library Book: "The Little Free Library is a terrific example of placing books--poetry included--within reach of people in the course of their everyday lives. Free is always a good thing, and the project has a nice give-and-take feel to it. Here's hoping we bump into literature when we turn the next corner--before we have time to resist!"--Billy Collins "Stewards across the globe can be found within the [Little Free Library Book's] pages, along with helpful how-to's for any question you can conjure, professional blueprints for building your own LFL, and photos of some of the coolest Libraries around."--Loft “Little Free Library has turned into a worldwide book sharing and social movement--Huffington Post Margret Aldrich is a freelance writer and editor. Her articles have appeared in the Utne Reader, Experience Life!, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her family.

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 remember, she'd struggled with a series of learning disabilities that made it nearly impossible to judge time and space--standing at a cross walk, she couldn't tell you if an oncoming car would arrive in ten seconds or thirty; if you asked her to let you know when ten minutes had passed, she might notify you in a minute or an hour. These symptoms had always kept her from getting a driver's license, which she wanted to have for grad school. Instead of leaving the doctor's office with permission to drive, she left with a shocking diagnosis--doctors had found a large hole in her brain responsible for her life-long struggles. Because there aren't established tools to rely on in the wake of this unprecedented and mysterious diagnosis, Cole and her doctors and family create them, and discover firsthand how best to navigate the unique world that Cole lives in. Told without an ounce of self-pity and plenty of charm and wit, Head Case is ultimately a story of triumph, as we watch this passionate, loveable, and unsinkable young woman chart a path for herself. Praise for Head Case “Head Case is hilarious, moving, thought-provoking: it will change the way you think about what it means to move through the world, no matter the shape of your own human brain.  Cole Cohen's brain is unusual, and her voice is indelible: this is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer.  I can't wait to see what she writes next.”—Elizabeth McCracken "Terrifically readable, while still being piercing and honest about different kinds of struggle, some familiar, some utterly her own. Besides that, Cole Cohen's also really funny. And unafraid of being bleak. And funny/bleak. I so enjoyed being carried along by Cohen's voice."—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake "Rich with yearning and ache, conveying a scrunched sense of claustrophobia and imagery of cinematic quality. . .The author also delivers flashes of humor to add levity to the proceedings. A beautifully wrenching memoir as piercing as smelling salts."--Kirkus (starred review)" "Head Case is funny, touching, acerbic, and emotional; it vividly evokes the world as she experiences it and leaves you feeling you have met an exceptional, tough, indomitable character. " --Susan Orlean "I'm delighted and inspired by Cole Cohen's Head Case, an account of herself that shines throughout with her particular brand of perseverance, humor, hard-won clarity and wisdom." --Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty "Cole Cohen writes with poignant clarity about her life of continual disorientation--the result of a hole in her parietal lobe. I laud her persistence, her humor, her gracious prose, and most of all, her honesty - and, as the mother of a child likewise afflicted with an "invisible disability," I am grateful for this revelatory memoir. Cohen's challenges are as universal as their cause is unique, and Head Case, so raw and artful both, is an important book. Bravo!"--Robin Black, author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This "Cole Cohen writes with clarity, humor and honesty about her own unique brain, but Head Case is also about the very human journey of learning to navigate the big world from inside one's one mind. This is a fascinating and brave memoir."--Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born Cole Cohen graduated from the California Institute of the Arts MFA program in Writing and Critical Studies in 2009. She was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs prize in Nonfiction and she has been a Yaddo Fellow. She currently lives in Santa Barbara, California where she works as the Events and Program Coordinator for UC Santa Barbara's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

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 into another story. Cleverly translated by Jacob Steinberg, this Phoneme Media edition of a new novel by one of Mexico's most notorious and celebrated writers includes a translator's afterword and explanatory maps by illustrator Zsu Szkurka. Praise for Mario Bellatin: "Everyone talks about inventing their own language, but Mario Bellatin actually does it." --Francisco Goldman Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has published dozens of novels with major and minor publishing houses throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States, including Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, published in 2014 by Phoneme Media. A Practicing Sufi, Bellatin has won many international prizes, including, most recently, Cuba's 2015 José María Arguedas Prize. David Shook has translated Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, and The Large Glass: Three Autobiographies, forthcoming from Phoneme Media in December. He and Bellatin have collaborated to make films on three continents. Shook's own poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prize and long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize.  Jacob Steinberg was born in Stony Brook, New York, in 1989. A poet, translator, and critic, his publications includeMagulladón and Ante ti se arrodilla mi silencio. As a translator he has worked with Sam Pink, Luna Miguel, and Mario Bellatin, among others. Scrambler Books released his first English-language collection, Before You Kneels My Silence, as well as the first volume of his translations of contemporary Argentine poet Cecilia Pavón. He currently lives in New York.

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 their own brand of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger.  Haunting, surreal, and possessing an unsettling humor, Haints Stay will ensure Winnette’s growing reputation as an imaginative stylist and one of the most striking voices of his generation.  Praise for Haints Stay “The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling. Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty.”—The Lit Pub “Haints Stay puts to mind the very best contemporary novels of the old West, including those by powerhouses like Charles Portis, Patrick DeWitt, Robert Coover, Oakley Hall, E.L. Doctorow and Sheriff Cormac McCarthy himself, not to mention Thomas McGuane’s classic screenplays for The Missouri Breaks and Tom Horn. But Colin Winnette has his own dark and delightful and surprising agenda. Be wary. He might be the new law in town." —Sam Lipsyte “Life is nasty, brutish, and short in this noir-tinged Western... that falls somewhat uncomfortably between ‘Deadwood’ and The Crying Game. It sounds like a cross between Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard right up until Winnette flips the script.”—Kirkus Reviews “If the Western genre could be thought of as a pile of old stones, Haints Stay is a particular piece of lovely spit-shined agate at the top, gleaming in invitation, and under its glow the others are changed.” —Amelia Gray “Funny, brutal and haunting, Haints Stay takes the traditional Western, turns it inside out, eviscerates it, skins it, and then wears it as a duster. This is the kind of book that would make Zane Grey not only roll over in his grave but rise undead from the ground with both barrels blazing.”—Brian Evenson “From his curiously harrowing Animal Collection to the glorious guts of Fondly, I trust wherever Colin Winnette’s imagination sees fit to take me. And now — with Haints Stay — we venture to the lawless old West for a story stitched out of animal skins and language that glimmers like blood diamonds. This is a dangerous novel; let’s read it and risk our lives together.”—Saeed Jones “Before the novel ends, there’s cannibalism, an amputation, a bloody jailhouse shoot-out, a surprise birth, and the slaughter of a town’s entire population. [A] portrait of the frontier as a place where desperation and death were always near at hand.”—Publishers Weekly “I loved it. Loved it! Haints Stay had me from the very first line—the visceral ante upped and crescendoing nearly every page. Humor, gore, that wonderful unsettling feel you get when you’re reading a book that excites you and kind of scares you as well?,Yes, please.”—Lindsay Hunter Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including the SPD bestseller Coyote, and Fondly, listed among Salon's "best books of 2013." His writing has appeared in the Believer, the American Reader, McSweeney's, and 9th Letter, among other places. His prizes include the NOS Book Contest (for Coyote) and Sonora Review's Short Short Fiction Prize. He was a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize for short prose and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Award. He conducts a semi-regular interview series for Electric Literature and is an associate editor of Pank magazine. He lives in San Francisco. Karolina Waclawiak received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and The Believer (where she is also an editor). She lives in Los Angeles.

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 fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why the New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful and humorous writing, this book serves as a document of the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music, the ideas in songs and albums, how fantasies of artists become complicated by real life, and just what happens when you follow that obsession into muddy festival fields, dank basements, corporate offices or court records. Jessica Hopper is a music and culture critic whose work regularly appears in GQ, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and theChicago Tribune. She is a senior editor at The Pitchfork Review and the music editor at Rookie. Her essays have appeared inBest Music Writing for 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011. Hopper was the longtime music consultant for This American Life. Her book, The Girls' Guide to Rocking, was named one of 2009's Notable Books For Young Readers by the American Library Association. She lives in Chicago with her husband and young sons. 

The Given World (Simon & Schuster)  Spanning over twenty-five years of a radically shifting cultural landscape, The Given World is a major debut novel about war's effects on those left behind, by an author who is "strong, soulful, and deeply gifted" (Lorrie Moore, "New York Times" bestselling author of Birds of America).  In 1968, when Riley is thirteen, her brother Mick goes missing in Vietnam. Her family shattered, Riley finds refuge in isolation and drugs until she falls in love with a boy from the reservation, but he, too, is on his way to the war. Riley takes off as well, in search of Mick, or of a way to be in the world without him. She travels from Montana to San Francisco and from there to Vietnam. Among the scarred angels she meets along the way are Primo, a half-blind vet with a secret he can't keep; Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artist's eye; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid, Riley's conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her grandmother's ashes in a tin box. All are part of a lost generation, coming of age too quickly as they struggle to reassemble lives disordered by pain and loss. At center stage is Riley, a masterpiece of vulnerability and tenacity, wondering if she'll ever have the courage to return to her parents' farm, to its ghosts and memories--resident in a place she has surrendered, surely, the right to call home. Praise for The Given World: In The Given World, Marian Palaia has assembled a collection of restive seekers and beautifully told their stories of love and lovelessness, home and homelessness, with an emphasis on both makeshift and enduring ideas of family. It has been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world. She has a great ear for dialogue, a feel for dramatic confrontation, and a keen understanding of when background suddenly becomes foreground. She is a strong, soulful, and deeply gifted writer--Lorrie Moore, author of Bark "The Given World is astonishing in every regard: the voice, the range of characters, the charismatic, colloquial dialogue, the ability to summon, through telling detail, geographically diverse worlds that are far flung, but still cohere. Vietnam, counter-cultural San Francisco, the Vietnam War draft's resonance on a Montana reservation, all give evocative shape and texture to an historical era. It's edgy, often cutting, humorous, and impassioned.--Rob Nixon From the moment I met Riley I was drawn into her world, which is really ours, America in the last century as it careened into this one. I found this novel as thrilling and surprising as a ride on a vintage motorcycle, along the winding, sometimes hair-raising but always arresting ride that is Riley's life. It is a trip I will always remember.--Jesse Lee Kercheval, author ofMy Life as a Silent Movie "Marian Palaia has imaginatively engaged the Vietnam War these many decades later and transformed it into a brilliant and complex narrative able to transcend that war, all wars, all politics, all eras and illuminate the great and eternally enduring human quest for self, for an identity, for a place in the universe. The Given World is a splendid first novel by an exciting new artist."--Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize "Marian Palaia is a writer of remarkable talent. In Riley, she has captured Vietnam's long shadow with prose that cuts straight to the bone. Readers who enjoyed Jennifer Egan's The Invisible Circus will love The Given World.--Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist "Not all the American casualties of Vietnam went to war. In stunning, gorgeous prose, in precise, prismatic detail, Palaia begins with that rupture and works her way deep into the aftermath -- its impact on one person, on one family, on one country. Riveting and revelatory."--Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves "Some rare books give you the sense that a writer has been walking around with a story for years, storing it up, ruminating on it. This is one of those books. I'm grateful for the slow and patient emergence of these words on the page. No sentence is wasted. However long The Given World took, it was worth every minute."--Peter Orner, author of The Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge "Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous lyricism--reading her, you feel as if you've never heard language this beautiful and this true."--Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife Marian Palaia was born in Riverside, California, and grew up there and in Washington, DC. She lives in San Francisco and has also lived in Montana, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received the 2012 Milofsky Prize. She was a 2012-2013 John Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University and is a recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review and TriQuarterly. Marian has also been a truck driver, a bartender, and a logger.

Life #6 (Ig Publishing)  Best-selling and critically acclaimed author Diana Wagman brings us another suspenseful tale about a woman facing death. Fiona's marriage is crumbling, and she has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Caught up in a wave of memories as she faces her own mortality, Fiona recalls the five previous times in her life that she nearly died, including a fateful boat trip thirty years ago with her former boyfriend, Luc. She flees her life, struggling marriage, and cancer treatment to rendezvous with Luc, in the process reliving the harrowing boat trip the two of them shared three decades earlier, which permanently altered their lives. Now that Fiona desperately needs Luc to save her, will he be the man she remembers? Or will she discover heartbreak again? An adventurous, emotionally complex tale inspired by Diana Wagman's own experience at sea, Life #6 explores the folly of youth, what happens to us when we're pushed to the brink, the regrets of love lost, and what it really means to love, as well as the many ways we die and are renewed throughout our lives. Diana Wagman is the author of five novels, most recently Life #6.  Her second novel, Spontaneous, won the 2001 USA Pen West Award for Fiction.  Her fourth novel, The Care & Feeding of Exotic Pets, won a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers award.    Her short stories and essays have appeared in Salon, Black Clock,Conjunctions, and elsehwere and as part of the n+1 anthology MFA vs NYC. She is an occasional contributor to the LA Times.