Skylight Books Podcast Series

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking--recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa's surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery." It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead." Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Chloe Aridjis's Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. Aridjis is joined by Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back and writer for Netflix's Orange is the New Black.

From Laurels Award Fellowship recipient Sophia Shalmiyev comes the exquisite Mother Winter, a haunting and deeply personal story of fleeing the Soviet Union, where Shalmiyev was forced to abandon her mother, and her subsequent years of searching for surrogate mothers—whether in books, art, lovers, or other lost souls. Mother Winter is the story of Sophia’s emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a motherless woman now raising children of her own. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev grew up in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad. When her father packed up for a new life in America, he took Sophia with him but left behind her estranged and alcoholic mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her. The book depicts in urgent vignettes Sophia’s subsequent years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connections. She describes her tumultuous childhood in the USSR; her experiences as a refugee; the life she built for herself in the Pacific Northwest; and her cathartic journey back to Russia as an adult to search for the mother she never knew. Shalmiyev is in conversation with Sara Benincasa, a stand-up comedian, actress, and the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs.

Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them. Mao is in conversation with Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti.

Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing, and Creating Comics shows students how to critically examine the craft and storytelling elements found inside a graphic novel or comic and spotlights groundbreaking work by comics creators and scholars from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds. This accessible, introductory guide to comics discusses how a comic is made and introduces students to the unique form and structure of comics, demonstrating how panels, splash pages, and word balloons are used to tell a story. It encourages students to apply literary theory and social politics to the world of comics to encourage discussions of comics within a larger cultural context. Rachelle Cruz introduces students to significant movements and moments in comics history in the United States. Users are provided with comic-making activities so they can practice the craft and storytelling elements discussed throughout the book. Students will gain first-hand insight from comics professionals and practitioners through interviews with creators, artists, writers, anthology editors, scholars, and comics enthusiasts. Cruz is in conversation with comic artsits Nilah Magruder and Yumi Sakugawa.

Famous for her pasta parties, Noodlephant is shocked when the law-loving kangaroos decide noodles are only for them! Noodlephant won’t let this stand—Noodlephants can’t survive on sticks and branches, after all. Determined to do something to push back against an unjust law, she and her friends invent a machine that transforms pens into penne, pillows into ravioli, and radiators into radiatori. With that, the pasta parties are back! But that very night, the kangaroos come bounding through the door… ready to enforce their unjust laws. A zany tale full of pasta puns, friendship, and one Phantastic Noodler, Noodlephant, written by Jacob Kramer and illustrated by K-Fai Steele, explores a community’s response to injustice.

In this debut work of autofiction, high school junior Nikki Darling roams the uncanny suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. Nikki is ambivalent about her grades and even about showing up for class, instead flitting between a series of irresponsible and nominally illegal adolescent experiences. Left to her own devices by absent parents, she flings herself into punk music and counterculture, hoping to evade the intergenerational silence passed down through the women in her family. Fade Into You is a poignant reminder of how it feels to be a young girl both trapped and set free by looming future expectations, and a tribute to the discomfort and joy of growing up in the in-between—between Mexican and white, earnest and unruly, street smart and vulnerable.

The year is 2015. Jonas might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age twenty-eight, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like, visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student—and a difficult place to be a drug addict. He goes to Malmö, a city trying to cope with the arrival of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. Driven by an existential need to “do good,” Jonas volunteers with an organization that teaches Swedish to the desperate and idling young refugees. But a friendship with one young refugee, Aziz, will force Jonas to question whether “doing good” can actually help another person. A resplendent work of autofiction, Johannes Lichtman's Such Good Work uses dark humor and pathos to consider the complexity of being a good person in our modern world, as well as the effects of nationalism and identity politics in a time when conversations around migrant policies are vital and omnipresent.

Whiting Award-winning author Brontez Purnell’s first children’s book tells the story of a child charged with caring for his baby brother when his mom is out at night. In The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett, 11-year-old Jacuzzi is an introspective and imaginative child who loves taking care of his 11-month-old baby brother. When their mom goes out for a date with her boyfriend, he watches his sibling and entertains himself. Readers are taken inside Jacuzzi Gaskett’s precocious mind, where he thinks about the classmates who don’t get him, all the books that have taken him to faraway places, and “sometimes misses his dad.” Purnell is in conversation with Beth Pickens, an artist, writer, and mother living in Brooklyn.

When Sophie Swankowski surfaces from the freezing waters in Michelle Tea's Castle on the River Vistula, she finds herself in an ancient castle in Poland—and in the center of an ages-old battle. Even with her magic powers, the strength and wisdom she learns from her companions in Warsaw, and the help of her gruff mermaid guardian, Syrena, how can one thirteen-year-old from scrappy Chelsea Massachusetts, really save the world? Luckily, Sophie won’t be alone. As she connects to other girls around the globe who have been training, just like her, for this very fight, she begins to think she just may become the hero she’s meant to be. But when she has to face the pure source of evil alone, using all the strength she has to keep it from destroying everything, how easy it would be to simply give up and join the other side... Tea is in discussion with actor, writer, and comic Brendan Scannell.

In Emily Jungmin Yoon's arresting and urgently relevant debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, she confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called “comfort women,” the majority of whom were Korean and who were forced into sexual labor to serve the Japanese Imperial Army in the Pacific theater of World War II. In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country?” Yoon asks. “What is right in war?” In an author's note, Yoon explains that her poetry “does not exist to answer, but rather to continue asking, questions about my immigrant, ESL, Korean, and womanly experiences, or the violent history of twentieth-century Korea.” In taking on poetry about the comfort women,” she writes that "I'd like my poetry to serve to amplify and speak these women's stories, not speak for them.” Yoon is joined in conversation by Muriel Leung and Morgan Parker.