Litseen

MandoMeet
2020-12-13 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join CHSA for a chance to learn Mandarin with specialist Kathy Yang! Kathy is an expert Mandarin teacher. For our MandoMeet sessions, all levels of adult learners are welcomed. New learners are always welcomed, check out our MandoMeet page for past lessons and learning materials.
To join, make sure to RSVP. As there is limited space is available for the class, only sign-up for MandoMeet if you are able to attend the session live. Recordings of the lesson are not available. Please contact CHSA if you have any questions about registration.
Choose between a free ticket or provide a donation to support free programming by the Chinese Historical Society of America. There is a suggested donation of $5.
Feel free to join the program at 12:50pm for a check-in with Kathy prior to the lesson beginning. Online access information will be sent out 2 hours and 10 minutes before the lesson begins.
While no materials are required for the lesson, colorful sticky notes and markers are highly encouraged. Similar writing material is also beneficial to participant learning. We also recommend learners check their microphones and cameras before coming to class.

VIRTUAL: Claire Marie Stancek with Dan Beachy-Quick & Jennifer Firestone / wyrd] bird
2020-12-13 14:00 - 16:00
Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host a virtual event with Claire Marie Stancek for her new book of poems, wyrd] bird. She’s joined by Dan Beachy-Quick and Jennifer Firestone.
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order a copy of wyrd] bird here. We’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.
In addition to wyrd] bird (Omnidawn Publishing), Claire Marie Stancek is the author of two previous poetry books, Oil Spell (Omnidawn Publishing) and MOUTHS (Noemi Press). She earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from University of California, Berkeley, where she currently works as a staff writer. With Jane Gregory and Lyn Hejinian, she co-edits Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Originally from outside Toronto, Ontario, she now lives in Oakland, California.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include Arrows (Tupelo Press) and Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions), a collection of translations from the ancient Greek. Recently long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, his work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is an University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry: Story (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Flashes (Shearsman Books) and Holiday (Shearsman Books). She is currently collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Conversations with Authors - David Harris (Virtual Event)
2020-12-13 16:00 - 18:00
David Harris’s newest release, My Country ‘Tis of Thee: Reporting, Sallies, and Other Confessions is a wide-ranging and incisive anthology conveying the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s.
David Harris is a reporter, a clear-eyed idealist, an American dissident, and, as these selected pieces reveal, a writer of great character and empathy. Harris gained national recognition as an undergraduate for his opposition to the Vietnam War and was imprisoned for two years when he refused to comply with the draft. His writings trace a bright throughline of care for and attention to outsiders, the downtrodden, and those who demand change, and these eighteen pieces of long-form journalism, essays, and opinion writings remain startlingly relevant to the world we face today. This career-spanning collection of writings by an always-independent journalist follow Harris from his early days as a prominent leader of the resistance to the Vietnam War, through regular contributions to many publications, including Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and on into the twenty-first century.
Peter Coyote is the author of the 1960’s counter-culture memoir Sleeping Where I Fall, which received universally excellent reviews and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated as one of the top five nonfiction books published in California in 2015. His third book is forthcoming, Unmasking Your True Self (the Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha), which combines 50 years of Buddhist practice and acting and uses masks and improv exercises to foster liberation experiences and teach people “how to get out of their own way.” Peter has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films. An ordained Zen Buddhist priest and transmitted teacher, Peter is currently giving live weekly dharma talks on Facebook and preparing for a fourth book called Vernacular Buddhism.

WALTER MOSLEY IN CONVERSATION WITH CBC HOST JOHN FREEMAN
2020-12-18 17:00 - 19:00
Devil in a Blue Dress
BY WALTER MOSLEY

Mosley’s celebrated 1990 novel introduces readers to Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a World War II veteran who turns to detective work to make a living. Rooted in Watts, a historically African American neighborhood of Los Angeles, the story reinvigorated the hard-boiled mystery genre, populating it with rarely seen nonwhite characters. The book’s success led to a bestselling series of Easy Rawlins mysteries that follow the character into the 1960s (and to a 1995 film adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin and starring Denzel Washington).

HIGH DAWN: Noah Ross, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Jamie Townsend, Topazu, Subset
2020-12-18 18:00 - 19:30 | online
Small Press Traffic and UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium present HIGH DAWN 4
Readings by Noah Ross and S*an D. Henry-Smith
Introduced by Jamie Townsend
Music by Topazu & Visuals by Subset
Friday, December 10, 6pm
RSVP for Zoom link: spt-dec.eventbrite.com
Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2019), Active Reception (Nightboat Books, 2021), and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and, with Lindsay Choi, Mo0on/IO.
S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography, and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. S*an is also the author of two chapbooks, Body Text and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System. Wild Peach, released fall 2020, is their first full length collection.
Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as the full collections Shade (Elis Press, 2015) and Sex Machines (speCt!, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.
Topazu is a San Francisco-based selector whom hosts the local Infinite Beat Ambient showcase and radio show Infinite Beat on SutroFM. Since 2015, the show features producers, artists and DJs that are shaping the Bay Area sound in experimental synthesis as well as celebrates romanticism, nostalgia and cinematic themes with modern day electronics.Besides curating Infinite Beat, she has been featured DJing many local shows including Sure Thing, Surface Tension, Honey Soundsystem and Recombinant Media Labs. With her interests in abstract textures, carnal rhythms and her exuberance in darker, chaotic noise, Topazu has also supported many international artists such as Wolfgang Voigt, Evigt Morker, Silent Servant, Takaaki Itoh and Marie Davidson. She was a featured performer for the first San Francisco edition of Mutek in 2018.

Elif Shafak
2020-12-19 12:00 - 14:00
reading and discussing her new novel
10 minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World
published by Bloomsbury Books
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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(Click Here) to purchase book.
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Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist
A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak.
In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
Tequila Leila’s memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city’s historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.
In Tequila Leila’s death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 18 books, 11 of which are novels. Her work has been translated into 54 languages. Her latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize; and chosen Blackwell’s Book of the Year. Her previous novel, The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by BBC among 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow.
She is a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice TED Global speaker. Shafak contributes to major publications around the world and she was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people “who will give you a much needed lift of the heart”. Shafak has judged numerous literary prizes, and chaired the Wellcome Prize and is presently judging the Orwell Prize.
visit: www.elifshafak.com

James Sullivan - Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett (Virtual Event)
2020-12-19 16:00 - 18:00
In conversation with Tom Barbash
Thursday, December 19, 4:00pm PT/7:00pm ET • Virtual Event
In the bestselling tradition of Indianapolis and In Harm’s Way comes a thrilling and vividly told account of the USS Plunkett—a US Navy destroyer that sustained the most harrowing attack on any Navy ship by the Germans during World War II, that gave as good as it got, and that was later made famous by John Ford and Herman Wouk.
More than the story of a single, savage engagement, Unsinkable traces the individual journeys of five men on one ship from Casablanca in North Africa, to Sicily and Salerno in Italy and then on to Plunkett’s defining moment at Anzio, where a dozen-odd German bombers bore down on the ship in an assault so savage, so prolonged, and so deadly that one Navy commander was hard-pressed to think of another destroyer that had endured what Plunkett had. After a three-month overhaul and with a reputation rising as the “fightin’est ship” in the Navy, Plunkett (DD-431) plunged back into the war at Omaha Beach on D-Day, and once again into battle during the invasion of Southern France—perhaps the only Navy ship to participate in every Allied invasion in the European theatre.
Featuring five incredibly brave men—the indomitable skipper, who will receive the Navy Cross; the gunnery officer, who bucks the captain every step of the way to Anzio; a first lieutenant, who’s desperate to get off the ship and into the Pacific; a seventeen-year-old water tender, who’s trying to hold onto his hometown girl against all odds, and another water tender, who mans a 20mm gun when under aerial assault—the dramatic story of each plays out on the decks of the Plunkett as the ship’s story escalates on the stage of the Mediterranean. Based on Navy logs, war diaries, action reports, letters, journals, memoirs, and dozens of interviews with the men who were on the ship and their families, Unsinkable transcends historical appreciation of a single military ship to become a timeless evocation of young men stepping up to the defining experience of their lives.
James Sullivan was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler, the magazine. He lives with his family outside Portland, Maine, 3.4 miles from the birthplace of film director John Ford, who steamed into Omaha Beach on Plunkett.
Tom Barbash is the author of the novels The Dakota Winters and The Last Good Chance and the non-fiction books On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal, which was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts.

"A Christmas Memory" read by Thomas Lynch--virtually
2020-12-20 15:00 - 17:00
BYOF (Bring Your Own Fruitcake) and settle in for this traditional Mrs. Dalloway’s event. This year it will be a bit different, like everything else: We will host our dear friend Thomas Lynch virtually on Crowdcast.
Based on Capote’s own boyhood in rural Alabama in the 1930s, A Christmas Memory was originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956 and later was included in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
This is a free event, though we encourage you to make a contribution to support Mrs. Dalloway’s or to purchase a copy of the book through our website.
Registration is required to attend. Be sure to add your contribution before you “Save your Spot” on Crowdcast. Click here to register. Thank you!
Order a copy of A Christmas Memory from Mrs. Dalloway’s. A perfect gift for anyone on your list!
Thomas Lynch, a longtime resident of the Elmwood, is an actor and man-about-town.

Sunday, December 13, 2020 – 3:00pm

Poems to Make You Laugh & Cry
2021-01-04 18:00 - 20:00
Please join us for Poems to Make You Laugh & Cry, a special virtual event honoring the late local poet Peter McLaughlin. To evoke Pete, poets and writers who loved Pete will read their favorite poems. We’ll start with Good Times editor Steve Palopoli reading “Shopper’s Corner,” Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz David Sullivan will read “I Wish I Was Billy Collins,” Wellstone Books Publisher Steve Kettmann will read “Middle Age,” novelist and Soho Press publisher Bronwen Hruska will read “The Woman of My Dreams,” and Wallace Baine, local author and man of letters, will read … whatever he wants.
Register for this free Crowdcast event here.
This is a free event. The book may be preordered below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
McLaughlin’s posthumous book, I Wish I Was Billy Collins, is part standup comedy, part painfully revealing self-exploration—a tender, heartbreaking, hilarious book of poems about the male condition in the 21st Century.
These are poems to read and reread and then to read aloud to friends. Even nonplussed strangers will smile knowingly after being ushered into Pete McLaughlin’s world, laughing at his manic, self-deprecating take on the grim horror of waking up to find yourself a divorced middle-aged dude living by yourself with a cat, one given to fits of projectile vomiting.
The poems range from a riff on the yearning of an “Angry Prius” who just wants to get out in the fast lane, one time, and drive all-out “mercilessly tailgating all comers, / even senior citizens,” to the revelations of “Middle Age,” about being picked up by a woman in her sixties who “plays teasing, exploratory footsie beneath the tablecloth/her unblinking green-light eyes/locked mercilessly onto mine/she winks knowingly, her big toe somehow in my pocket now.
Pete McLaughlin grew up in San Francisco and was a standout runner in high school and at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, before earning his teaching credential. He was an elementary school teacher and a high school coach for years before moving to Santa Cruz, California, where he often played his trumpet alone on the bluffs looking out at the pounding Pacific.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh | GGP Online Book Club
2021-01-05 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, January 5, 2021 at 7 PM PST for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88275010328.
You can order a copy in paperback at https://bit.ly/ggpMyYear or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/MyYearAB.
Staff Reviews

A darkly comic look at what happens when a young woman attempts to drug herself into a year-long hibernation. Extreme? Indeed. It also speaks to the myriad ways we can all choose to numb out and disconnect from life.
— Samantha

Winter 2019 Reading Group Indie Next List

“Ottessa Moshfegh, more than any other writer I can think of, is great at capturing the feelings of despondency and malaise that come with living when and how we do. There are plenty of negative words to describe the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—she’s detached and depressed, she’s cruel and unfeeling—but Moshfegh writes her with such care and specificity I felt like I could live in her head forever.”
— Theo Henderson, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
Description

Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Book of 2018
“One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.”
— Entertainment Weekly
From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible
About the Author

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller.
Praise For…

Named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, The New York Times, Amazon, Buzzfeed, GQ, The Huffington Post, Vice, NPR, LitHub, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly
A New York Times bestseller
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get over Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

VIRTUAL EVENT: Winter Reading Program Mixer
2021-01-06 19:00 - 21:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: WINTER READING PROGRAM MIXER
Whether you are looking for your next read or just starting our Winter Reading Program, join our booksellers for a lively online discussion about each of the awesome titles in the program. Read three of the eight recommended books by February 28th and earn rewards from Bookshop, Birichino Winery, and Pacific Cookie Company! Read more about the Winter Reading Program here.
Register here for this free event on Crowdcast!

Virtual Event: Danielle Hawa Tarigha
2021-01-09 12:00 - 14:00
JOIN US ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 AT 12PM PT WHEN DANIELLE HAWA TARIGHA DISCUSSES HER BOOK, UPLIFT AND EMPOWER: A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING EXTREME POVERTY AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89568964677
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,89568964677# or +13462487799,,89568964677#
Webinar ID: 895 6896 4677
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kex7DqWe5z
About Uplift and Empower
Did you know that over 700 million people live on less than $2 a day?
Nearly 10% of the global population struggles to survive 24 hours at a time.Eradicating extreme poverty may seem like a simple issue, but in reality, it’s very complex.
In Uplift and Empower: A Guide to Understanding Extreme Poverty and Poverty Alleviation you’ll learn about:

The history and context of poverty and how the Industrial Revolution shaped modern social structures
Major challenges caused by poverty and what it means to live within the poverty mindset
Innovative solutions to addressing poverty, such as new methods for job creation and community engagement
And so much more…

This book is an exploration into one of the most pressing issues of our time. It’s for anyone interested in becoming part of the solution, and everyone that’s ready to Uplift and Empower.

Poetry & Short Stories Reading
2021-01-09 14:00 - 16:00
Join us for a virtual poetry & short stories reading featuring Brian Dempster (Seize), Caroline Kim (The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories), and Maw Shein Win (Invisible Gifts and Storage Unit for the Spirit House).
About the authors and their books:
Brian Komei Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member in Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also serves as Director of Administration for the Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Studies. editor of both From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement. Topaz, his debut book of poetry, received the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry.
His book Seize spares no one the highs and lows of fatherhood. The speaker struggles to care for his young and ailing child — a child whose many medical problems create an obstacle course of moral and emotional dilemmas. How does a father come to terms with the large and unknowable mysteries of a child who cannot communicate in a “normative” way? How does a parent — especially one who is dependent on language — guide a child without the use of speech? And how does one become the parent of another when their own uncertainties, their own wounds — intergenerationally from war, from strained race relations, from constantly being denied a place to belong — are still healing?
Caroline Kim was born in Busan, Korea but moved to America at an early age. She has lived on the East Coast, Midwest, and Texas but now makes her home in Northern California with her family. Her collection of stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, won the 2020 Pitt Drue Heinz Literature Prize. You can find her on Twitter at @carolinewriting.
Exploring what it means to be human through the Korean diaspora, Caroline Kim’s stories feature many voices. From a teenage girl in 1980’s America, to a boy growing up in the middle of the Korean War, to an immigrant father struggling to be closer to his adult daughter, or to a suburban housewife whose equilibrium depends upon a therapy robot, each character must face their less-than-ideal circumstances and find a way to overcome them without losing themselves. Language often acts as a barrier as characters try, fail, and momentarily succeed in connecting with each other. With humor, insight, and curiosity, Kim’s wide-ranging stories explore themes of culture, communication, travel, and family. Ultimately, what unites these characters across time and distance is their longing for human connection and a search for the place–or people–that will feel like home.
Maw Shein Win is a writer, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016 – 2018) and her forthcoming second full-length collection of poetry will be published by Omnidawn in Fall 2020. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @mawsheinwin.
With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and “show dogs with bejeweled collars” crowd into Win’s real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, haunt the book’s six sections. The nats, almost all of whom were once humans who died violently, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father’s cigarette smoke.
You can purchase the speakers’ works here:
Seize: https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2708/Seize.html
The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories: https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2703/The_Prince_of_Mournful_Thoughts_and_Other_Stories_%28_Pitt_Drue_Heinz_Lit_Prize_%29.html
Storage Unit for the Spirit House: https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2189/Storage_Unit_for_the_Spirit_House.html
Invisible Gifts: https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2019/Invisible_Gifts.html
15% off all purchases with discount code HOLIDAY15!
Choose to ship your orders (free shipping for orders $30+) to your home or select in-store pick up at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704.

Daniel Mason in Conversation with Diane Del Signore--virtually
2021-01-10 14:00 - 16:00
Discussing Mason’s most recent book A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, winner of the Simpson Library Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Northern California Book Award for fiction. This event is hosted by Ashby Village. To register on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83908237472. For further information: info@ashbyvillage.org or call 510.204.9200. Donations to Ashby Village encouraged.

Sunday, January 10, 2021 – 2:00pm to 4:00pm

These stories–among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner–cap a fifteen-year project. From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the “struggle for survival…hand to hand, word to word.”
“An enchanting cabinet of curiosities and wonders….Mason is one of our best historical novelists, creating panoramas of rich detail, propulsive plot, and artful character development….In his first story collection, he shows how quickly and completely he can immerse readers in a foreign place and time….Nine tales of human endurance, accomplishment, and epiphany told with style and brio.”– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Daniel Mason is also the author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, and The Winter Soldier. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope, and Lapham’s Quarterly. A recipient of a fellowship from the NEA, he is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford.
Diane Del Signore is Executive Director of the Simpso Literary Project.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Now What?
2021-01-11 18:00 - 20:00
An Evening with the Editor and Contributors of Now What? The Voters Have Spoken—Essays on Life After Trump.
Where Do We Go From Chaos?
As Jon Meacham writes in a back-cover blurb, “many of America’s most thoughtful voices offer their views of the next chapter of our national life,” in Now What? The Voters Have Spoken—Essays on Life After Trump, published this month by Santa-Cruz-based Wellstone Books. Join Stephen Mack Jones, Mark Ulriksen, Angela Wright Shannon, and Steve Kettmann to hear brief excerpts from the essays and wide-ranging discussion.
Register here for this free event on Crowdcast!
Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist STEPHEN MACK JONES is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers August Snow and Lives Laid Away, which was short-listed for the CWA-UK “Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award.”
Artist and illustrator MARK ULRIKSEN has been a regular New Yorker magazine cover artist for over 25 years. He’s covered The Masters and British Open for Golf Digest, painted murals for the Chicago Bears and written and illustrated the book Dogs Rule Nonchalantly. His past work for Wellstone Books includes the covers of Kiss the Sky by Dusty Baker, Shop Around by Bruce Jenkins and Holy Toledo by Ken Korach.
ANGELA WRIGHT SHANNON is a freelance writer, editor and actor. She was formerly a reporter and editor at The Charlotte Observer, managing editor for The Winston-Salem Chronicle weekly newspaper, and a regular panelist on “North Carolina This Week” on North Carolina Public Television.
STEVE KETTMANN is the co-founder, with Sarah Ringler, of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods (www.wellstoneredwoods.org), a Soquel writers retreat center, and publisher of Wellstone Books. A former staff reporter for New York Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle, he conceived and edited Game Time, a collection of New Yorker baseball writing by Roger Angell; authored One Day at Fenway and Baseball Maverick; and has co-authored more than 12 books, including six New York Times bestsellers.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Now What?
2021-01-11 18:00 - 20:00
An Evening with the Editor and Contributors of Now What? The Voters Have Spoken—Essays on Life After Trump.
Where Do We Go From Chaos?
As Jon Meacham writes in a back-cover blurb, “many of America’s most thoughtful voices offer their views of the next chapter of our national life,” in Now What? The Voters Have Spoken—Essays on Life After Trump, published this month by Santa-Cruz-based Wellstone Books. Join Stephen Mack Jones, Mark Ulriksen, Angela Wright Shannon, and Steve Kettmann to hear brief excerpts from the essays and wide-ranging discussion.
Register here for this free event on Crowdcast!

This is a free event. The book may be preordered below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist STEPHEN MACK JONES is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers August Snow and Lives Laid Away, which was short-listed for the CWA-UK “Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award.”
Artist and illustrator MARK ULRIKSEN has been a regular New Yorker magazine cover artist for over 25 years. He’s covered The Masters and British Open for Golf Digest, painted murals for the Chicago Bears and written and illustrated the book Dogs Rule Nonchalantly. His past work for Wellstone Books includes the covers of Kiss the Sky by Dusty Baker, Shop Around by Bruce Jenkins and Holy Toledo by Ken Korach.
ANGELA WRIGHT SHANNON is a freelance writer, editor and actor. She was formerly a reporter and editor at The Charlotte Observer, managing editor for The Winston-Salem Chronicle weekly newspaper, and a regular panelist on “North Carolina This Week” on North Carolina Public Television.
STEVE KETTMANN is the co-founder, with Sarah Ringler, of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods (www.wellstoneredwoods.org), a Soquel writers retreat center, and publisher of Wellstone Books. A former staff reporter for New York Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle, he conceived and edited Game Time, a collection of New Yorker baseball writing by Roger Angell; authored One Day at Fenway and Baseball Maverick; and has co-authored more than 12 books, including six New York Times bestsellers.

Conversations with Authors - Gretchen Rubin (Virtual Event)
2021-01-12 18:00 - 20:00
Gretchen Rubin‘s most recent release, Outer Order, Inner Calm is a lovely, easy-to-use illustrated guide to decluttering that shows us how to take control of our stuff—and, by extension, our lives.
Gretchen Rubin knows firsthand that creating order can make our lives happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative. But for most of us, a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work. When we tailor our approach to suit our own particular challenges and habits, we can find inner calm.
With a sense of fun, and a clear idea of what’s realistic for most people, Rubin suggests dozens of manageable tips and tricks for creating a more serene, orderly environment, including:

Never label anything “miscellaneous”
Ask yourself, “Do I need more than one?”
Don’t aim for minimalism
Remember: If you can’t retrieve it, you won’t use it
Stay current with a child’s interests
Beware the urge to “procrasticlear”

By getting rid of things we don’t use, don’t need, or don’t love, we free our minds (and our shelves) for what we truly value.
Gretchen is also the author of the bestselling books The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, Better than Before, and The Four Tendencies. She’s also written a bestselling biography of Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, and one of John Kennedy, Forty Ways to Look at JFK. She also hosts a popular, award-winning podcast, “Happier with Gretchen Rubin” and a blog, where she writes about her daily adventures in happiness and habit-formation. She is also a regular columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine and makes regular appearances on CBS This Morning. Before turning to writing, Gretchen had a career in law. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Gina Apostol
2021-01-12 18:00 - 20:00
Join Gina Apostol and friends for the launch party of the first ever US publication of Gina Apostol’s Philippine National Book Award–winning novel
Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
published by Soho Press
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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Raymundo Mata is a nightblind bookworm and a revolutionary in the Philippine war against Spain in 1896. Told in the form of a memoir, the novel traces Mata’s childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of the books of the man who becomes the nation’s great hero José Rizal (Rizal, in real life, is executed by the Spaniards for writing two great novels that spark revolution—the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. At the time Rizal died, he was working on a third novel, Makamisa).
Raymundo Mata’s autobiography, however, is de-centered by another story: that of the development of the book. In the foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes, we see the translator Mimi C. Magsalin (a pseudonym), the rabid nationalist editor Estrella Espejo, and the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic Dr. Diwata Drake make multiple readings of the Mata manuscript. Inevitably, clashes between these readings occur throughout the novel, and in the end the reader is on a wild chase to answer enduring questions: Does the manuscript contain Makamisa or is it Makamisa? Are the journals an elaborate hoax? And who is the perpetrator of the textual crime?
In this story about the love of books, the story of a nation emerges. But what is a nation? What The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata imagines is that through acts of reading, a nation is born.
Gina Apostol’s third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Community Roundtable: Miss Chinatown
2021-01-13 14:00 - 15:00
Join the CHSA Community for a roundtable discussion on topics that impact our community on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month! Our goal is to keep the community united during the time apart through our online, roundtable discussions. We will be hosting online roundtables every-other-week with different topics to engage with the CHSA community.

Here is our upcoming schedule! Feel free to join all topics* of interest to you:

January 13th-Miss Chinatown. A discussion about memories of the Miss Chinatown pageant in preparation for the Chinese New Year celebration.

Interested in joining? Click here to register!
Please note: this is an interactive event. We encourage everyone to check that their microphones and cameras are working so that they can engage in the discussion. Space is limited to encourage participation among attendees.
*Topics and discussion dates are subject to change depending on current events and interest.

Robert Jones Jr. - The Prophets (Virtual Event)
2021-01-13 18:00 - 20:00
Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation’s harmony.
With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr. fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.
Robert Jones, Jr. was born and raised in New York City. He received his BFA in creative writing with honors and MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Feminist Wire, and The Grio. He is the creator of the social justice social media community Son of Baldwin. Jones was recently featured in T Magazine‘s cover story, “Black Male Writers of Our Time.” The Prophets is his debut novel.

VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters presents David P. Barash with David Livingstone Smith / Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents
2021-01-13 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are very pleased to host a virtual event with David P. Barash for his new book Threats: Intimidation and Its Dicontents. He’ll be in conversation with David Livingstone Smith (On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It).
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Threats here. We’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
From hurricanes and avalanches to diseases and car crashes, threats are everywhere. Beyond objective threats like these, there are also subjective ones: situations in which individuals threaten each other or feel threatened by society. Animals, too, make substantial use of threats. Evolution manipulates threats like these in surprising ways, leading us to question the ethics of honest versus dishonest communication. Rarely acknowledged–and yet crucially important–is the fact that humans, animals, and even plants don’t only employ threats, they often respond with counter-threats that ultimately make things worse. By exploring the dynamic of threat and counter-threat, this book expands on many fraught human situations, including the fear of death, of strangers, and of “the other.” Each of these leads to unique challenges, such as the specter of eternal damnation, the murderous culture of guns and capital punishment, and the emergence of right-wing nationalist populism. Most worrisome is the illusory security of deterrence, the idea that we can use the threat of nuclear war to prevent nuclear war!
Threats are so widespread that we often don’t realize how deeply they are ingrained in our minds or how profoundly and counter-productively they operate. Animals, humans, societies, and even countries internalize threats, behind which lie a myriad of intriguing questions: How do we know when to take a threat seriously? When do threats make things worse? Can they make things better? What can we do to use them wisely rather than destructively? In a comprehensive exploration into questions like these, noted scientist David P. Barash explains some of the most important characteristics of life as we know it.
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. He’s written more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles on human and animal behavior, and has written, co-authored and edited 39 books, most recently Threats: intimidation and its discontents, which was just published on Oct. 1 by Oxford University Press.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He has written or edited nine books, including Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for nonfiction. His work has been translated into seven languages. David is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose publications are cited not only by other philosophers, but also by historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and anthropologists. He has been featured in several prime-time television documentaries, is often interviewed and cited in the national and international media, and was a guest at the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke about dehumanization and mass violence.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Madeleine Watts
2021-01-13 19:00 - 21:00
Madeleine Watts discusses her highly anticipated debut novel, The Inland Sea (Catapult).
“Full of heart and disquiet, astute and precise, almost savage in its eloquence, illuminated about what it feels like to love, to be left, to want more.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel. REGISTER HERE.
About The Inland Sea
Drifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame.
The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends.
Two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather–the British explorer John Oxley–traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it.
Interweaving a woman’s self-destructive unraveling with the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, The Inland Sea is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.
About Madeleine Watts
Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, Australia and currently lives in New York. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It was awarded the Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub. The Inland Sea is her first novel.

VIRTUAL EVENT: LIVING WRITERS SERIES, Sofia Samatar
2021-01-14 17:20 - 19:00
The UCSC Literature Department and Creative Writing Program Present: LIVING WRITERS SERIES WINTER 2021 “Shelter and Place,” a theme about world building when the world seems to be falling apart, about writing about place, about seeking and finding and not finding shelter in stormy times, and of course, what it means to be a writer and a person writing while sheltering in place.
JANUARY 14TH FEATURED WRITER: SOFIA SAMATAR
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University in Virginia.
Register for this FREE event series here.
The Living Writers Series runs on select Thursdays from 5:20-6:55p.m. Authors’ books available for pick up or delivery via Bookshop Santa Cruz. Find them here.

VIRTUAL: Mary Ziegler with Becca Andrews / Abortion and the Law in America: Roe V. Wade to the Present
2021-01-14 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith and Mother Jones are very pleased to host a virtual event with Mary Ziegler for her new book Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. She’ll be in conversation with Mother Jones reproductive rights reporter Becca Andrews.
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order a copy of Abortion and the Law in America here. We’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
With the Supreme Court likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion decision, American debate appears fixated on clashing rights. The first comprehensive legal history of a vital period, Abortion and the Law in America illuminates an entirely different and unexpected shift in the terms of debate. Rather than simply championing rights, those on opposing sides battled about the policy costs and benefits of abortion and laws restricting it. This mostly unknown turn deepened polarization in ways many have missed. Never abandoning their constitutional demands, pro-choice and pro-life advocates increasingly disagreed about the basic facts. Drawing on unexplored records and interviews with key participants, Ziegler complicates the view that the Supreme Court is responsible for the escalation of the conflict. A gripping account of social-movement divides and crucial legal strategies, this book delivers a definitive recent history of an issue that transforms American law and politics to this day.
Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law. Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow has called her “the premier historian of abortion in the post-Roe era.” She teaches and writes on the legal history of reproduction and constitutional law, family law, and sexuality. Her latest book is Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her first book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard, 2015), was the winner of the 2014 Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline. She often serves as commentator in leading mass media outlets across the world, including The Atlantic, The BBC, the Boston Globe, CNN, the Guardian, MSNBC, NBC, The New York Times, NPR, PBS News Hour, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Becca Andrews is a reporter at Mother Jones. A Southerner, she most often writes about the Southeast, gender, and culture. Before joining Mother Jones as an editorial fellow, she wrote for newspapers in Tennessee. Her work has also appeared in Slate, Marie Claire UK, and USA Today. Her first book, No Choice, on the dwindling access to abortion in the United States, is forthcoming from Hachette’s Public Affairs imprint.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Kevin Begos in Conversation with Dan Polsby, Vintage Berkeley--virtually
2021-01-14 19:00 - 21:00
discussing Tasting the Past: One Man’s Quest to Discover (and Drink!) the World’s Original Wines.
“Takes readers along on a journey to find the historical origins of wine. [Begos’s] story unfolds in a manner similar to the growth of ancient grapevines; rooted in a strong central narrative, side stories grow like tendrils, wrapping around and supporting each other, while clusters of vividly described wines emerge like ripe grapes.”–Science
To register and buy the book, please write dan@vintageberkeley.com.

Thursday, January 14, 2021 – 7:00pm

“A vintner’s blend of science, history, travel, and tantalizing drink recommendations.”–Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Bo1tanist
Pull up a chair and pour yourself a glass of whatever Dan recommends, and enjoy a lively conversation between these wine experts!
In search of a mysterious wine he once tasted in a hotel room minibar, journalist Begos travels along the original wine routes–from the Caucasus Mountains, where wine grapes were first domesticated eight thousand years ago, crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, and then America–and unearths a whole world of forgotten grapes, each with distinctive tastes and aromas. We meet the scientists who are decoding the DNA of wine grapes, and the historians who are searching for ancient vineyards and the flavors cultivated there. Begos discovers wines that go far beyond the bottles of Chardonnay and Merlot found in most stores and restaurants, and he offers suggestions for wines that are at once ancient and new.
Kevin Begos is a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and a former AP correspondent whose stories and research have appeared in major newspapers and other publications, including Scientific American, Harper’s, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, the Guild of Sommeliers, USA Today, and the New York Times.

Nora Harlow and Saxon Holt in Conversation--virtually
2021-01-14 19:00 - 21:00
discussing their new book Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates: Plants for a Lush, Water-Conscious Landscape.
Every Bay Area gardener needs this book written and photographed by the same team that produced Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates (published by EBMUD in 2004 and an instant bestseller at Mrs. Dalloway’s when we first opened).
Watch this space for registration details as they become available.

Thursday, January 14, 2021 – 7:00pm

Gardening in an area defined by arid summers and soggy winters can be challenging. But gardens can thrive in such conditions, and this definitive handbook shares the plants and practices that will help you succeed. Landscape architect Nora Harlow and award-winning photographer Saxon Holt explain how plants adapt to the climate and how topography and climate relate. A comprehensive plant directory provides details on each plant’s needs, and stunning photography shows how smart design can help address seasonal issues. It’s everything you need to create a flourishing summer-dry garden.
Nora Harlow is a landscape architect and gardener with wide-ranging experience in the summer-dry climates of California. She was assistant editor of Pacific Horticulture magazine for many years and supervisor of water conservation for the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland, where she designed low-water landscapes for District facilities.
Saxon Holt is a photojournalist who has spent more than 40 years exploring Kingdom Plantae and the fundamental importance of plants to the health of the planet. A lifelong gardener, he abandoned commercial photography when he discovered garden publishers and could no longer stay in a studio. His work has been featured in diverse publications, from Architectural Digest and Pacific Horticulture to Smithsonian and Money magazines.

Kate Messner on Instagram Live IGTV
2021-01-16 11:00 - 12:00
reading her timely book The Next President: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of America’s Presidents, an inspiring and informative book for kids about the past and future of America’s presidents.
“Ingeniously structured around inaugural years, [this book]’s softly textured digital vignettes are montaged to give a sense of events unfolding in many places and lives at once. readers may be convinced that the future is wide open-presidentially speaking.”–Publishers Weekly, starred review
Join us on Instagram IGTV. Follow along @MRSDALLOWAYS. Videos disappear after 24 hours so be sure to watch!

Saturday, January 16, 2021 – 11:00am

Who will be the NEXT president? Could it be you? When George Washington became the first president of the United States, there were nine future presidents already alive in America, doing things like practicing law or studying medicine.
When JFK became the thirty-fifth president, there were 10 future presidents already alive in America, doing things like hosting TV shows and learning the saxophone.
And right now–today!–there are at least 10 future presidents alive in America. They could be playing basketball, like Barack Obama, or helping in the garden, like Dwight D. Eisenhower. They could be solving math problems or reading books. They could be making art–or already making change.
Kate Messner is an award-winning author whose many books for kids have been selected as Best Books by the New York Times, Junior Library Guild, IndieBound, and Bank Street College of Education. She lives on Lake Champlain with her family.

Virtual Event: Michelle Gallen and Crissy Van Meter
2021-01-16 12:00 - 14:00
JOIN US ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 16 AT 12PM PT WHEN MICHELLE GALLEN DISCUSSES HER NOVEL,
BIG GIRL, SMALL TOWN, WITH CRISSY VAN METER ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81976016190
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,81976016190# or +12532158782,,81976016190#
Webinar ID: 819 7601 6190
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcGpjfKace
Praise for Big Girl, Small Town
“[A] sensational debut . . . Gallen’s effortless immersion into a gritty, endlessly bittersweet world packs a dizzying punch.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“I loved Majella from the first page. Our relatable heroine jumps off the page like an old friend. Utterly brilliant and deliciously hilarious! With humor, wit and beauty, Gallen subtly unveils a violence and conflict that lies beneath, exploring the legacy of the Troubles and the deeply felt effects through generations.”
—Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo
“A winning evocation of a small Irish community whose people burst from its pages. Engaging and satisfying.”
—Daily Mail
About Big Girl, Small Town
Meet Majella O’Neill, a heroine like no other, in this captivating Irish debut that has been called Milkman meets Derry Girls
Majella is happiest out of the spotlight, away from her neighbors’ stares and the gossips of the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up just after the Troubles. She lives a quiet life caring for her alcoholic mother, working in the local chip shop, watching the regular customers come and go. She wears the same clothes each day (overalls, too small), has the same dinner each night (fish and chips, microwaved at home after her shift ends), and binge-watches old DVDs of the same show (Dallas, best show on TV) from the comfort of her bed.
But underneath Majella’s seemingly ordinary life are the facts that she doesn’t know where her father is and that every person in her town has been changed by the lingering divide between Protestants and Catholics. When Majella’s predictable existence is upended by the death of her granny, she comes to realize there may be more to life than the gossips of Aghybogey, the pub, and the chip shop. In fact, there just may be a whole big world outside her small town.
Told in a highly original voice, with a captivating heroine readers will love and root for, Big Girl, Small Town will appeal to fans of Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, and accessible literary fiction with an edge.
About Michelle Gallen
Michelle Gallen was born in County Tyrone in the mid 1970s and grew up during the Troubles a few miles from the border between what she was told was the”‘Free” State and the “United” Kingdom. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and won several prestigious prizes as a young writer. Following a devastating brain injury in her midtwenties, she co-founded three award-winning companies and won international recognition for digital innovation. She now lives in Dublin with her husband and kids.
About Crissy Van Meter
Crissy Van Meter grew up in Southern California. Her writing has appeared in Vice, Bustle, Guernica, and Catapult. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She lives in Los Angeles.

Mahmood Mamdani in conversation with Gil Anidjar
2021-01-17 12:00 - 14:00
discussing
Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
by Mahmood Mamdani
published by Belknap Press (an imprint of Harvard University Press)
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is the author, among other books, of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford UP, 2003) and Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia UP, 2014).
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
