Litseen

Litquake on Lockdown: Sarah Ray and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
2020-05-27 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The “climate generation”—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet’s environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise. Author and professor Sarah Jaquette Ray releases her new book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (UC Press), an “existential tool kit” for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience while advocating for climate justice. FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live on Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Speakers

Sarah Jaquette Ray
Sarah Jaquette Ray teaches environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and is also the author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture.

Alka Joshi with Angie Coiro
2020-05-27 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
This event is online.
Join us for an event with Alka Joshi, your new favorite novelist. Reading during this time period can be challenging… but the exquisite story we’re about to share is guaranteed to sweep you away to another time and place.
We know you’ll love Alka’s debut, The Henna Artist, as much as we do. Beautiful and compellingly readable, this novel effortlessly evokes post-Raj 1950s Jaipur, all while completely enmeshing you in the conflicts and politics that drive the courageous protagonist Lakshmi Shastri. Against all odds, and after fleeing an arranged marriage to an abusive older man, the teenaged Lakshmi carves out a living for herself as a henna artist, friend, and confidante to wealthy, upper-caste women within the grand Pink City. Then, as a grown woman several years into this new life, an exciting twist suddenly threatens to unravel all that Lakshmi has built.
In conversation with our own award-winning in house journalist, Angie Coiro, this is one literary conversation you do not want to miss.
More than just a romantic work of historical fiction, The Henna Artist is based off Alka’s late mother’s life— but this story serves as a reimagining of what life might have been like if Alka’s mother hadn’t been in an arranged marriage at 18, with three children by 21. Instead, the novel recreates her life as if she had been able to pursue the independence and education that she never enjoyed in real life… the independence and education that Alka’s mother advocated for her.
Captivating and smart, this is the perfect read for your digital book group— a novel that will transport you completely each time it is opened.
Registration for this event is open, with the additional options of making a tax-deductible donation to Kepler’s Literary Foundation, or supporting Kepler’s Books with a (non-tax-deductible) book purchase. Donations will go toward Kepler’s Literary Foundation programs online, in local schools and throughout our community.
**Registration will close one hour before the event; please reserve your spot early to guarantee access, as registrations are limited.**

Frank Wilderson III in conversation with Justin Desmangles
2020-05-28 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
discussing the subject of his new book
Afropessimism
published by Liveright Books / W.W. Norton
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet.
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(Click Here) to make reservations
Event is free, but reservations are required
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(Purchase AFROPESSIMISM here)
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In the tradition of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of the non-analogous experience of being Black.
A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, Afropessimism presents the tenets of an increasingly influential intellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting slavery through a Marxist framework of class oppression, Frank B. Wilderson III, “a truly indispensable thinker” (Fred Moten), demonstrates that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive, anti-black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but an almost necessary force in our civilization that flourishes today, and that Black struggles cannot be conflated with the experiences of any other oppressed group. In mellifluous prose, Wilderson juxtaposes his seemingly idyllic upbringing in halcyon midcentury Minneapolis with the harshness that he would later encounter, whether in radicalized, late-1960s Berkeley or in the slums of Soweto. Following in the rich literary tradition of works by DuBois, Malcolm X and Baldwin, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.
Professor and chair of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson III has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction, among other awards.
Justin Desmangles is chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation, administrator of the American Book Award, and host of the radio broadcast New Day Jazz, now in its fifteenth year.
What has been said about the work of Frank Wilderson III:

Frank Wilderson slings piercing stories and scalding analyses with literary fire and intellectual rigor. His tales juke genre and high-step over high-theory mumbo jumbo, and float Franz Fanon some new wings. Like Ralph Ellison’s bluesman, he peers unflinching into the abyss, testifies to its brutal histories and hopeless predicaments, ‘to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not through the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.’ He ghostwrites our brutal pasts into present and still hopeless predicaments, yet divines deep love and blues humor. Even if our own hopes may live elsewhere, we cannot dismiss Afropessimism‘s unnerving and undeniable truths, nor the timeless art of its author.
—Timothy B. Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till
A writer of hard, searing lyricism…. [Wilderson] is, to my mind, an indispensible thinker.
—Fred Moten, author of The Undercommons

One Person, No Vote: Carol Anderson in Conversation with Congresswoman Barbara Lee
2020-05-28 19:00 | CA
Program will air Thursday May 28th, 7:00 PM PST

Register (for free) to watch this program’s debut

Carol Anderson is one of our nation’s leading voices on racial justice. In her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning bestseller White Rage, she chronicled the history of systemic injustices that have impeded black progress in America, from Reconstruction to the present day. In One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award, she zeros in on the fallout from the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This “impeccably researched, deftly written” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) book offers a whip-smart, riveting analysis of the disenfranchisement of voters of color, with insights that have proven, in the aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections, to be resoundingly prescient — and, for the 2020 elections, more urgent than ever.
Anderson will be in conversation with Congresswoman Barbara Lee, one of the most well-regarded, outspoken, and trailblazing members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and currently the only African American woman in House Democratic leadership. This empowering and galvanizing conversation will enlighten us about how voter suppression has worked in the past and, most importantly, what we can do now to deny it a future.
Our series on Voting Rights has been generously supported by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, Guy and Jeanine Saperstein, and Mal Warwick Donordigital.

Recommended Reading

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote
Order your copies from one of our independent bookstore partners

Quarantine Storytime // Deborah A. Miranda
2020-05-28 19:00 | CA
During the Shelter in Place, CLA is presenting live readings online with poets, writers, and translators, and the local presses who publish them.
Our second event features Deborah A. Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, published by Heyday. Deborah’s reading will be streamed on Facebook Live and Instagram Live on Thursday, May 28 at 7PM.
Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Her mixed-genre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday 2013), received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections: Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and the forthcoming Altar for Broken Things. She is coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Deborah lives in Lexington, Virginia with her wife Margo and a variety of rescue dogs. She is the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches literature of the margins and creative writing.

Round Weather Reading Series: Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman
2020-05-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Round Weather, 951 Aileen St., Oakland, 94608
Round Weather art gallery is starting a reading series of earth writing and ecopoetics. Join us to see contemporary poetry shine its leading lights onto the natural world in California.

Author Alia Volz reading from Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
2020-05-28 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, May 28th at 7 PM at GGP as we welcome author Alia Volz reading from & discussing her new book, HOME BAKED: MY MOM, MARIJUANA, AND THE STONING OF SAN FRANCISCO. Our discussion will be webcast on GGP’s Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.

(Order your copy in paper at bit.ly/GGPHomeBaked, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at bit.ly/LibroHomeBaked.)

Description
A blazingly funny, heartfelt memoir from the daughter of the larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco—for fans of Armistead Maupin and Patricia Lockwood

During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia’s future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life.

Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.

Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

About the Author
ALIA VOLZ is a homegrown San Franciscan. Her writing appears in The Best American Essays 2017, the New York Times, Tin House, Threepenny Review, River Teeth, Nowhere magazine, Utne Reader, New England Review and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Writers Reflect on Prince and Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California. A 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, Volz has also been an Artist in Residence with Writing Between the Vines and the Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat. The Squaw Valley Community of Writers awarded her the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice. She was runner-up of The Moth’s GrandSLAM Championship in 2014 and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Praise For…
One of She Reads’ “Most Anticipated Memoirs of 2020”
One of Alma’s “Favorite Books for Spring 2020”

“I devoured this book! Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, a savvy business woman, a social and medicinal revolution: What’s not to love? This is a story Alia Volz was born to tell.”
—Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“In Home Baked, Alia Volz manages not only to write about her parents with clear-eyed compassion and empathy, she also gives us a rich history of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s. As I read, her family and the city came alive for me: every person and street were vivid, complicated, tragic, and beautiful. I loved this engrossing, informative, funny, and heartbreaking book. Volz is a true talent.”
—Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of Woman No. 17, California, and others

Clement: Robert Steven Goldstein
2020-05-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Robert Steven Goldstein joins us to discuss his novel, Enemy Queen.
About Enemy Queen
A woman initiates passionate sexual encounters with two articulate but bumbling and crass middle-aged men, but what she demands in return soon becomes untenable. A short time later she goes missing, prompting the county sheriff to open a murder investigation.
When Stanley Berman, a Jewish New York attorney, is appointed Chief Counsel at a North Carolina University, he opts to share a house with his good friend, Thomas McClellan, a professor in the school’s English Department. The men spend their evenings drinking wine, playing chess, and lamenting their ineptitude with women. Then the Professor, a Southern good old boy, former high school football lineman, and avid hunter, hatches a scheme to bring a young woman into the house, insisting that as a creative writing teacher, such women find him alluringly subversive and artistic. The Counselor is dubious but persuaded nonetheless—much to his detriment.
The articulate but bumbling Counselor and Professor find themselves outwitted at every turn by Victoria, a young woman who is clever, inscrutable, and superb at finishing what she starts. She initiates passionate sexual encounters with the men, but as time goes on, what she demands in return becomes untenable. When she goes missing, John Watson, the county sheriff—and the Professor’s lifelong friend—feels compelled to open a murder investigation.
Full of wicked humor, artful eroticism, scintillating dialogue, and a bit of intrigue, Enemy Queen is an exhilarating romp set in a North Carolina college town.
About the Author
Robert Steven Goldstein retired from his job as a healthcare information executive at age fifty-six and has been writing novels ever since. His first novel, The Swami Deheftner, about the problems that ensue when ancient magic and mysticism manifest in the twenty-first century, has developed a small cult following in India. Cat’s Whisker, his second novel, will be published soon; an excerpt from it, entitled “An Old Dog,” was featured in the fall 2018 edition of Leaping Clear, a literary journal. Enemy Queen is his third novel. Robert Steven Goldstein has practiced yoga, meditation, and vegetarianism for over fifty years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now lives in San Francisco with his wife of thirty years and two rambunctious dogs

Zoom Forward! #11 with Jon Franzen, John Moir
2020-05-29 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
Phren-Z, The Hive Poetry Collective, and Bookshop Santa Cruz present Zoom Forward! #11 with Jon Franzen, John Moir part of the Zoom Forward Reading Series—an ongoing reading series to showcase writers, keep our cultural spritits high, and support Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Join the Santa Cruz Writes/phren-Z email list by subscribing here. Weekly Zoom links will be emailed to you. Contact Jory Post with any questions at jory@cruzio.com.

Literary Pop!
2020-05-29 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Literary Pop celebrates the moments when literature and pop culture collide. Come and listen as poets, fiction writers, essayists, comedians and storytellers share their pop culture obsessions.

Eastwind (virtual) Book Club
2020-05-30 14:00 - 15:00 | CA
Join Eastwind’s (virtual) Book Club! This month, we are celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold.
We will be holding discussions on our Facebook group throughout the month. Our Live Book Club Zoom Discussion is on Saturday, May 30th at 2pm. Register to receive the meeting link!
RSVP here: https://howmuchofthesehills.eventbrite.com
Book Club members can use coupon code GOLD10 for a 10% discount at www.asiabookcenter.com
Buy the Book: http://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2062/How_Much_of_These_Hills_Is_Gold_%28Hardcover%29.html
Join our Facebook group: www.tinyurl.com/ewclub
This event is co-sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley, OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates Bay Area Chapters, and Asian Pacific American Student Development (APASD).
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About the book:
An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape–trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones and the specters of a ravaged landscape, as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature.
About the author:
Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Saturday Night Special presents: Escape Online
2020-05-30 19:00 | CA
SNS is staying safe online again for our May reading, but I’m crossing my fingers we’ll be back at Nick’s Lounge this summer. See below for how to donate to Nick’s and how to sign up in advance to read at SNS on ZOOM.
In honor of our confinement, our captive imaginations, and our imminent release into the virus-infested world, the theme for May is ESCAPE.
Share your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances, on our (optional) theme (or any topic).
Each reader will have 3 minutes maximum. For prose writers this is about one and a half double-spaced pages.
MAY FEATURED PERFORMERS: Vida Felsenfeld and José Luis Gutiérrez
Saturday, May 30, 2020
7 – 9:30 pm
Hosted by: Hollie Hardy
SIGN UP starts one week in advance, on May 23. Requests added in the order received until the list is full. To sign up, put your request to read in the event comments, or direct message Hollie Hardy. Please time your reading & keep it to 3 minutes max.
To prevent being mistaken for a Zoom bomber and blocked, use your real full name on Zoom. If you are new and unknown to host, please reach out in advance so I can vet you, and put you on the safe list. We will be using the Waiting Room feature again and only letting in people we can verify. This worked great last month thanks to help from Abe Becker and Liz Cahill
ZOOM INFO:
Meeting ID: 984-6555-3687
Password: [REDACTED]
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:
https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/98465553687?pwd=[REDACTED]
Or Telephone: +1 669 900 6833
SUPPORT Nick’s Lounge on GoFundMe:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/nicks-lounge-karaoke-support-fund?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link-tip&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet
AUTHOR BIOS:
José Luis Gutiérrez is the author of two poetry collections, “A World Less Away” and recently, “The Motel Entropy & Other Sorrows.” He was born in Miami in 1975, and grew up in Panama. He now lives in the Bay Area, where he works as an interpreter in the medical and legal sectors. He’s also a screenwriter and filmmaker. When he isn’t working he can be found playing guitar, swimming, hiking, writing poems or enjoying a good cigar. Buy books on his website at joseluisgutierrez.net.
Vida Felsenfeld was born and raised in Oakland, by her mother with 11 other siblings. She attended Catholic school and graduated from college at age 40. It was then, that she discovered she was an artist and embarked upon becoming a flamenco dancer and poet.
Her poems have been published in Rag Zine, an Art and Literary Zine, Berkeley Times Fifth Annual Poetry Edition, Penumbra Art & Literary Annual, and Milvia Street Art & Literary Journals. She’s been a featured reader at various Bay Area literary events, including poetry reading at Eves at The Beat Museum, the Berkeley Annual Poetry Festival, Alameda Island Poets, Lyrics and Dirges, Alley Cat Bookstore & Gallery and the Milvia Street Annual Poetry Book celebration. She has performed her Rock the Dot Project: Poetry/Flamenco dance pieces at Broad Statements: Perspectives on Womxnhood, the Berkeley Annual Poetry Festival, La Misión Flamenca and the Melissa Cruz Student showcases, Deadication I and II. She continues to dance and teach flamenco to children. Most recently she submitted her first poetry manuscript for publication.s

AUTHORS OF COLOR BOOK CLUB: The Revisioners
2020-06-01 18:00 | The Ruby, 23rd and bryant street, san francisco, 94110
Jean Rhys said that “reading makes immigrants of us all,” that “it takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” Now more than ever, it’s vital—and heartening—to read, and read widely. We’ll read thrilling, mind-blowing, intriguing, heartbreaking, comic, strange, and/or provocative books by women of color—and, each month, we’ll gather to talk about what we’ve read! When possible, we’ll also have the writer join us.
Local author and friend of The Ruby, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, will be joining us for the discussion.
PLEASE NOTE: Thanks to Counterpoint, we have FIFTEEN copies of THE REVISIONERS available for the first fifteen people who sign up for book club! You will be notified if you are one of the lucky fifteen!
About THE REVISIONERS
“Sexton takes on [Toni Morrison’s artful invocation of the ghost] in her new novel The Revisioners. . . She writes with such a clear sense of place and time that each of these intermingled stories feels essential and dramatic in its own way.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“A powerful tale of racial tensions across generations.” —People
In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family.
Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine’s descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays Ava to be her companion. But Martha’s behavior soon becomes erratic, then threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine’s converge.
The Revisioners explores the depths of women’s relationships—powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between mothers and their children, the dangers that upend those bonds. At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom.
ABOUT MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON
MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Litquake on Lockdown: Ode to Our 13-Year-Old Selves
2020-06-02 18:00 | CA
Prompted by a fireside moment at a writing conference, these poets with varying childhood experiences of race, gender, sexuality, migration, culture and religion, will share work that honors their 13-year-old selves — and the surprise, disbelief, pride, love, and even derision those 13-year-old selves might have for the grown and poetry folx they have become. Participants will each open their readings by addressing themselves as their younger selves might experience them now. An unforgettable evening of vulnerable intimacy, physical distancing, and social connection. With Hari Alluri, Nico Amador, Faisal Mohyuddin, Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Seema Reza. FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live at Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Speakers

Nico Amador
Nico Amador is a poet, community organizer and facilitator based in Vermont by way of San Diego and Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in Bettering American Poetry, Vol 3, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Hypertext Review, Poets Reading the News, Poet Lore, Bedfellows… Read More →

Cynthia Dewi Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage (Northwestern University Press) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket). Her work has appeared widely in print and online, including in ESPNW, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Scoundrel Time, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry… Read More →

Seema Reza
Seema Reza is the author of A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. Her writing has appeared in print and online in McSweeney’s, The Feminist Wire, Bellevue Literary Review, The Offing, Full Grown People, and The Nervous Breakdown, among others. She has performed… Read More →

Faisal Mohyuddin
Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer, artist, and educator. He is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, winner of the 2017 Sexton Prize in Poetry and a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society. His other awards include the Prairie Schooner’s Edward Stanley… Read More →

Hari Alluri
Hari Alluri is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya), Carving Ashes (CiCAC/Thompson Rivers), and the chapbook The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel Press, 2016). Winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship for Poets of Color, his current projects are supported by grants from… Read More →

Robert Mailer Anderson & Friends
2020-06-02 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Robert Mailer Anderson will be joined by Jacqueline Obradors, Jon Sack, with musical accompaniment by Jay Walsh (of Douglas Fir)
celebrating his new graphic novel
Windows on the World
Co-authored with Zack Anderson
Illustrations by Jon Sack
published by Fantagraphics Books
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Crowdcast platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Crowdcast before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Crowdcast.
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(Click Here) for reservations
Event is free, but reservations are required
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The book for this event may be purchased at this link :
>Purchase WINDOWS ON THE WORLD here<
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Set in a New York City in mourning, this poignant graphic novel explores the push-and-pull between love and obligation.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, an undocumented worker named Balthazar busses tables at New York City’s famous Windows on the World restaurant. Back in Mexico, his family watches their TV screen in horror as the Twin Towers collapse. Refusing to give up hope that Balthazar is alive, his son Fernando embarks on a treacherous journey across the border to New York to find him. Along the way, Fernando learns what it means to be undocumented in America — encountering at turns an indifferent bureaucracy and a supportive group of fellow immigrants who help guide him through his quixotic mission to bring his family back together.
Now a major motion picture!
Robert Mailer Anderson is a San Francisco Library Laureate as well as a novelist, screenwriter, producer, and activist. He is the author of the novel Boonville.
Jon Sack is a US and UK based artist and writer whose comic books include La Lucha and Iraqi Oil For Beginners.
Jacqueline Danell Obradors is an actor and has appeared in numerous feature film that include Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), Deuce Bigalow:Male Gigolo (1999), Tortilla Soup (2001), A Man Apart(2003) and Unstoppable (2004). She has also appeared on the television crime drama NYPD Blue (2001–2005.)
Jay Walsh play Vocals, Guitars, and Piano for the musical combo DOUGLAS FIR.

Sasha Abramsky - Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar
2020-06-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar is a biography of a truly extraordinary sports figure who blazed trails of glory in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries. Dod was the third woman to win the Ladies’ Championships at the Wimbledon tennis tournament. She did so for the first time in 1887, at the ludicrously young age of fifteen. She remains today the youngest person ever to have won a singles trophy in what would come to be known as the big-four Grand Slam tennis tournaments.
Dod won Wimbledon five times, grew bored with competitive tennis, and moved on to myriad other sports. She became the world’s leading female ice skater and tobogganist, perfecting her talents in St. Moritz, Switzerland; befriended Elizabeth Main, the most skilled female mountaineer of the age, and joined her in summiting many of Switzerland’s and Norway’s most difficult mountains; became an endurance bicyclist; played hockey for England; won the British ladies’ golf championship in 1904; and finally, in 1908, took the Olympic silver medal in archery in the London Olympics.
In her time, she had a huge following, with fans coming out by the thousands to cheer her on. She was feted by the media, and repeatedly profiled by the top sports journals of the day. Had Dod lived in a different age, this fame would have followed her throughout her life. But Dod’s years of glory occurred just before the rise of cinema, radio, and other electronic media. By the outset of World War I, she was largely a forgotten figure; she died alone and without fanfare in 1960.
Little Wonder brings this remarkable woman’s story to life, contextualizing it against a backdrop of rapid social change and tectonic shifts in the status of women in society. Dod was born into a world in which even upper-class women such as herself could not vote, were restricted in owning property, and were assumed to be fragile and delicate. True, the monarch was a queen, Victoria; but Victoria’s reign was hardly a bastion of feminist progress. Women of Lottie Dod’s class were expected not to work and to definitely get married. Dod turned that equation on its head; she never married and never had children, instead putting heart and soul into training to be the best athlete she could possibly be.
Dod was one of the pioneers who paved the way for the likes of Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and the top female athletes of today. She accepted no limits, no glass ceilings, believed she could compete with the top men in whatever sport she set her sights on, and always refused to compromise.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared over the past twenty-five years in major newspapers and magazines in the United States and United Kingdom. These include the Nation, the Atlantic, the New Yorker online, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, and the New Statesman. He has written widely about poverty and inequality; hunger; mass incarceration; the treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; along with book reviews, cultural essays, and travel writing. Little Wonder is Abramsky’s ninth book. He teaches writing part-time at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Sacramento with his wife and two children.

America’s Most Unusual Marriage: Adam Hochschild on Rebel Cinderella in conversation with Monika Bauerlein
2020-06-02 19:00 | CA
Trust bestselling author and historian Adam Hochschild to unearth one of history’s forgotten heroines and give her story the page-turning treatment it deserves. Russian immigrant Rose Pastor Stokes spent her first twelve years in America in a sweatshop, only to skyrocket to the upper class when she married an heir to a massive mining and real estate fortune. It’s a classic Cinderella story: that is, if Cinderella converted her prince to socialism, became an antiwar and labor activist, caused a scandal by promoting birth control access, and was dubbed “one of the most dangerous influences of the country” by a sitting President.
This tale of a volatile, bright-burning Gilded Age marriage could only exist in the America of Jay Gatsby, bootleggers, and the Lost Generation: an era of glamour and privation, of big dreams and bigger inequities. An era, as Hochschild reveals, with far more parallels to our own than anything in the Brothers Grimm. Only Hochshild could do justice, in words and images, to a crusader who was far ahead of her own time, but strikingly relevant to ours. Hochschild will be joined by Monika Bauerlein, CEO and award-winning editor of Mother Jones.

Andrew Fraknoi: Visit the Top Tourist Sights of the Solar System
2020-06-02 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
So many of us are dreaming of the places we would love to visit, hatching plans for our next vacation. Andrew Fraknoi asks us to imagine the top tourist destinations in our solar system that our great-grandchildren will be visiting.
Using spectacular images from space probes and the world’s largest telescopes, we will explore the most intriguing future “tourist destinations” among the planets and moons in our cosmic neighborhood. Our stops will include the 4,000-mile lava channel on Venus, the towering Mount Olympus volcano on Mars (three times the height of Mount Everest), the awesome Verona Cliffs on the moon Miranda (which are the tallest “lover’s leap” in the solar system), the recently discovered salt-water steam geysers on Saturn’s intriguing moon Enceladus (nicknamed “Cold Faithful.”). We’ll finish with the latest images of the eerie vistas on Pluto.
Andrew Fraknoi retired in 2017 as the Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College, and now teaches non-credit astronomy courses for older adults at The Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco and the OLLI program at SF State. Fraknoi has appeared regularly on local and national radio, explaining astronomical developments in everyday language, and was the California Professor of the Year in 2007. He is the lead author on a college astronomy textbook and a children’s book When the Sun Goes Dark. He also writes science fiction and has published three stories in the last few years. The International Astronomical Union has named Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his contributions to the public understanding of science.
This is the perfect get-away from our current problems, rooted in real science with a hopeful view of the future.

DEAR EDWARD by Ann Napolitano | GGP Online Book Club
2020-06-02 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Ann Napolitano’s amazing new novel, DEAR EDWARD.
This book is one of Kathleen’s recent favorites. Samantha of GGP said this about DEAR EDWARD: “I’m a little reluctant to reveal the details of the events that propels this extraordinary novel forward. A plane crash leaving only one young survivor seems repellently gloomy and yet Napolitano has given us one of the most hopeful stories I’ve ever read!”
Please join us even if you have not read the book yet. We’ll play a sample from the audiobook from our audiobook partner, Libro.fm.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84683199803.
You can order a hardcover of DEAR EDWARD at bit.ly/EdwardHC, or an audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at bit.ly/EdwardAB.

Ali Araghi in conversation with Laleh Khadivi
2020-06-03 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Ali Araghi in conversation with Laleh Khadivi
celebrating Ali Araghi’s new novel
The Immortals of Tehran
published by Melville House
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Crowdcast platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Crowdcast before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Crowdcast.
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Event is free, but reservations are required
(Re-visit this link) in the near future to make reservations
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Books for this event may be purchased at these links :
(To be posted)
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As a child living in his family’s apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather’s every mesmerizing word. On the day of his father’s death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse . . . and the boy’s own fated role in the story.
Ahmad grows up to suspect that something must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together through decades of famine, loss, and political turmoil in Iran. As the world transforms around him, each turn of Ahmad’s life is a surprise: from street brawler, to father of two unusually gifted daughters; from radical poet, to politician with a target on his back. These lives, and the many unforgettable stories alongside his, converge and catch fire at the center of the Revolution.
Exploring the brutality of history while conjuring the astonishment of magical realism, The Immortals of Tehran is a novel about the incantatory power of words and the revolutionary sparks of love, family, and poetry—set against the indifferent, relentless march of time.
Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator. He earned his MA in Ancient Cultures and Languages at the University of Tehran and has translated Samuel Beckett into Persian. After completing his MFA from the University of Notre Dame, he is currently working on his PhD in Comparative Literature, International Writers Track, at Washington University. He won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and has published stories and translations in Prairie Schooner, The Fifth Wednesday Journal, Asymptote, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He lives in St. Louis.
Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution her family fled, finally settling in Canada and then the United States. Khadivi received her MFA from Mills College and was a Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University. In 2008 she received The Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2009 she published her first novel The Age of Orphans and in 2017 her second titled A Good Country.

Zeyn Joukhadar - The Thirty Names of Night
2020-06-03 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.
Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature “magical and heart-wrenching” (The Christian Science Monitor) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Map of Salt and Stars. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and of American Mensa. Joukhadar’s writing has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Award Finalist in Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. He has been an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center, the Fes Medina Project, Beit al-Atlas, and the Arab American National Museum.

Eric Goodman: Cuppy and Stew
2020-06-03 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Eric Goodman discusses his new novel Cuppy and Stew.
Praise for Cuppy and Stew
“CUPPY AND STEW is completely natural, poignant, and riveting from the first page to the last. An easy read in the best sense of that phrase, and a major work of fiction.”—Ron Hansen
“Eric Goodman’s CUPPY AND STEW: THE BOMBING OF FLIGHT 629, A LOVE STORY reads like a fairy tale—until some pretty remarkable darkness sets in, as the title tells us it will. Part novel, part memoir (the author writes in the voice of his wife), part journalistic inquiry, the dark forests of this tale lead down to the far more treacherous and psychological underworld of the hero’s journey—and a gritty, hard-earned climb back to the light. A most compelling read.”—Sands Hall
“The grim tragedy of the first US terrorist bombing in 1955 that killed the narrator’s parents hovers over this powerful story. Readers are given the complicated love story of the two who die on United Flight 629 and the moving struggle of the daughters who are orphaned by the tragedy: ‘It was me and my sissy against the world.’ CUPPY AND STEW brilliantly blends the known and the imagined and will stand as a model for new possibilities in historical fiction.”—Jim Heynen
About Cuppy and Stew
In November, 1955, a young man in Denver, Colorado, hid twenty-five sticks of dynamite and a crude timer in his mother’s suitcase. In what the FBI would term the first example of American air piracy, United Flight 629 blew up twelve minutes after taking off, killing everyone aboard. Part historical novel, part memoir, CUPPY AND STEW tells one family’s story before and after the bomb went off. Narrated by a young girl whose parents died on Flight 629, CUPPY AND STEW evokes the not-so-innocent 1950s, and the struggles of Cuppy and Stew’s daughters to survive their parents’ deaths. Prize-winning novelist Eric Goodman’s sixth novel is not only his most moving but also his most personal. His wife’s parents perished on United 629.

We Are the Voices & City Lights Live Present: Alli Warren + Cedar Sigo
2020-06-04 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
celebrating the release of Alli Warren’s new poetry book
Little Hill
published by City Lights
Event co-presented by We Are the Voices
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet.
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(Click Here) to make reservations
Event is free, but reservations are required
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(Purchase Little Hill here)
The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.
Praise for Little Hill:
“Little Hill is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it’s unsparing. Still, it’s a gift.”––Alice Notley
“Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best.”––CAConrad
“Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism—the litany does not end there. . . . Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised—the question of what it means to love in times of terror.”—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism
Alli Warren published her Poetry Center Book Award-winning debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, with City Lights in 2013. She is also the author of I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as numerous chapbooks. She has edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, co-edited the Poetic Labor Project, and contributed to SFMOMA’s Open Space. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Harpers, Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, Best American Experimental Poetry, and BOMB. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, on Joanne Kyger (Wave Books, 2017), and author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Royals (Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), and two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University, and University Press Books.
About We Are the Voices: Through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this project connects Mills College students with local and national poets, performers, writers, and scholars to collaborate around transformative art and critical scholarship.
Led by Mills Professor Sheila Lloyd, We Are the Voices We Have Been Waiting For: Poetry, Performance, and Public Humanities is a five-year, multi-pronged project that brings visiting artists and scholars to campus, broadening the conversation for Mills students and building connections with our local community.city

Litquake on Lockdown: Daniel Mallory Ortberg and Something That May Shock and Discredit You
2020-06-04 18:00 | CA
From the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyreand Merry Spinster, writer of Slate’s “Dear Prudence” column, and cofounder of The Toast comes this hilarious and stirring collection of essays and cultural observations spanning pop culture—from the endearingly popular to the staggeringly obscure. In Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s most personal work to date, he offers vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith. From a thoughtful analysis of the beauty of William Shatner to a sinister reimagining of HGTV’s House Hunters, and featuring figures as varied as Anne of Green Gables, Columbo, Nora Ephron, Apollo, and the cast of Mean Girls, Something That May Shock and Discredit You will make you see yourself and those around you entirely anew. FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live at Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Speakers

Daniel Mallory Ortberg
Daniel Mallory Ortberg is the “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster.

VIRTUAL: Meredith Talusan in conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan / Fairest: A Memoir
2020-06-04 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery host a virtual event with Meredith Talusan for her new memoir Fairest. She’ll be in conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan (Long Black Veil; Good Boy: My Life in 7 Dogs)! Please join us.
“A ball of light hurled into the dark undertow of migration and survival.” – Ocean Vuong
“Talusan sails past the conventions of trans and immigrant memoirs.” – The New York Times Book Review
We’ll be streaming live on our Facebook page.
Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:
> Buy the book and we’ll deliver it directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.
Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni’s Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.

Meredith Talusan is an award-winning author and journalist who has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, WIRED, SELF, and Condé Nast Traveler, among many other publications, and has contributed to several essay collections. She has received awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding executive editor of them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ digital platform, where she is currently contributing editor. Photo by Albrica Tierra. Photo by Albrica Tierra.
Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of fifteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her column “Men & Women” appears on the op/ed page of the New York Times on alternate Wednesdays. She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the nonprofit advocating for authors, readers, and freedom of expression. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD; she was co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors from 2013-17. She also is a member of the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College, and the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy.

YOU'RE GOING TO DIE PRESENTS: YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.
2020-06-04 18:30 | CA
Thursday, June 4, 2020
6:30 PM 9:00 PM
GLOBALLY (map)

You’re Going to Die Presents: YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.
an online community event
for enlivening connection
featuring words & music from
The Feelings Parade
The Singer and The Songwriter
Chelsea Coleman
Nick Jaina
Jordan Edelheit
Ned Buskirk
& more, more, more….
You’re Going to Die offers a mortally conscious & enliveningly entertaining experience, proudly presenting great artists as they deserve to be presented: in the concert context of acknowledging their mortal magic…
Honestly. We just wanna have a fun night together.
We might cry, but mainly we’re gonna laugh & sing a lot.
Virtual Doors at 6:30pm
Show at 7pm
Ends at 9pm
REGISTRATION: https://bit.ly/3gbDTmr
TICKETING:
Like so many other artists & nonprofits with an event focus, much of our work for the foreseeable future is cancelled. For this special online event we suggest that people pay between $10-50, but don’t hesitate to go above or below based on what feels possible. And PLEASE, if you are suddenly in financial danger, DO NOT pay us. We’re just happy you’re alive & able to join. If you’re still earning income (or are just generally resourced), we very much welcome your generosity.
Venmo: @YG-2D
Paypal: chelsea@yg2d.com
Mortally Yours,
the You’re Going to Die Team
www.yg2d.com

The Racket Weekly : A Necessary Distraction
2020-06-04 19:00 - 20:30 | CA
The Racket Weekly : A NECESSARY DISTRACTION, JUNE 4th, 7PM
ZOOM LINK TO COME
You know what’s good right now? Distraction. We know it looks different for all of us, but regardless if it’s a drink or two at the end of the day, a deep dive into an epic, a six film movie marathon, a wet cloth over your eyes, a dog, a cat, a mouse, a bird, a documentary on tigers – whatever it might be it is more necessary than ever. Our quintet of readers will be discussing their distractions, what’s keeping the bad thoughts at bay, or inviting them into stay.
6/4 PST, 7PM, ZOOOOOOOOOOM.
The Readers (So Far):
James Cagney
Emily Pinkerton
Wesley Cohen
Chris Danzig

Author Alex George Discussing THE PARIS HOURS | GGP Online Zoom Chat
2020-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for an online discussion with author Alex George, discussing his new historical fiction novel, THE PARIS HOURS.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87893211762.

(Order your copy of THE PARIS HOURS in hard cover at bit.ly/GGPParisHC, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at bit.ly/GGPParisLibro.)
May 2020 Indie Next List

“Alex George has woven a beautiful tapestry of a historical novel in The Paris Hours through four colorful, intertwining threads. Each of the characters will touch your heart with their stories of love, loss, the ravages of war, and their search for answers and a path to pick up the broken pieces of their lives. Lush with descriptions of 1927’s Paris and the appearance of many famous cultural figures of the era, The Paris Hours will transport readers to a time and place they will be reluctant to leave until the last unexpected moment.”
— Betsy Von Kerens, The Bookworm of Omaha, Omaha, NE
Description

“Like All the Light We Cannot See, The Paris Hours explores the brutality of war and its lingering effects with cinematic intensity. The ending will leave you breathless.” —Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World
One day in the City of Light. One night in search of lost time.
Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost.
Camille was the maid of Marcel Proust, and she has a secret: when she was asked to burn her employer’s notebooks, she saved one for herself. Now she is desperate to find it before her betrayal is revealed. Souren, an Armenian refugee, performs puppet shows for children that are nothing like the fairy tales they expect. Lovesick artist Guillaume is down on his luck and running from a debt he cannot repay—but when Gertrude Stein walks into his studio, he wonders if this is the day everything could change. And Jean-Paul is a journalist who tells other people’s stories, because his own is too painful to tell. When the quartet’s paths finally cross in an unforgettable climax, each discovers if they will find what they are looking for.
Told over the course of a single day in 1927, Alex George’s The Paris Hours takes four ordinary people whose stories, told together, are as extraordinary as the glorious city they inhabit.
About the Author

A native of England, Alex George read law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He has lived in the Midwest of the United States for the last sixteen years. He is the founder and director of the Unbound Book Festival, and is the owner of Skylark Bookshop, an independent bookstore in downtown Columbia, Missouri.
Alex is the author of The Paris Hours, A Good American, and Setting Free the Kites.

Eves At The Virtual Beat
2020-06-04 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
During Women’s History month a constellation of events brought together a group of fabulous womxn+ writers. The meeting of these hearts and minds exploded into something powerful and a new monthly reading series concept was born, “Eves at the Beat”.
June’s Eves At The Virtual Beat will feature
Amalia Alvarez
Lyndsey Ellis
Leticia Hernandez
Naomi Quiñonez
Alia Volz
Ophelia Williams
hosted by Janice Blaze Rocke
curated by Nicole Henares
Topic: Eves At The Beat On Zoom
Time: Jun 4, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83865957296?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 838 6595 7296
Password: [REDACTED]
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Dial by your location
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Meeting ID: 838 6595 7296
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Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kebI0idpfg

Bill McKibben, Sy Montgomery, Jennifer Ackerman, Mary Ellen Hannibal For Books On B
2020-06-05 12:00 | CA
Fundraising Goal: $2000
It’s a tough time for local bookstores, what with the social distancing and the sheltering in place. So we’re raising funds to help local Bay Area bookstores stay in business, with a series of fundraisers. This event will feature Bill McKibben, Sy Montgomery, Jennifer Ackerman and Mary Ellen Hannibal.
Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’
Sy Montgomery’s 28 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors. The Soul of an Octopus was a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Awards. The Good Good Pig, her memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood, is an international bestseller.
Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for three decades. She is the author of eight books, including The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, just published by Penguin Press, and the New York Times bestseller, The Genius of Birds.
Mary Ellen Hannibal is a long-time journalist focused on natural history and literature. Her most recent book, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction, was named one of 2016’s best non-fiction books by the San Francisco Chronicle.
This event is hosted by Charlie Jane Anders, organizer of Writers With Drinks.
All proceeds benefit Books on B in Hayward. Shop online now!

June 5 at 12 PM
Register at Eventbrite

We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you’ll get an email with the Zoom access code. (Check that Eventbrite is using your current email address.) You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.
