Litseen

Dani Shapiro
2019-02-19 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Dani Shapiro returns to Mrs. Dalloway’s to present Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.
“Identity is frail business, and in her searing story, Dani Shapiro makes the most disquieting discovery: that everything, from her lineage, to her father, down to her very own sense of self is an astounding error. How do we live with ourselves after finding we are not who we thought we were? The answer is not disquieting. It is beautiful.”–Andre Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
To reserve your seat, purchase a copy of Inheritance by speaking with a bookseller or ordering from our website.

Tuesday, February 19, 2019 – 7:30pm

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro’s memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity, and love.
Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Also an essayist and a journalist, Shapiro’s short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Poetry at Pegasus: GennaRose Nethercott and Miriam Bird Greenberg
2019-02-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
GennaRose Nethercott’s book The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco/HarperCollins) was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series for 2017. She is also the lyricist behind the narrative song collection Modern Ballads, and is a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, and PANK, has she been a writer-in-residence at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, Art Farm Nebraska, and The Vermont Studio Center, among others. A born Vermonter, she tours nationally and internationally composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation, she’s written about the nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America’s margins and crossed the continent as a hitchhiker and aboard freight trains herself. The author of two chapbooks—All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers, 2013) and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass (Ricochet Editions, 2013), Miriam grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas, the daughter of a New York Jew and a goat-raising anthropologist involved in the back-to-the-land movement. These days she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches creative writing and ESL, helping jewelry students use laser cutters and architecture grad students wrap their heads around building information systems.

GennaRose Nethercott and Miriam Bird Greenberg
2019-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
GennaRose Nethercott discusses her new collection, The Lumberjack’s Dove with Miriam Bird Greenberg. Also featuring live shadow puppetry!

“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” –Louise Gluck
A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise Gluck
In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.”
Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

Alan Brennert
2019-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
reads from Daughter of Moloka’i, the sequel to his bestselling Moloka’i.

Lyrics & Dirges: A Monthly Reading Series
2019-02-20 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Lyrics & Dirges features a mix of prominent, emerging and beginning writers. Its aim is to highlight various forms of writing in an effort to spotlight the diverse literary community of the Bay Area.
Reading in February:
Jenny Qi is a writer and scientist. Her essays and poems are published or forthcoming in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, BLR, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net, and her first manuscript was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize. She has a PhD in Cancer Biology and works in science and health communications. She also co-hosts a storytelling podcast called Bone Lab Radio, now in Season 2. Website: www.jqiwriter.com
Tony Aldarondo Is a Puerto Rican poet who has read his poetry from San Fran to Japan, and in many venues throughout the bay area. He is an actor and a voiceover artist. And a member of the screen actors Guild, and has toured the state of California with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. He loves writing Poetry, plays, and music and is super excited to read at Pegasus Books.
Heather June Gibbons was born in Utah and grew up on an island in Washington. She is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press) and two chapbooks, Sore Songs (Dancing Girl Press), and Flyover (Q Avenue Press). Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Best New Poets, Blackbird, Boston Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and West Branch. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Full Fellowship Residency from the Vermont Studio Center, the Pavel Strut Poetry Fellowship from the Prague Summer Program, and the Harold Taylor Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in San Francisco, CA and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University, the Writing Salon, and as a Teaching Artist for Performing Arts Workshop, a youth arts education non-profit.
James Cagney is a poet from Oakland. He has appeared as a featured poet at venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Vancouver, and Mumbai. Nomadic Press will publish his first collection Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory in August. Visit his blog at https://thedirtyrat.blog/
Yaccaira Salvatierra is an educator and art instructor living in San José. Her poems have appeared in Huizache, Diálogo, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle, among others. She is a VONA (Voices of Our Nation) alumna, the recipient of the Dorrit Sibley Award for achievement in poetry, the 2015 winner of the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, and a nominee for a Pushcart Prize. Although she has lived in over seven cities in California, San José has been home for the past 17 years where she lives with her two sons.
Hosted and Curated by Mk Chavez.

Meet Author Jasmine Guillory
2019-02-21 18:30 - 20:00 | Oakland Public Library – Main Branch, 125 - 14th Street, Oakland, 94612
Meet Jasmine Guillory, a writer, lawyer and Oaklander who has earned enthusiastic praise for her recent novels The Wedding Date and The Proposal.
New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay called The Wedding Date “a charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel.”
Entertainment Weekly gushed “Guillory writes with the fizzy effervescence of a glass of champagne, and the entire book goes down just as easily (and quickly). The Wedding Date starts out as a fling, but it makes us want a more long-term relationship with Guillory and her irresistible writing style.”
Kirkus Reviews called The Proposal “A charming book for the modern romance lover.”
You can find her online at @thebestjasmine on Twitter, or at jasmineguillory.com.
Books will be available for sale and signing following the main event, courtesy of East Bay Booksellers.
When:
Thursday, February 21, 2019 – 6:30pm
Where:
Oakland Public Library: Main Library
Bradley Walters Community Room
125 14th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: (510) 238-3134
See map: Google Maps

Chloe Aridjis
2019-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
Sea Monsters: A Novel
published by Catapult Press
Pulsing to the soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, an intoxicating portrait of Mexico in the late 1980s by this brilliant Guggenheim fellow and Prix du Premier Roman Étranger–winning author.
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.”
Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican-American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

Poetry Center Book Award Reading: Lauren Levin and Melissa Mack, reading and in conversation
2019-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Thursday, February 21 – 7:00 pm

The Poetry Center, HUM 512, San Francisco State University

I eat crumbs out of the baby’s neck
I’m glad there are no great poems by women
I’m glad there are no great poems by Jews
I’m glad there are no great poems about motherhood
I’m glad no great poems have ever been written.
—Lauren Levin, from The Braid
The Poetry Center presents Poetry Center Book Award winner Lauren Levin, author of The Braid, (Krupskaya Books), together with award judge Melissa Mack. Both poets read from their work, then engage in conversation with each other and the audience. This event is free and open to the public.

Many of the books I read for the Poetry Center Book Award spoke to me, were doing urgent and interesting work, shared vital rhythms, sounds, forms, and concerns. But The Braid rose. It articulated and worried—as in worked, as in worried—some of my (and I would venture to say ‘our’) most pressing concerns. What I’m looking for is a way to join with the world / and love won’t let me do that any more than hatred will. And the way it did so was expansive and specific, so good at the vague grammar of consciousness and the precision of “personal” experience. Maybe I should call this poem that refuses to stop / ‘the care-giver’ / or ‘the shepherdess’ or ‘the murderess’… Levin’s long poems made of long lines allow tenderness and aggression to coexist, like in the game Levin plays with daughter Alejandra, “Little bee, little bee, don’t sting your mama” / while she nudges my face with her mouth and nose … / and shouts into my mouth, STING! Also, the principal of the braid as a combinatory form in which the source materials remain fully themselves, even when brought together, I found so respectful and responsible in this era of cooption, merging, networks. Different bodies at different times in different places have different experiences. The obvious things are worth saying instead. Once, my niece, five years old or so, told me, of a party she’d been to, “There was a part where I didn’t feel included.” I felt included in this braid alright. Levin’s examination of whiteness as the pastoral—willful innocence and a desire to be soothed, to be able to exit the scene at any time—and of persistent anxiety was gripping. But I do believe that it is meaningful / where relief and solace come from // If I am not afraid / because I have been listening to Reagan speeches / vs. if I am not afraid // Because the bravery of my murdered friends / has taken my fear away / That is a meaningful distinction. The Braid is rigorous and uncomfortable and beautiful and I am glad to have picked it for this award and I hope everyone reads it.
—Melissa Mack, judge’s citation for the Poetry Center Book Award

Lauren Levin is a poet, mixed-genre writer and art critic, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.
Melissa Mack is the author of The Next Crystal Text (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018) and the chapbook Includes All Strangers (Hooke Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in a variety of anthologies, journals, poet’s theater, and that most ephemeral of forms, the public reading. She organizes with the Oakland Summer School, a collaborative, non-institutional space of gathering & study created by a group of activists, artists, and educators, and she lives and works in Oakland.

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Marina Mularz
2019-02-21 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Marina Mularz discusses her new story collection, Welcome to Freedom Point.

Praise for Welcome to Freedom Point
“Fresh, witty, delightfully weird, Welcome to Freedom Point is equally infused with quirky charm, youthful energy, and the palpable sense of age-old loneliness that can sneak up and gut you. A collection of deeply human contradictions.”– GINA FRANGELLO Author of A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting
About Welcome to Freedom Point
It’s all happening in the small town of Freedom Point, Wisconsin Karlee Starr explores the rhythms of young love and snot-soaked heartache on a middle school dance floor. Thirteen-year-old Jacob Kentor suffers an identity crisis at Hooters. Desperate yeti hunting conceals the death of a marriage. A motivational speech ends in arrest. Equal parts humor and heartbreak, Welcome to Freedom Point dissects the thrills and spoils of small-town adolescence in a series of linked stories that captures the essence of what it means to come of age…at any age. In the spaces between each uproarious episode, the good people of Freedom Point collectively celebrate–or simply survive–the deeply human art of aiming for more one uncomfortable leap at a time.

Fourth Friday Formal: George Higgins and Charlotte Innes
2019-02-22 19:00 - 21:00 | St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Avenue, Albany, CA, 94706
Oakland poet and actor, George Higgins, is a Cave Canem Fellow whose poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Pleiades, Nimrod, and others. About his collection There, There, Joan Aleshire wrote, “…this book deepens our knowledge of how to live in the world,” and Dan Tobin wrote, “…these are poems of ‘perfect contact’ in which the soul inevitably ascends, even if it’s through a kill hole in the skull.” Charlotte Innes has had poems appear in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Rattle, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, and others. About her collection Descanso Drive, Sarah Maclay wrote, “Urgent, muscular, rapt, distilled—at times like a melding of Plath and Boland—and as unnervingly prescient as it is attentive to and haunted by both the historical and personal past…” and Rick Mullin wrote, “…finely-crafted poems, beautifully voiced, that carry us from her native England to her new home in California.” A limited open reading and a brief interview with the featured poets will be included.

George Higgins & Charlotte Innes
2019-02-22 19:00 - 21:00 | St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington Avenue, Albany, CA, 94706
George Higgins is an Oakland poet and actor. About his first book There, There (White Violet Press, 2013), Joan Aleshire wrote, “this book deepens our knowledge of how to live in the world,” and Dan Tobin wrote, “these are poems of ‘perfect contact’ in which the soul inevitably ascends, even if it’s through a kill hole in the skull. There, There is an auspicious debut.” His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), Pleiades, Nimrod, Poetry Flash, Salamander, and Fugue, among others. He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College where he was a Holden Fellow. He is also a Cave Canem Fellow. He performs completely improvised one act plays with the improv troupe the (i)ncidentalists.
(Photo: Jon Rou)
Charlotte Innes is the author of Descanso Drive(Kelsay Books, 2017), a first book of poems, and two chapbooks, Licking the Serpent (2011) and Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in many publications including The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Tampa Review and Rattle. They have also been anthologized in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015) and The Best American Spiritual Writing for 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), amongst others. A former newspaper reporter, she has also written on literary topics for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation and other publications. Although she is originally from England, she has lived for almost 30 years in Los Angeles where she has taught journalism at the University of Southern California, as well as English, journalism, and creative writing at high schools throughout the Los Angeles area.
The reading will begin at 7:00 p.m. and end at 9:00 p.m. A limited open reading, and a short interview with the featured readers will be included. This is a free event.

THERE 28
2019-02-22 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
THERE 28 will be Friday, February 22, 2019, featuring brilliant Oakland memoirist Faith Adiele, equally amazing memoirist Reyna Grande, and poet MK Chavez, also of Oakland. Musical guests TBA.
THERE was featured prominently in the San Francisco Chronicle!
THERE (THe Eastbay Reading Extravaganza) is a reading series showcasing emerging and established writers from Oakland and Berkeley, with the occasional San Franciscan. Doug hosts it on the (usually) third Friday of each month at Octopus Literary Salon in Uptown Oakland. It also features a live original musical performance by a local musical artist at “halftime” of each month’s reading, and Doug’s famous original LitQuiz literary trivia contest. It’s from 7:00-9:00pm. THERE has been putting the there back in Oakland since 2015!

Clearly Meant presents James Cagney
2019-02-23 14:00 - 15:00 | Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
James Cagney is a poet from Oakland. He has performed in venues and museums throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. His first book, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour of Chaos Theory, is available from Oakland’s own Nomadic Press. James will read his poems, then sit for an interview; audience discussion will follow the interview. A month before the reading a free chapbook of James Cagney’s poems will be available at all BPL branches

Bay Area Chinese Writers Discuss their Writing
2019-02-24 13:00 - 16:00 | San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA, 94102
More than ten Chinese writers from the Bay Area will talk about their passion for literature and how and why they write. They will give tips on how to finish a book and share interesting stories from their writing journeys. The talk will be followed by Q&A, book signing, and refreshments provided by the writers. The program will be conducted in Mandarin.

Main Library
Latino/Hispanic Community Room A/B

Christie Aschwanden / Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
2019-02-24 16:00 - 18:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special afternoon event with acclaimed FiveThirtyEight science writer Christie Aschwanden for her new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. More information to be announced — please save the date and join us!

In recent years recovery has become a sports and fitness buzzword. Anyone who works out or competes at any level is bombarded with the latest recovery products and services: from drinks and shakes to compression sleeves, foam rollers, electrical muscle stimulators, and sleep trackers.

In Good to Go, Aschwanden takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening tour through this strange world. She investigates whether drinking Gatorade or beer after training helps or hinders performance; she examines the latest trends among athletes, from NFL star Tom Brady’s infrared pajamas to gymnast Simone Biles’ pneumatic compression boots to swimmer Michael Phelps’ “cupping” ritual; and she tests some of the most controversial methods herself, including cryochambers, float tanks, and infrared saunas.

At a time when the latest recovery products and services promise so much, Good to Go seeks answers to the fundamental question: Do any of them actually help the body recover and achieve peak performance?

Christie Aschwanden is the lead writer for science at FiveThirtyEight and health columnist for the Washington Post. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, her writing has appeared in Outside, Discover, Smithsonian and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in Colorado.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.

This is an all ages event with mature themes. The bar opens with doors at 2pm; event starts at 4pm.

As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below — when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you’d like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Good to Go, order below and put your request in the comments field.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

Rebecca Gomez Farrell at Alameda Authors Series 3
2019-02-25 18:00 - 20:00 | Alameda Free Library, Stafford Room, 1550 Oak Street, Alameda, ca, 94501
For the third year, AAUW Alameda presents a spring series of talks featuring authors who live and write in Alameda and nearby, now co-sponsored by the Friends of the Alameda Free Library. Our February author Rebecca Gomez Farrell will discuss her novel Wings Unseen and her current writing projects.
Biography
Rebecca Gomez Farrell writes all the speculative fiction genres she can conjure up. Her first fantasy novel, Wings Unseen, debuted in August 2017 from Meerkat Press. You can find her short stories in over 20 anthologies, magazines, and websites including Dark Luminous Wings, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fright into Flight. Becca co-leads the 400-member strong East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup group and organizes a chapter of the national Women Who Submit writing organization, which encourages female writers to send their work out for publication. She also co-moderates Facebook resource groups for female-identifying writers and is a regular participant in the Bay Area literary reading scene. Becca’s food, drink, and travel blog, theGourmez.com, has garnered multiple accolades and influences every tasty bite of her fictional worldbuilding. Fiction Website: RebeccaGomezFarrell.com. Social Media: @theGourmez.

SPANISH LANGUAGE BOOK CLUB Meeting
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join us for a lively discussion about “Patricia sigue Aqui” by Maria Minguez Arias.
For more information about the bookclub please contact J. Iranyi <iranyi@me.com>

Posted in BOOK CLUB

Maxine Gordon on the life and legacy of Jazz legend Dexter Gordon
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of
Sophisticated Giant:The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon
by Maxine Gordon (Author), Farah Jasmine Griffin (Foreword), Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III (Afterword)
published by University of California Press
Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923–1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his “solo” turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter’s personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, “Man, you ought to leave your karma to science.”
Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore–even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.

Maxine Gordon is an independent scholar with a lifetime career working with jazz musicians. As an oral historian and archivist in the fields of jazz and African American cultural history, Sophisticated Giant fulfills the promise she made to her late husband, jazz saxophonist and Academy Award-nominated actor Dexter Gordon, to complete his biography.

Mikhail Iossel w/ Matthew Zapruder - - Notes from Cyberground
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
Tuesday, February 26
7:00pm

EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS welcomes Mikhail Iossel to discuss his new new book Notes From Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling, on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm. He will be in conversation with Matthew Zapruder.
America under Donald Trump. Russia under Vladimir Putin. Many have ridiculed them. None have done so with such scathing wit as Mikhail Iossel. From a youth spent in the USSR to a life remade in the USA, Iossel shares the brunt of this experience on Facebook, where thousands follow his blistering posts on Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, and his lyrical, eerily timely reflections on life under totalitarianism. Notes from Cyberground brings together a choice selection of Iossel’s aphorisms, ranging from a few words to a few hundred words. Each chapter covers a month from Election Day 2016 to October 2018. Even when comical, this gem of a book is dead serious. It will bring solace to anyone who feels distressed by today’s surreal politics

* * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mikhail Iossel, the Leningrad-born author of the story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know (W. W. Norton) and coeditor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2010), is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal and the founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program. Back in the Soviet Union, he worked as an electromagnetic engineer/submarine demagnetizer and as roller-coaster security guard, and belonged to the organization of samizdat writers, Club-81. He came to the US in 1986, at the age of thirty, a whole and complete life behind him, and started writing in English in 1988. Among his awards are Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner Fellowships. His stories and other prose, in English and in translation to several languages, have appeared in NewYorker.com, Guernica, Literarian, AGNI, North American Review, Threepenny Review, Interia, Boulevard, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of four collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Believer. An associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA program and English department, he is also editor at large at Wave Books and, from 2016 to 2017, was the editor of the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.

Event date:

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 – 7:00pm

Event address:

East Bay Booksellers
5433 College Avenue

Oakland, CA 94618

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
2019-02-27 08:00 - 17:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
Minutes of Glory and Other Stories
published by The New Press
A dazzling short story collection from the person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “one of the greatest writers of our time”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree” (“Mugumo” in this collection), written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States— Ngũgĩ’s collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.
Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.
One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver, Wrestling with the Devil, and Minutes of Glory (all from The New Press).
Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ is recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards.
What has been said about the work of

This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. . . . I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence. (Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review)

“Engrossing … At once exhilarating and defiant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoir is a thought-provoking document of a grim time in Kenyan history.” (Publishers Weekly)

The Washington Post reviews Birth of a Dream Weaver, saying “every page ripples with a contagious faith in education and in the power of literature to shape the imagination and scour the conscience.” (The Washington Post)

Nona Caspers and Friends
2019-02-27 18:00 - 19:30 | James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center of San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St. San Francisco,, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Join us to celebrate Nona Caspers’ latest book, the novel, The Fifth Woman. Publisher’s Weekly said, “This gem of a collection is a transcendent portrayal of bereavement, showing how death elevates the mundane and affects everything humans do, see and think.” The San Francisco Chronicle called the book “… mesmerizing, moving…”
Years after Caspers’s unnamed narrator loses her first lover in a tragic accident, she finds herself wondering, “What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?” In vivid, richly detailed vignettes, the book tracks the cyclical nature of grief and remembrance across a life fractured by loss. At times dryly comical, at other times radiantly surreal,The Fifth Woman is a testament to the resurrecting power of memory and enduring love.
Caspers will share the stage with two of her former graduate students from the Creative Writing program at SFSU. Author signing and book sale by Dog Eared Books Castro to follow event.

Folkland Book Club featuring books from Small Press Distribution
2019-02-27 18:00 - 19:30 | Oakland Public Library – Main Branch, 125 - 14th Street, Oakland, 94612
Join us for a monthly book club featuring titles from Small Press Distribution. Pick up a free copy of our February book at the January Book Club meeting (1/30), or at the Main Library Reference desk starting on January 31 while supplies last.
FEBRUARY’S BOOK CLUB PICK: PRIMITIVITY: STORIES BY AMY SAYRE BAPTISTA
The landscape of Amy Sayre Baptista’s PRIMITIVITY is mapped by cracked asphalt and dark woods, by broken bridges spanning greedy rivers, sunbaked dirt and ghost roads, séances held in gun repair shops, and retribution exacted in long grasses and hog pits and Segway tracks. These nine stories weave together a community borrowed from history and spanning centuries in a re-imagined Pike County, a geographical conundrum found in three different states yet joined by the same hungry river. From strangers to spiritualists to families bound by love and blood, the characters who populate Sayre Baptista’s stories tell tall tales of survivorship in the American south. To enter PRIMITIVITY’s pages is to arrive in a harsh yet beguiling topography of ghosts, thieves, and a hangman’s lament.
Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions (2017), Corium, SmokeLong Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Butter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She was a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo Poetry fellow (2013), and a scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011). She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective, and Poetry While You Wait (Chicago). She is a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and teaches Humanities at Western Gov-ernors University. She lives in Illinois.
Our Book Club moderator, Nirvana Shahriar is a senior undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. A lover of language and literature, she studies English and Linguistics. Her love for language, and interest in both the written and spoken word has led her to fa-cilitate classes at UC Berkeley that are structured around liter-ature, like book clubs. Experienced in facilitating and leading discussion, Nirvana is looking forward to more literary reads with new folks and faces.

Jan Steckel and Tom Odegard at #we
2019-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
#we presents Tom Odegard speaking on “Being Intersex” and reading poetry on the subject, and Jan Steckel speaking on “Bi Babes in the Woods” and reading bi poems from her new book Like Flesh Covers Bone. A Q&A will follow. Hosted by Richard Loranger.

Lloyd Kahn
2019-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
A Celebration of The Pacific Ocean: Lloyd Kahn’s Latest Book, Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast
from Shelter Publications
Preceded by Discussion and Vintage Photos of NorCal Surfing in the ’50s — Before Wetsuits

Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher. Shelter Publications specializes in books on building and architecture,as well as health and fitness.

Renowned SF Poet Lew Ellingham Celebrates Birthday With Book Launch
2019-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Come celebrate Lew Ellingham’s 80+ (?) birthday wherein he will launch his new book, 2018; new narrative exponent, poet, and playwright Kevin Killian talks about his Semiotext(e) book Fascination, (his newest is Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater); and poet Patrick Mellon launches his first book, Alkali Shores, the most recent publication from local publisher Ithuriel’s Spear.

Lew’s new offering is 2018, “Give Me My Words”, the author’s manuscripts chronologically presented through 2018, with the addition of a memoir or eulogy, “Compton”, the final story of a friend who recently died, an Alzheimer’s victim — almost all the settings are in San Francisco, prose poems or stories usually a single page in length, gathered in a jumbled mind.

Patrick Mellor’s new poetry book from Ithuriel’s Spear, Alkali Shores, is his first book of poems and was written over the last 15 years. Its aim is to represent the intersection of biological and cultural history expressed in individual human cognition and universal mythology.
Mellor has studied paleobiology, botany, and philosophy at Oxford and San Francisco State universities, specializing in the botany and ecology of the California deserts, philosophy of mind and early modern rationalism.
Kevin Killian will read from Fascination, a memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.
Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely. The two together depict the author’s early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island’s North Shore in the 1970s. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon’s resignation intersected with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: ‘You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”

The fun begins at 7pm. All welcome.

THE RACKET!
2019-02-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Details soon!
Hosted by Noah B. Sanders

Nayomi Munaweera
2019-02-28 19:00 - 21:00 | SJSU MLK Library, 150 E San Fernando St, San Jose, CA, 95112, United States
THURSDAY
February 28, 2019
7PM
MLK Library, Room 225/229
San José State University
Reading followed by an on-stage interview – conducted by SJSU Professor of English Revathi Krishnaswamy – plus a book sale and signing.
Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors was long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Prize. It was short-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Northern California Book Prize. It won the Commonwealth Regional Prize for the Asian Region and was the Target Book Club selection for January 2016. Munaweera’s second novel, What Lies Between Us was hailed as one of the most exciting literary releases of 2016 from venues ranging from Buzzfeed to Elle magazine. It won the Sri Lankan National Book Award for best English novel and the Godage Award. Munaweera teaches at Mills College and at the Ashland University low-residency MFA Program. She holds writing workshops in Sri Lanka through a program called Write to Reconcile in which she co-teaches with legendary writer, Shyam Selvadurai. Their aim is to use writing as a tool of reconciliation and healing for survivors of the civil war in that nation.

Mikhail Iossel, author of Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling
2019-02-28 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
In Conversation with Will Durst
Come to the scathing! Join Russian émigré Iossel (journalist, novelist) and the Bay’s most illustrious political satirist Durst in what will be a raucous and biting exchange. Why suffer?

Jen Beagin
2019-02-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Jen Beagin discusses her new novel, Vacuum in the Dark

Praise for Jen Beagin
“How can you resist a love story in which the object of desire is named Mr. Disgusting? Like Denis Johnson, Jen Beagin is able to find humanity and wonder (and yes, love) in some of the most forlorn and hopeless corners of our world.”— Tom Perrotta, author of Mrs. Fletcher and The Leftovers
“Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin is like one of those old-fashioned classics by Charles Bukowski or John Fante or, more recently, Denis Johnson, a shambling, lyrical dispatch from the dive bars and the flop houses where the downtrodden, divested of hope, livelihood, good health, and any number of other markers of respectability, nevertheless retain full possession of their hearts and minds, their integrity, their souls, too, perhaps–and no one nearly as triumphantly as Mona Boyle, Beagin’s heart-breaking hero & alter-ego. Rare is the encounter with such a frank and unflinching voice reporting from life on the edge, and rarer still the humor and compassion that Beagin manages to locate in some of the country’s, and the psyche’s, darkest corners. This book invaded my dreams, took over my conversation, and otherwise seduced me totally.”— Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
“Jen Beagin has one of the freshest voices I’ve read in years – funny, wise, whip-smart and compassionate. I tore through Pretend I’m Dead with a deep sense of affection for all of its beautifully flawed characters and their bittersweet lives.”— Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up

About Vacuum in the Dark
Mona is twenty-six and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. She moved there mostly because of a bad boyfriend—a junkie named Mr. Disgusting, long story—and her efforts to restart her life since haven’t exactly gone as planned. For one thing, she’s got another bad boyfriend. This one she calls Dark, and he happens to be married to one of Mona’s clients. He also might be a little unstable.
Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster, either. There’s also the Hungarian artist couple who—with her addiction to painkillers and his lingering stares—reminds Mona of troubling aspects of her childhood, and some of the underlying reasons her life had to be restarted in the first place. As she tries to get over the heartache of her affair and the older pains of her youth, Mona winds up on an eccentric, moving journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her beginnings where she attempts to unlock the key to having a sense of home in the future.
The only problems are Dark and her past. Neither is so easy to get rid of.
A constantly surprising, laugh-out-loud funny novel about an utterly unique woman dealing with some of the most universal issues in America today, Vacuum in the Dark is an unforgettable, astonishing read from one of the freshest voices in fiction today.

James Weeks: Meditations Across the Kings River
2019-02-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
About the Book
Tens of thousands of spiritual seekers around the world have been touched by James Weeks’s online essays and affirmations. Now in book form for the first time, Meditations Across The King’s River is inspired by James’s travels throughout the Caribbean and West Africa as an Ifa priest. Here, readers will find hope, encouragement, and wisdom to sustain them on their soul’s journey.
About the Author
James Weeks is the producer of the upcoming documentary film, Across The King’s River. He is also a babalawo, or priest in the Ifa spiritual tradition, an award-winning photographer, and a journalist who has published in Parenting magazine, the S.F. Weekly, Reggae Beat, The Virgin Islands Daily News and the St. Croix Avis. James is a native of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands and currently lives in Oakland with his wife and youngest son. To learn more, visit his website www.acrossthekingsriver.com.
