Skylight Books Podcast Series

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 fortune with their Latin food empire, has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before she must return to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling Left Bank mansion known as “The House of Stars,” where a spirited but bedridden Countess Séraphine rents out rooms to young women visiting Paris to work, study, and, unofficially, to find love. Cautious and guarded, Lita keeps a cool distance from the other girls, who seem at once boldly adult and impulsively naïve, who both intimidate and fascinate her. Then Lita meets Cato, and the contours of her world shift. Charming, enigmatic, and weak with illness, Cato is the son of a notorious right-wing politician. As Cato and Lita retreat to their own world, they soon find it difficult to keep the outside world from closing in on theirs. Ultimately Lita must decide whether to stay in France with Cato or return home to fulfill her immigrant family’s dreams for her future. Praise for Patricia Engel: “With unsparing psychological precision . . . Engel has fashioned . . . an arresting voice: immediate, unsentimental, and disarmingly direct.”–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Patricia Engel’s short story collection, Vida, a The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, established her as one of this country’s best young writers, winning praise from Junot Díaz, Uzodinma Iweala, Francisco Goldman, and others. She has been widely published and has won numerous awards, including the Boston Review Fiction Prize.  She lives and teaches in Miami, Florida.

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 pretty much eschews literary rules and conventions and, rather cleverly and clandestinely, stitches into his tightly-wound nightmarish narrative all of the essential elements of the classic novel form: a plot that rushes forward ruthlessly; a deep and richly purified character study of a man inundated in a tsunami of existentialism -- ending in a bone-crushing Cri de Coeur; and a commanding, pitiless consciousness that gnaws on the broken carcass of the reader's assumptions, if not his flesh, long after the book has been read."--Warren John Deacon, writer, director, teacher "When you read this book, be prepared to be challenged. You will be challenged with word choice and you will be challenged to pay attention to every line. You can never drop your guard. This is not a light book."--Barb Cowles, writer, editor, publisher Michael Woodworth Fuller is a diverse writer, having written poems, dramas, historical non-fiction, film and television. He wrote for the Promo Department at CBS-TV, particularly for Mission Impossible, Hogan's Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, andGomer Pyle. He free-lanced for television with Alan J. Levitt and scripted several independent films, prominent among themPeace for a Gunfighter. In poetry, Michael has two published poems in the Library of American Poets, "Darryl" and"Firewood." While spending most of his time on Legacy, he wrote ISOMATA: The Place and its People, a history of the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, now known as Idyllwild Arts. Forthcoming after Legacy is Five!, a volume of short stories also to be published by Event Horizon Press.

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 memoir, The Friedkin Connection, provides a candid portrait of an extraordinary life and career, offers a window into the rarified world of Hollywood and reveals all of the decisions—technical, artistic, and business—he confronted in crafting his distinctive and landmark films. The Friedkin Connection takes readers on a journey through the numerous chance encounters and unplanned occurrences that led a young man from a poor urban neighborhood to success in one of the most competitive industries and art forms in the world. With keen wit and intellect, Friedkin proves as gifted a storyteller on the page as he is on the screen, taking readers from the streets of Chicago to the executive suites of Hollywood, from star-studded movie sets to the precision of the editing room. Readers get delicious behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of all of Friedkin’s film, from the casting of The French Connection (Friedkin considered everyone from Jackie Gleason to journalist Jimmy Breslin for the role of Popeye, before settling on Gene Hackman) and the painstaking process of filming the famous chase scene on the subway and on the streets of New York City, to the dramas that ensued during the filming of The Exorcist (how Friedkin happened upon the now-famous “Tubular Bells” score after firing two composers; how Mercedes McCambridge went about creating the voice of the demon—and how she probably ruined Linda Blair’s chances at winning the Oscar). These accounts read like page-turners, but they also reveal a filmmaker at the height of his craft, a true artist who learned as he went along and wasn’t afraid of taking risks. Still an influential filmmaker—his acclaimed 2011 movie, Killer Joe, starred Matthew McConaughey—William Friedkin has much to say about the world of movie making and his place in it. As fast-paced and thrilling as his acclaimed movies, The Friedkin Connection is a wonderfully cinematic look at an artist and an industry that has transformed who we are—and how we see ourselves. “Friedkin’s book does the unthinkable: It relates the behind-the-scenes stories of his triumphs like The French Connection andThe Exorcist, but also sees Friedkin take responsibility (brutally so) for his wrong calls, like Sorcerer and Cruising. In doing so, he captures the gut-wrenching shifts of a filmmaker’s life — the bizarre whipsaw from success to disaster.” —Peter Bart, Variety “Enthralling. . . . Hardcore film geeks will salivate over this time capsule from a grateful and still-brilliant legend.” —Booklist “For aspiring directors, a glimpse into the school of hard knocks, but there’s plenty of good stuff, lean and well-written, for civilian film fans, too.” —Kirkus Reviews

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 neglected tree her mother could no longer attend to. The story of the fruit serves as a gateway for Solnit to relate intimate details about her own life, from the history of her complicated and tempestuous relationship with her mother, now suffering from memory loss, to an unexpected invitation to visit Iceland, to her own medical emergency.  An exploration of the way we make our lives out of stories, the book is a powerful call to reinvent memoir.  Solnit does so by redefining the self, braiding together a story that is as much about how the self extends into the world through empathy and imagination and the stories that sustained her as it is about her own life during a difficult year. THE FARAWAY NEARBY speaks to storytelling structures and is formally inventive itself:  the book is fitted together like a Russian doll, with stories within stories and chapter titles that repeat. Stitching together the entire narrative is a fourteenth chapter that runs like a connecting thread throughout the whole book. Solnit relates a story of the T’ang Dynasty artist Wu Dazoi in which he is imprisoned by the Emperor and escapes through his own painting.  Stories, she writes, are like this magical painting – containing entire worlds for a reader to disappear into. Her personal stories serve both as doorways into other narratives which she immersed herself in during this time (from fairy tales to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and as entry points into the lives of others, from the young Che Guevara learning empathy among the leprosy-afflicted to an Arctic traveler who survived by eating her frozen children and a blues musician who cured himself of drinking by the stories he told.  A fitting companion  to her much-loved  A Field Guide to Getting Lost, THE FARAWAY NEARBY is a dazzling book about the magic and power of storytelling, the imaginative essence of empathy, and the forces that bring us together and keep us distant. Rebecca Solnit is the author of twelve books, including A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust,and River of Shadows, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Mark Lynton History Prize. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, she lives in San Francisco. Visit www.rebeccasolnit.com

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 continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television's narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. No longer necessarily concerned with creating always-likable characters, plots that wrapped up neatly every episode, or subjects that were deemed safe and appropriate, shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield, and more tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence, and existential boredom. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This revolution happened at the hands of a new breed of auteur: the all-powerful writer-show runner. These were men nearly as complicated, idiosyncratic, and "difficult" as the conflicted protagonists that defined the genre. Given the chance to make art in a maligned medium, they fell upon the opportunity with unchecked ambition. Combining deep reportage with cultural analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of a genre that represents not only a new golden age for TV but also a cultural watershed. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players, including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), Matthew Weiner and Jon Hamm (Mad Men), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), in addition to dozens of other writers, directors, studio executives, actors, production assistants, makeup artists, script supervisors, and so on. Martin takes us behind the scenes of our favorite shows, delivering never-before-heard story after story and revealing how cable TV has distinguished itself dramatically from the networks, emerging from the shadow of film to become a truly significant and influential part of our culture. Praise for Difficult Men: "The new golden age of television drama--addictive, dark, suspenseful, complex, morally murky--finally gets the insanely readable chronicle it deserves in Brett Martin's Difficult Men . . . Here, at last, is the real story, and it's a lot more exciting than the version that gets told in Emmy acceptance speeches."--Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood "This book taught me a thing or two about how a few weird executives enabled a handful of weirder writers to make shows I still can't believe were on TV. But what I found more interesting--and disturbing--is how it helped me understand why an otherwise lily-livered, civic-minded nice girl like me wants to curl up with a bunch of commandment-breaking, Constitution-trampling psychos--and that's just the cops."--Sarah Vowell "Any addict of the new 'golden' television (or extended narratives on premium cable) will love this book. Along the way, it is also one of the smartest books about American television ever written. So don't be surprised if that great creator, David Chase (of (The Sopranos), comes out as a mix of Rodney Dangerfield and Hamlet."--David Thompson Brett Martin has been reporting and writing non-fiction for more than fifteen years. He’s contributed to Vanity Fair, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Food and Wine, Details, Men’s Journal and O: The Oprah Magazine, and is a frequent contributor to This American Life. He is currently a Contributor to GQ.  THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 17, 2013 COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781594204197

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 adult, he found himself unconsciously aligning with their enemies. This was not because he necessarily liked what they were doing; it was because they were doing it on purpose (and they were doing it better). They wanted to be evil. And what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol--Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still obsessed with some kid he knew for one week in 1985? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is the rare example of serious criticism that's instantly accessible and really, really funny. Klosterman is the only writer doing whatever it is he's doing. Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times bestselling author of seven previous books, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Eating the Dinosaur; Killing Yourself to Live; and The Visible Man. His debut book, Fargo Rock City, was the winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has written for GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, and The Onion A.V. Club. He currently serves as “The Ethicist” for the New York Times Magazine and writes about sports and popular culture for ESPN.  THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JULY 17, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781439184493

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 writing code than connecting with human beings. Brilliant, neurotic, and lonely, Eric spends high school in the solitary glow of a screen. By his early twenties, Eric's talent has made him a Silicon Valley millionaire. He can coax girls into bed with ironic remarks and carefully timed intimacies, but hiding behind wit and empathy gets lonely, and he fears that love will always be out of reach. So when Eric falls for the beautiful, fiercely opinionated Maya Marcom, and she miraculously falls for him too, he's in new territory. But the more he learns about his perfect girlfriend's unresolved past, the further Eric's obsessive mind spirals into confusion and doubt. Can he reconcile his need for order and logic with the mystery and chaos of love? This brilliant debut ushers Eric Muller-flawed, funny, irresistibly endearing-into the pantheon of unlikely heroes. With an unblinking eye for the absurdities and horrors of contemporary life, Gabriel Roth gives us a hilarious and heartbreaking meditation on self consciousness, memory, and love. Praise for The Unknowns:  "What a funny, moving, brilliantly cut gem of a novel. An ever-shifting Venn diagram of love and logic, The Unknowns floored me." --author of Panorama City, Antoine Wilson "The Unknowns feels at first like a very great and very funny coming-of-age novel, about a high-school loser destined for Internet riches. But then suddenly you realize you're reading something much more powerful: a beautiful and painful story about the dangers of learning too much-and about how little we can ever really know about other people."--author of The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters  "The Unknowns is so staggeringly funny and smart that its depths and sorrows, when they came, took my breath away."--author of Dare Me, Megan Abbott "Gabriel Roth's first novel is a warmly wry coming-of-age story and a darkly funny-and darkly resonant-satire of one effervescent moment in San Francisco's abusive relationship with technology. If Peter Thiel had backed a character from Infinite Jest, he would have gone on to look something like Eric Muller. A tender, comic debut from one of the coder-novelists of the future."--author of A Sense of Direction, Gideon Lewis-Kraus Gabriel Roth was born and raised in London and educated at Brown University and at San Francisco State University, from which he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. For several years he was employed as a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He now works as a writer and software developer and lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. THE UNKNOWNS is his first novel. 

PEN Center USA will present an Emerging Voices Fellowship panel of current and former Emerging Voices Fellows and mentors for the benefit of interested applicants. PEN Center USA's mission is to stimulate and maintain interest in the written word, to foster a vital literary culture, and to defend freedom of expression domestically and internationally.

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 reconcile his family's roots with the haze of MDMA, texts and tweets that he's been living in. Mr. Lin has refined his deadpan prose style here into an icy, cynical, but ultimately thrilling and unique literary voice."--New York Observer "With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation." --Bret Easton Ellis Tao Lin is the author of the novels Richard Yates and Eeeee Eee Eeee, the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, the story collection Bed, and the poetry collections cognitive-behavioral therapy and you are a little bit happier than i am. He is the founder and editor of the literary press Muumuu House. His work has been translated to twelve languages and he lives in Manhattan. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JUNE 20, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780307950178

HAND-CRAFTED CANDY BARS (Chronicle Books) The beloved candy bars of childhood have grown up, but there is no need to go to the French Laundry to get your fix. Candy bar devotees Susie Norris and Susan Heeger show how to reinvent candy bars as they should be--thick and layered with nougat, crisp with toffee, and coated with fine chocolate. Familiar candy-store bars and other nostalgic favorites are re-created using the freshest ingredients, right down to the peanut-laden caramel and chocolate-drenched cookie crunch. A mix-and-match flavor chart inspires anyone with a sweet tooth to dream up custom treats of their own, such as covering marshmallows with molten chocolate. From the basics of candy making to tips on dressing up these luscious indulgences as elegant desserts, Hand-Crafted Candy Bars evokes the sweet memory of youth with simple, scrumptious sophistication. Susie Norris is a cookbook author, award-winning artisan chocolatier, pastry chef/instructor, and educational fundraiser.  Her first book was CHOCOLATE BLISS (Random House, 2008) and HAND-CRAFTED CANDY BARS (Chronicle, 2013) has just been released, Her chocolate work has been featured on Food Network, in Dessert Professional Magazine and many other publications. She recently taught baking at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and Sur La Table in Los Angeles.  Prior to her work in the food business, she was Vice President of Series Television at Disney Channel and held similar positions at Nickelodeon, CBS, NBC and Turner Network Television.  www.handcraftedcandybars.com Susan Heeger, co-author of Hand-Crafted Candy Bars, is a California native and graduate of Harvard University. A long-time magazine and newspaper feature writer, she specializes in garden, design, home, lifestyle, and food stories. She is a former staff writer for Martha Stewart Living and author of the newly released Landprints: The Landscape Designs of Bernard Trainor, published by Princeton Architectural Press. She also co-wrote From Seed to Skillet, a guide to edible gardening and cooking from the garden, published by Chronicle Books. Her feature stories have appeared in publications that include The Los Angeles Times Magazine, This Old House, Martha Stewart Living, Coastal Living, Country Living, and Cooking Light. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON JUNE 18, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781452109657