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Skylight Books Podcast Series
Hosted by Skylight Books · EN
Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
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SKYLIT: Matthew Reed Baker, 1970s JAZZ FUSION (GENRE: A 33 1/3 SERIES)
May 15, 202500:52:15Tap to summarizeFrom BITCHES BREW to "Feels So Good" and beyond, author Matthew Reed Baker delves into the funky, smooth, and transcendent records that resulted from the merging of jazz with R&B, pop, rock, and much much more in the 1970s. Miles Davis, Weather Report, Chuck Mangione, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, and Steely Dan are just some of the acts that are discussed in 1970s Jazz Fusion, a welcome new installment from 33 1/3's spin-off series on musical genres. Bookseller and writer Justin Remer hosts this discussion of both the book and the music. Hosted and produced by Justin Remer. Recorded remotely via Zencastr. Opening music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire Closing music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" by Elastic No-No Band
Transcribe →Better Than the Movie 24: WOMAN IN THE DUNES w/ Emily VanKoughnett
May 1, 202501:32:30Tap to summarizeAbe is Bae? The wonderful Emily VanKoughnett (Los Angeles Review of Books; LIT ANGELES) returns to Better Than the Movie with a classy pick: Kobo Abe's existential psychological thriller The Woman in the Dunes. The novel, from 1962, was made a few years later into an Oscar-nominated film adapted by Abe and directed by the inimitable Hiroshi Teshigahara. Both are considered top-tier classics... but which is better? Hosted by Justin Remer, Allan Traylor, and Tyler Austin. Produced by Justin Remer. Recorded at the LAPL Octavia Lab. Opening music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire. Closing music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" by Elastic No-No Band.
Transcribe →SKYLIT: Sina Grace, WEST HOLLYWOOD MONSTER SQUAD
Apr 17, 202501:02:57Tap to summarizeAward-winning graphic novelist and illustrator Sina Grace (Superman: The Harvests of Youth) joins host Tyler Austin to discuss his new book, West Hollywood Monster Squad. A ragtag crew must make their way across West Hollywood after some unexpected pink snow begins creating giant monsters in their midst. It's a sweet, funny "turbo gay" story for our time. Sina and Tyler discuss themes of the story, as well as the intricacies of the Pokémon video games, what it's like working at Skylight, and whatever else crosses their minds during this delightful hour-long chat. Produced by Tyler Austin & Justin Remer. Recorded remotely via Zencastr. Hosted by Tyler Austin. Opening music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire. The "Justin's music is great" music: "Don't Depend on Me (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire. Closing music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" by Elastic No-No Band.
Transcribe →Better Than the Movie 23: THE NATURAL w/ Jonah Lipton
Mar 27, 202501:48:25Tap to summarizeHappy Opening Day! Baseball is back, and BTTM is back with another baseball-themed book adaptation. Bookseller and writer Jonah Lipton joins the crew to discuss Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel THE NATURAL, and its 1984 film adaptation starring Robert Redford. Famously the book is downbeat and cynical, reflecting postwar disillusionment, while the movie is upbeat and heroic, reflecting Reagan-era optimism. We know they're different but which one is better?? Hosted by Tyler Austin, Allan Traylor, and Justin Remer. Produced by Justin Remer. Recorded at the LAPL Octavia Lab. Opening music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire. Closing music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" Elastic No-No Band.
Transcribe →SKYLIT: Marya E. Gates, CINEMA HER WAY
Mar 13, 202500:50:09Tap to summarizeFilm journalist and critic Marya E. Gates talks with Justin about her new book, Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors In Their Own Words. The book is a stylishly illustrated collection of interviews with 19 film directors, including Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Mira Nair, Mary Lambert, and Katt Shea. Another great chat for our cinephile listeners! Hosted and produced by Justin Remer. Recorded remotely via Zencastr. Opening Music: "Optimism (Instrumental)" by Duck the Piano Wire. Closing Music: "Rule of 3s (Solemnity Child)" by Elastic No-No Band.
Transcribe →CHUCK KLOSTERMAN READS FROM HIS NEW BOOK BUT WHAT IF WE'RE WRONG?
Jul 12, 2016Tap to summarizeBut What If We're Wrong? (Blue Rider Press) We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure—until, of course, they don’t. But What If We’re Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who will conceive of it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge? Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We’re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.” Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of six other nonfiction books (most notably Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and I Wear the Black Hat) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist forThe New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and co-created Grantland with Bill Simmons. Klosterman is a native of North Dakota and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Entertainment Weekly TV critic Melissa Maerz.
Transcribe →ESTHER PEARL WATSON reads from UNLOVABLE, VOl. 3
Jun 22, 2014Tap to summarizeUnlovable, Vol. 3 (Fantagraphics Books) OH NO, you did not just get invited to the Unlovable Volume 3 Launch Party, we were just SHOWING you that there is one. Kim said that she and Erick were gonna like, crash it, but we just got these swede pants from the thrift store and new earrings from the Collin Creek Mall---OH FINE, EVERYONE IS INVITED! Skylight Books is proud to host the Unlovable Volume 3 Launch Party with cartoonist Esther Pearl Watson onSunday, May 4th. Summer vacation is here and Tammy Pierce is back with more sometimes ordinary, often humiliating, occasionally poignant, and usually hilarious exploits from the pages of Bust magazine! Her hopes, dreams, agonies, and defeats are brought to vivid, comedic life by Watson's lovingly grotesque drawings, filled with all the eighties essentials - too much mascara, leg warmers with heels, and huge hair, etc. - as well as timeless teen concerns like acne, dandruff, and the opposite sex (or same sex, in some cases). Tammy's life isn't pretty, but it is endlessly endearing and hilarious especially under the pen of Esther Pearl Watson. Esther Pearl Watson lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and fellow artist, Mark Todd. Together they authored the influential D.I.Y. tome, Whatcha Mean, What's A Zine?
Transcribe →Rebecca Solnit
Jan 16, 2014Tap to summarizeThe 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
Transcribe →Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Tom Bissell
Aug 25, 2012Tap to summarizeA Sense of Direction by Lewis-Kraus (Riverhead) Magic Hours (McSweeney's) by Bissell Essayists Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Tom Bissell will discuss and sign their new respective books, A Sense of Direction and Magic Hours. Praise for A Sense of Direction: "A very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward. With great compassion and zeal he gets at the question: why search the world to solve the riddle of your own heart?" —Dave Eggers "If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love, it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus. A Sense of Direction is the digressively brilliant and seriously hilarious account of a fellow neurotic’s wanderings, and his hard-won lessons in happiness, forgiveness, and international pilgrim fashion." —Gary Shteyngart Praise for Tom Bissell's previous works: "Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time… His descriptions of simulated gore and mayhem manage to be clinical, gripping, and hilarious all at once. He transmits to the reader the primitive, visceral excitements that make video games so enticing, even addictive, to their legions of devotees." —The New Republic "Written with such panache and laden with so much information that it rises to real seriousness… moves along as deftly as a novel… [A] combination of crack-up wit, wild ambition and preposterous youth." —The New York Times Book Review Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written for Harper’s, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, n+1, McSweeney’s, BookForum, The Nation, Slate, and other publications. A 2007-2008 Fulbright fellowship brought him to Berlin, world capital of contemporary restlessness. For the moment he lives in Brooklyn. Tom Bissell is the author of Extra Lives, Chasing the Sea, God Lives in St. Petersburg, and The Father of All Things. A recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Bay de Noc Community College Alumnus of the Year Award. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS MAY 21, 2012.
Transcribe →Esther Pearl Watson
Jul 19, 2010Tap to summarizeUnlovable Vol. 2 (Fantagraphics) Esther Watson, co-author of Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? and author of Unlovable will discuss and sign the second volume in her hilarious and heartbreaking series that's loosely based on the 1980s-era diary of a high school girl that she found in a gas station bathroom. "Watson's graphic style and messily scrawled confessions read like a genuine diary, filled with humor and despair. Unlovable makes me grateful to be past that painful stage." --The Seattle Weekly Esther Pearl Watson lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and fellow artist, Mark Todd. Together they authored the influential D.I.Y. tome, Whatcha Mean, What's A Zine? Learn more at funchicken.com.
Transcribe →