Skylight Books Podcast Series

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. In Tonight I'm Someone Else, she asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre—including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission— Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth. Hodson is joined by Wendy C. Ortiz, author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook, and the dreamoir Bruja.

In a haze of morning crumpets and restrictive tights, Ted Scheinman delivers a hilarious and poignant survey of one of the most enduring and passionate literary coteries in history. Combining clandestine journalism with frank memoir, academic savvy with insider knowledge, Camp Austen is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Jane Austen that can also be read in a single sitting. Brimming with stockings, culinary etiquette, and scandalous dance partners, this is summer camp like you've never seen it before.

These days / the world seems to split up / into those who need to dredge / and those who shrug their shoulders / and say, It’s just something / that happened. While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and—perhaps most frightening of all—freedom. Nelson is joined by Ali Liebegott, author of three books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, and Cha-Ching!

Culled from a sprawling personal and professional archive of thousands, Double Vision marks the first time that George Rodriguez’s two lives, his career of double exposures, have been gathered into a single volume. Until now, only his images of Chicana/o protest and politics have ever appeared in published volumes, gallery, or museum exhibitions. A student of Sid Avery and a contemporary of Dennis Hopper, but born in South Los Angeles and often working as the first Latino photographer in the room at a time when his own rights were on the line, Rodriguez is one of the great visual documentarians of Los Angeles and of the cultural complexities of Mexican-American life. Rodriguez is joined in conversation with Josh Kun, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of a 2018 Berlin Prize and a 2006 American Book Award.

A masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep helped to define a genre and remains one of the most celebrated and stylish novels of the twentieth century. Now, this comprehensive, annotated edition offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the novel, bringing the gritty and seductive world of Chandler’s iconic private eye Philip Marlowe into full color. Notes on the historical context of Chandler’s Los Angeles; excerpts from the author’s personal letters and source texts; explorations of the issues of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity that permeate the story; and important interpretations and clarifications enrich the reader’s understanding and situate the novel within the tradition of crime fiction that Chandler both built upon and made new. The annotators have asked a group of LA authors to read favorite passages from the novel, followed by a talk by the annotators. Readers include Judith Freeman, David Ulin, Steph Cha, Kim Cooper and Gary Phillips.

Over the course of her fortieth year, which this memoir chronicles, Glynnis MacNicol embarks on a revealing journey of self-discovery that continually contradicts everything she'd been led to expect. Through the trials of family illness and turmoil, and the thrills of far-flung travel and adventures with men, young and old (and sometimes wearing cowboy hats), she is forced to wrestle with her biggest hopes and fears about love, death, sex, friendship, and loneliness. In doing so, she discovers that holding the power to determine her own fate requires a resilience and courage that no one talks about, and is more rewarding than anyone imagines. Intimate and timely, No One Tells You This is a fearless reckoning with modern womanhood and an exhilarating adventure that will resonate with anyone determined to live by their own rules. MacNicol is joined by journalist and cultural critic Ann Friedman.

In a remote corner of Oregon, James Pogue found himself at the heart of a rebellion. Granted unmatched access by Ammon Bundy to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pogue met ranchers and militiamen ready to die fighting the federal government. He witnessed the fallout of communities riven by politics and the danger (and allure) of uncompromising religious belief. The occupation ended in the shooting death of one rancher, the imprisonment of dozens more, and a firestorm over the role of government that engulfed national headlines. In a raw and restless narrative that roams the same wild terrain as his literary forebears Edward Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson, Pogue's Chosen Country examines the underpinnings of this rural uprising and struggles to reconcile diverging ideas of freedom, tracing a cultural fault line that spans the nation. Pogue is joined by David Garrett Byars, who made his directorial debut at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival with No Man's Land, a documentary about the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

In 2014, Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail for a DUI and battery of an officer. She served her time at the tail end of a 414-day relapse into alcohol addiction after more than a decade of sobriety. During that year and seven weeks, she was in what she describes as a “chronic state of blackout”--The Lost Chapters. Incarceration might have ruined her, if not for the stories that comforted her while she was locked up-- both the artful tales in the books she read while there, and, more immediately, the stories of her fellow inmates. With classics like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to contemporary accounts like Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, Schwartz's reading list is woven together with visceral recollections of her daily humiliations faced in the county jail system. Through the stories of others—whether rendered on the page or whispered in a jail cell—she learned powerful lessons about how to banish shame, use guilt for good, level her grief, and find the lost joy and magic of her astonishing life. Schwartz is joined in conversation by Bernadette Murphy, author of Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life.

Ambler Tamblyn's Any Man follows six men: an English teacher, an unsuccessful standup comedian, a bi-racial web designer; a high school student, an alt-right media personality, and a transgender man. While one man’s experience launches him into the spotlight as an unlikely activist and voice for justice, another’s trauma is told through every voice but his own, a damning commentary on how we abuse and erase the stories and experiences of survivors. In Any Man, the serial rapes act as a mirror, reflecting prejudices from the media and society back towards each victim as they grapple with guilt, shame, fear, PTSD, anger, and confusion about their attack. Journalists and people on social media hound and harass the victims, some going so far as to question whether it is even physically possible for a woman to rape a man. Soon the culture feels equally as complicit and violent as the actual predator herself. The power of this novel comes from the victims’ resistance of the narrative thrust upon them, refusing to be plot devices, but actual agents of action, central, and ever-present as they summon the strength and courage to speak out. Tamblyn is joined in conversation by Janet Fitch, author of  the novels White Oleander, an Oprah Book Club selection, Paint It Black, and most recently The Revolution of Marina M.

Over the course of United States history, resistance against oppression and the gains made from various struggles for everyone's equality have often been Black led. However, liberal politics and the lack of strong leftist political power are two problems impeding the continued progress of Black America. Expanding on their original essay "The Anarchism Of Blackness," Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson make the case for a new program of transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework likened to the Black experience itself. This is not a compromising book that negotiates with intolerance. As Black as Resistance is a declaration for everyone who is ready to continue progressing towards liberation for all people.