Skylight Books Podcast Series

In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new.   As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy.  _______________________________________________   Produced by Natalie Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

Skylight's own Lance Morgan is joined on the first Handsell of the year by Christine Bollow, the Programs and Marketing Manager for Loyalty Bookstores and a Bookstagrammer @readingismagical. She serves on the ABA's Bookseller Advisory Committee and is a contributor for the Feminist Book Club Podcast. Christine's book recommendations have been featured in Buzzfeed Books and Elle.com and she was highlighted by Books Forward as one of 10 Bookstagrammers to Follow for Asian & Pacific American Heritage Month. _______________________________________________   Produced by Natalie Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

When Darius told Angel he loved her, she believed him. But five weeks after the incident, Angel finds herself in Brooklyn, far from her family, from him, and from the California life she has known.   Angel feels out of sync with her new neighborhood. At school, she can’t shake the feeling everyone knows what happened—and that it was her fault. The only place that makes sense is Ms. G’s class. There, Angel’s classmates share their own stories of pain, joy, and fortitude. And as Angel becomes immersed in her revolutionary literature course, the words from Black writers like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston speak to her and begin to heal the wounds of her past. Mahogany L. Browne's Vinyl Moon weaves together prose, poems, and vignettes to tell the story of Angel, a young woman whose past was shaped by domestic violence but whose love of language and music and the gift of community grant her the chance to find herself again. _______________________________________________   Produced by Natalie Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

Join us for a heartwarming post-holiday introduction to the New Year, as Skylight's own Alena Saunders sits down with her father, esteemed writer George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo, Fox8), for an intimate conversation about his life and career. _______________________________________________   Produced by Natalie Freeman, Lance Morgan, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

Have you ever schemed with a friend? Stared at your phone screen well after you should have gone to sleep? Braced for heartbreak? Been told to smile more? Then Unimpressed will undoubtedly speak to you. In a book that bridges comics and memes, Miranda Tacchia uses her biting sense of humor and background in animation to create brilliant character portraits of women with only markers, Post-it notes, and tape. A master of expression, figure, and subtle (and other times not-so-subtle) comedy, Tacchia's protagonists are usually "unimpressed women" — who all share the fact that "they don't give a shit about you," as Tacchia puts it. What makes Unimpressed so impressive and entertaining is how Tacchia taps into instantly relatable feelings and situations while simultaneously creating art that exudes confidence and vulnerability. Tacchia is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Aminder Dhaliwal. The episode was recorded on October 8, 2021.  _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

It’s a normal night in August. Literature professor Arne and artist Tove are with their children at the resort in Sørlandet. Their friend, Egil, a driver by day, is staying in a cabin nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is on her way home from a seminar, the journalist Jostein is out on the town, and his wife Turid, who is an assistant nurse, has a night shift. Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears in the sky. No one, not even the astronomers, knows for sure what kind of phenomenon it is. Is there a star burning itself out? Why then has no one seen it before? Or is it a brand new star? Slowly the interest in the news subsides, and life goes on, but not quite as before, for unusual phenomena begin to occur on the fringes of human existence. Over these days in August, the characters the novel follows will each understand what is happening differently, and all face new struggles in their own lives. The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, is a novel about what we do not understand, about great drama seen through the limited lens of little lives. But first and foremost, it is a novel about what happens when the dark forces in the world are set free. Knausgaard is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Brandon Taylor. The episode was recorded on September 28, 2021.  _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere. Montell is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Owin Pierson. The episode was recorded on June 23, 2021. You can watch the Zoom recording here. _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town ... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years ... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims. Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak. Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are. Choi is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Steph Cha. The episode was recorded on September 1, 2021. You can watch the Zoom recording here. _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

Summer, 1976. Jesse and his brother, Edgar, are on the road in search of victims. They’re rovers, nearly indestructible nocturnal beings who must consume human blood in order to survive. For seventy years they’ve lurked on the fringes of society, roaming from town to town, dingy motel to dingy motel, stalking the transients, addicts, and prostitutes they feed on. This hard-boiled supernatural hell ride kicks off when the brothers encounter a young woman who disrupts their grim routine, forcing Jesse to confront his past and plunging his present into deadly chaos as he finds himself scrambling to save her life. The story plays out through the eyes of the brothers, a grieving father searching for his son’s murderer, and a violent gang of rover bikers, coming to a shattering conclusion in Las Vegas on the eve of America’s Bicentennial. Gripping, relentless, and ferocious, Rovers demonstrates once again why Richard Lange has been hailed as an “expert writer, his prose exact, his narrative tightly controlled” (Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times). Lange is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Jonathan Ames. The episode was recorded on August 11, 2021. You can watch the Zoom recording here. _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.

A Native American cartoonist explores the isolation and anxiety of being lost between two worlds but ultimate becoming comfortable in his own skin. Come Home, Indio shares the Jim Terry’s journey of discovering his spiritual home as a Native American. From a childhood in suburbia, disconnected from his identity as an Indigenous person, through an urban adulthood marked by a struggle with alcoholism and the death of his parents, to his life-altering experience at Standing Rock, he begins to find a new sense of self as a Native and as an American. Terry is joined in this Live Crowdcast episode by Ezra Clayton Daniels. The episode was recorded on July 14, 2021. You can watch the Zoom recording here. _______________________________________________   Produced by Maddie Gobbo, Lance Morgan, Natalie Freeman, & Michael Kowaleski. Theme: "I Love All My Friends," an unreleased demo by Fragile Gang. Visit https://www.skylightbooks.com/event for future offerings from the Skylight Books Events team.