Upcoming Events

discussing the subject of her recently released book Republic of Lies:American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power from Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co. A riveting tour through the landscape and meaning of modern conspiracy theories, exploring the causes and tenacity of this American malady, from Birthers to Pizzagate and beyond. American society has always been fertile ground for conspiracy theories, but with the election of Donald Trump, previously outlandish ideas suddenly attained legitimacy. Trump himself is a conspiracy…

POETS! 1st and 3rd Monday of each month, 7-9 pm Featured poets + open mic hosted by Jerry Ferraz On the first and third Monday of each month, Jerry Ferraz hosts a poetry reading that showcases local legends, poets passing through and folks from around the Bay -- typically two featured poets followed by an open mic. We can count on a warm group of poets and poetry fans eager to hear the features and the potpourri of poets of every…

celebrating the release of his new book Ascend Ascend from Third Man Books Written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while secluded in the tower of a 100-year-old church, Ascend Ascend is Janaka Stucky's most powerful book to date. Rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of Hekhalot literature, which chronicles an ascent up the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to witness the Merkabah, or "chariot of God," this…

The Bindery hosts the launch for Anniqua Rana's debut novel, Wild Boar in the Cane Field. More information to be announced soon, but please save the date and join us! One day, a baby girl, Tara, is found, abandoned and covered in flies. She is raised by two mothers in a community rife with rituals and superstition. As she grows, Tara pursues acceptance at all costs. Saffiya, her adoptive mother, and Bhaggan, Saffiya's maidservant, are victims of the men in their community,…

Editor Shelly Oria discusses the new collection Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement  with Rita Bullwinkel, Thea Matthews and Yalitza Ferreras. Praise for Indelible in the Hippocampus “This book is a proper danger to patriarchal silencing.” —Ashley Judd  “This anthology does so much to humanize, again, the stories that have emerged from the #MeToo Movement, already much dismissed and pushed off to the margins. And while that would be enough, it is more than that. There are many beloved writers…

celebrating the release of her new book James Joyce and the Matter of Paris published by Cambridge University Press In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city.…

Booksmith hosts a special evening with actor Avan Jogia for his debut book, Mixed Feelings: Poems and Stories. This will be his only SF/Bay Area appearance. Please join us! Please note: this is a ticketed event, to be held at Booksmith (1644 Haight St.) in San Francisco. The price of admission is equal to the cost of Mixed Feelings, which is included with each ticket. Tickets can be purchased here. In a raw and moving collection of poetry, stories, and art about living as a…

Bathsheba Demuth discusses her new book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Praise for Floating Coast “In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demouth has written a brilliant hybrid book about one of the most fragile and forgotten of Anthropocene front-line territories, the Bering Strait. Uniting ecology, anthropology, reportage and more, this is a superb work of environmental history, often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision.” — Robert…

Booksmith hosts Bay Area poet John James for his debut book of poems, The Milk Hours. Reading with him are local poets Jay Deshpande (The Destroyer in the Glass) & Noah Warren (Love the Stranger). Please join us! Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. “We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living,…

The Bindery hosts a special afternoon event with Petina Gappah (The Book of Memory) reading from her second novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light. Please join us! “This is how we carried out of Africa the poor broken body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, David Livingstone, so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own land.” So begins Petina Gappah's powerful novel of exploration and adventure in nineteenth-century Africa -- the captivating story of the loyal men and women who…

discussing the subject of her new book Wilding:Returning Nature to Our Farm from New York Review Books with an introduction by Eric Schlosser For many years Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell struggled to make a go as farmers, doing everything they could to make the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex as productive as possible, while rarely succeeding in making a profit. By 2000, facing bankruptcy, the couple decided they would try something new. They…

Jess Row discusses his new book, White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination. Praise for White Flights “These are brilliant, sweeping, intimate delights—and afterward, you may never read the same way again.”—Alexander Chee “A major literary and intellectual intervention, clarifying the real stakes in what we too complacently call ‘identity politics.’”—Pankaj Mishra “We need this book, now and yesterday.”—Kiese Laymon “Jess Row performs a much-needed analysis. . . . The landscape of the imagination, like the country itself, he argues…

The Bindery hosts Timothy Faust, back in San Francisco to present his first book, Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next. Please join us! The sun is setting on America’s half-century of punishing the sick, and this book promises a bright new dawn for us all. Single payer healthcare is not complicated: the government pays for all care for all people. It’s cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what’s the deal…