Secret Frequencies: A New York Education
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003
memoir

John Skoyles is a wonderful storyteller, by turns hilarious and street-smart and wise, and he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to grow up in the most urban of urban environments. This is a fine and beautifully detailed book.
— Charles Baxter

A deeply engaging and funny book by a marvelous writer.
— Tracy Kidder

A salty, entertaining coming-of-age story with a real-life Sopranos cast. Skoyles’ evocation of gritty, unhomogenized Manhattan in the post-Beat era particularly won my heart.
— Joyce Johnson

Skoyles brings a novelist’s poise and pace to Secret Frequencies…He captures the enormous mystery and thrill of a young man in the city.
— The New York Sun

John Skoyles’ memoir has the texture and humor of Angela’s Ashes, offering an Italian-American boyhood in Queens and coming of age in the Manhattan of the 1960s, as told by a wonderfully generous, honest and vulnerable mid-life poet.
— The Boston Sunday Globe