Litseen

Sesshu Foster & Arturo Ernesto Romo in conversation with Carribean Fragoza
2021-04-27 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform.

celebrating the book launch of ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, published by City Lights Books. Sesshu & Arturo will be in conversation with their fellow City Lights author Carribean Fragoza!
Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
———–
(Click Here) to purchase book.
———–

This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Books related to this event:

ELADATL
A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
Sesshu Foster, Arturo Ernesto Romo
due out in April 2021
Available for pre-order. A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes.

This Is Now: Kawai Strong Washburn
2021-04-27 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
Join Angie Coiro as she interviews the critically acclaimed debut novelist who stunned everyone from former President Obama to Marlon James and Tommy Orange with his extraordinary novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors.
This groundbreaking book folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into the modern-day struggles of a single working family. A young child, Naiona, falls suddenly from a boat on a rare vacation. After the incident, the 7 year-old boy seems to develop unusual powers that follow him into adulthood and add challenges to already complex relationships between his siblings, who are flung as far as California and Portland. With a heady, golden overlay of belief, myth and magic, plus a challenging backdrop of financial strife and Hawaiian politics, this is fundamentally a human story—in which individuals struggle to develop identity and connection against the weight of challenging surroundings, economic realities, and the slightly supernatural.
“Old myths clash with new realities, love is in a ride or die with grief, faith rubs hard against magic, and comic flips with tragic so much they meld into something new. All told with daredevil lyricism to burn. A ferocious debut.”—MARLON JAMES, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“So good it hurts and hurts to where it heals. It is revelatory and unputdownable. Washburn is an extraordinarily brilliant new talent.”—TOMMY ORANGE, author of There There

Get to know one of the most exciting new novelists working today for a very special This Is Now conversation with Kawai Strong Washburn.

KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘I. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Formerly a Bay Area writer and frequent visitor to Kepler’s, he now lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis.
** Please consider joining with a book purchase or donation to support Kepler’s Literary Foundation programs. **
Photo of Kawai Strong Washburn by Crystal Lieppa.

THE BAD MUSLIM DISCOUNT by Syed M. Masood | GGP Online Book Club
2021-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of THE BAD MUSLIM DISCOUNT by Syed M. Masood.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82405221338.
You can order a print copy at https://bit.ly/ggpBadMuslimDiscount or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/BadMuslimDiscountAB.
Staff Reviews

A charming novel of Muslim immigrants to the United States trying to find their way. Romance, humor, and tragedy and a Bay Area setting kept me listening in a long binge. The audiobook performance is very well done.— Mike
February 2021 Indie Next List

“I loved The Bad Muslim Discount so much I read the acknowledgements just so it wouldn’t end — and they were great, too! This is an insightful and funny novel about faith, family, and being a Muslim American today. Masood offers us a sharp perspective, a seamless style, and unforgettable characters, leaving the reader enriched for the experience.”
— Claire Benedict, Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, VT
Description

“Masood’s novel presents a stereoscopic, three-dimensional view of contemporary Muslim America: the way historical conflict in the Middle East lingers in individual lives, the way gossip travels in a close-knit immigrant community.” The New York Times Book Review
Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.
It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalism takes root within the social order and the zealots next door attempt to make Islam great again, his family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar’s deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can’t find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim.
At the same time, thousands of miles away, Safwa, a young girl living in war-torn Baghdad with her grief-stricken, conservative father will find a very different and far more dangerous path to America. When Anvar and Safwa’s worlds collide as two remarkable, strong-willed adults, their contradictory, intertwined fates will rock their community, and families, to their core.
The Bad Muslim Discount is an irreverent, poignant, and often hysterically funny debut novel by an amazing new voice. With deep insight, warmth, and an irreverent sense of humor, Syed M. Masood examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging through the lens of Muslim Americans.
About the Author

SYED M. MASOOD grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. A first-generation immigrant twice over, he has been a citizen of three different countries and nine different cities. He currently lives in Sacramento, California, where he is a practicing attorney.
Praise For…

“Masood offers sharp observations on religion, violence, and politics, and his clever choice to place the characters’ disparate experiences in parallel challenges Islamophobic stereotypes.” The New Yorker

VIRTUAL EVENT: Brian Fies, A Fire Story
2021-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
VIRTUAL EVENT: Celebrated author and illustrator Brian Fies will share A Fire Story, his firsthand account of the Northern California wildfires of 2017—revised and expanded, and now in paperback. Fies’s harrowing and uplifting tale of loss, survival, and the power of community will no doubt resonate with locals, having experienced our own fire story last August.
Register for this free virtual event here!
Early morning on Monday, October 9, 2017, wildfires burned through Northern California, resulting in 44 fatalities. In addition, 6,200 homes and 8,900 structures were destroyed. Author Brian Fies’s firsthand account of this tragic event is an honest, unflinching depiction of his personal experiences, including losing his house and every possession he and his wife had that didn’t fit into the back of their car. In the days that followed, as the fires continued to burn through the area, Brian hastily pulled together A Fire Story and posted it online–it immediately went viral. He has now expanded his original webcomic to include environmental insight and the fire stories of his neighbors and others in his community. A Fire Story is a candid testimony of the wildfires that left homes destroyed, families broken, and a community determined to rebuild. The updated and expanded Fire Story is an affordably priced paperback of 192 pages, including 32 pages of all-new material, extending the story past the events of the hardcover edition to include updates on the rebuilding, wrestling with insurance, wrangling with contractors, the management of sometimes volatile emotions, and the threats of yet another wildfire.
“A Fire Story is a victim’s testimony as well as a journalistic endeavor.” — Los Angeles Times
“Sometimes incorporating photographs and often communicating emotion with color, he affectingly relates the grief, rage, and powerlessness of losing one’s home and possessions; each time he remembers another thing he’s lost–home videos he’d been meaning to digitize, for instance–the pain feels brand-new again. Inviting, empathy-driven, and ultimately hopeful in the face of hardship.” — Booklist, Starred Review
AUTHOR:
Brian Fies is a writer and cartoonist of the award-winning graphic novels Mom’s Cancer and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? Although he lost his home, he and his wife are rebuilding in Santa Rosa, California.
