Litseen

Designing San Francisco: The Untold Story of How Artists and Activists Rebuilt Postwar SF
2017-09-12 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Alison Isenberg, Professor of History and Co-Director of the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities presents her new book Designing San Francisco, the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners–those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design–to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Previous accounts of midcentury urban renewal have focused on the opposing terms set down by Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs–put simply, development versus preservation–and have followed New York City models. Now Isenberg turns our attention west to colorful, pioneering, and contentious San Francisco, where unexpectedly fierce battles were waged over iconic private and public projects like Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gateway, and the Transamerica Pyramid.

When large-scale redevelopment came to low-rise San Francisco in the 1950s, the resulting rivalries and conflicts sparked the proliferation of numerous allied arts fields and their professionals, including architectural model makers, real estate publicists, graphic designers, photographers, property managers, builders, sculptors, public-interest lawyers, alternative press writers, and preservationists. Isenberg explores how these centrally engaged arts professionals brought new ideas to city, regional, and national planning and shape novel projects across urban, suburban, and rural borders. San Francisco’s rebuilding galvanized far-reaching critiques of the inequitable competition for scarce urban land, and propelled debates over responsible public land stewardship. Isenberg challenges many truisms of this renewal era–especially the presumed male domination of postwar urban design, showing how women collaborated in city building long before feminism’s impact in the 1970s.

An evocative portrait of one of the world’s great cities, Designing San Francisco provides a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define the urban future.

Ryan Gattis
2017-09-12 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his new novel
Safe
published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Ryan Gattis’ gritty, fast-paced thriller, Safe, hurtles readers toward a shocking conclusion that asks the toughest question of all: how far would you go to protect the ones you love?
Ricky ‘Ghost’ Mendoza, Jr. is trying to be good. In recovery and working as a freelance safecracker for the DEA, the FBI, and any other government agency willing to pay him, Ghost is determined to live clean for the rest of his days. And maybe he could, if the most important person in his life hadn’t gotten into serious financial trouble. To fix it, all Ghost has to do is crack a safe and steal drug money from under the noses of the gangs and the Feds without getting caught. Or killed.
Rudy ‘Glasses’ Reyes runs drugs and cleans up messes for the baddest of bad men. When Ghost hits one of his safes, Glasses must hunt him down or be held accountable. But Glasses is worried about more than just money. The heist puts everything in his life at risk—his livelihood, his freedom, even his family.
Ryan Gattis is the author of Kung Fu High School and All Involved, a novel about the 1992 L.A. riots. He lives in Los Angeles.

Tales and Legends from Mexico w/ Marcos Barraza
2017-09-13 18:00 - 19:30 UTC | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Marcos Barraza is a writer of varied topics such as physics, society, history and technology. His latest book, Cuentos y Legendas (Tales and Legends), is a compendium of historical tales from Victoria de Durango, the capital of the Spanish province of Nueva Vizcaya which today represents the Mexican states of Durango and Chihuahua.

Holloway Reading Series: giovanni singleton
2017-09-13 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
giovanni singleton earned a BA from American University and an MFA from the New College of California. She is the author of the poetry collections AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper (2017) and Ascension (2011), which won a California Book Award for Poetry. The book earned praise for its evocative use of white space, silence, and omissions.
singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts. Her honors and awards include fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Her work has been anthologized widely and appeared on the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts building. Coordinator for the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California–Berkeley, singleton has taught at Saint Mary’s College, Naropa University, and New Mexico State University.

Daniel Kane
2017-09-13 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing his new book
Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City
from Columbia University Press
During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In “Do You Have a Band?”, Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem.
Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.
Daniel Kane is reader in English and American literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His books include We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009) and All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003).

Victor Serge translator James Brook
2017-09-13 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
This is the East Bay book launch for A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems by Victor Serge, translated and edited by James Brook (PM Press).
Victor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik activist in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky’s; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico . . .
Like Serge’s extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule. Many of the poems were written during the “immense shipwreck” of Stalin’s ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen — as well as tributes to the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century.
“Victor Serge was a major novelist, a revolutionary, and a historical witness, so it is perhaps not surprising that his poetry has been overlooked. But his poetry is for real. It is as grounded in specifics as you might expect from a fighter in some of the twentieth century’s great struggles, and as visionary as you’d hope from a disciple of Rimbaud and a friend to the Surrealists. Reading it is like coming upon an unsuspected corridor in the house of literature. James Brook’s lucid translation does it full justice.”
–Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris
James Brook is a poet whose translations include works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, and Benjamin Péret. He is the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life (with Iain Boal) and Reclaiming San Francisco (with Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). The New York Times named his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman a Notable Book.

Novelist Jac Jemc & "Snap Judgement's" Eliza Smith
2017-09-13 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Jac Jemc will read from her new novel THE GRIP OF IT (FSG Originals) and discuss with Eliza Smith.
THE GRIP OF IT by Jac Jemc weaves the tale of a troubled married couple looking for a new start in an old home full of secrets.
“The Grip of It is a stunning, smart, genuinely creepy page-turner that I couldn’t put down. It’s got depth, thrills, twists, and great writing. I’d recommend this novel to anyone. One of the few haunted house stories that sticks the landing.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), Borne and City of Saints & Madmen
Jac Jemc is the author of The Grip of It newly released from FSG Originals in August 2017. Her first novel, My Only Wife (Dzanc Books) was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and her collection of stories, A Different Bed Every Time (Dzanc Books) was named one of Amazon’s best story collections of 2014. She edits nonfiction for Hobart.
Eliza Smith is a producer at WNYC’s Snap Judgment. In addition to producing nonfiction stories, she is also the fiction editor and adapts work by writers like Manuel Gonzalez, Amelia Gray, and Kelly Link into radio plays. Sometimes, she’ll freelance for publications like The Organist and The Litography Project.

Kim Shuck Poet Laureate Celebration
2017-09-14 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | SF Public Library, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, 94102, United States
Join us when Kim Shuck, San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate, is inaugurated. Kim, a life long resident of San Francisco, will read her poetry and discuss her plans as poet laureate.
A book sale by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library follows the event.

Voz Sin Tinta: Our monthly bilingual poetry series and open mic.
2017-09-14 18:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Sponsored by Alejandro Murguia, curated by Marguerite Munoz and Rene Vaz.
This month’s readers TBD.

Tongo Eisen-Martin
2017-09-14 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Tongo Eisen Martin celebrates the release of Number 61 in the Pocket Poets Series Heaven Is All Goodbyes published by City Lights Books.

Martha Ronk + Paul Vangelisti
2017-09-14 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Martha Ronk has published 11 books of poetry, most recently the photography-focused Ocular Proof (Omnidawn, 2016), Transfer of Qualities, prose poems (named to long list for the National Book Award) and National Poetry Series selection Vertigo, indebted to W.G. Sebald. Her most recent chapbook, Familiar/Unfamiliar (Magra Books, 2017), addresses Los Angeles. Recent poems appear in Volt, Lana Turner and Conjunctions. She lives in Los Angeles.
Paul Vangelisti has published more than 30 books of poetry and is a noted translator from Italian. In 2015 he edited Amiri Baraka’s S.O.S.: Poems 1961 – 2013, for Atlantic-Grove, and in the same year his book of sonnets, Solitude, appeared in a bilingual edition in Italy. In 2016 a new collection of poems, Border Music, was published by Talisman House. His translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961 – 1992, received the Academy of American Poets translation prize in 2010. Vangelisti lives and works in Los Angeles.

Sebastian Barry
2017-09-14 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Reading from Days Without End, winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award (his second) and just released in paperback.
“A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making, the most fascinating line-by-line first person narration I’ve come across in years.”–Kazuo Ishiguro
“For its exhilarating use of language alone, Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End stood out among the year’s novels. Epic in conception but comparatively brief in its extent, this brutal, beautiful book also features the year’s most beguiling narrator … A great American novel which happens to have been written by an Irishman.”–The Times Literary Supplement
Sebastian Barry is an award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, The Secret Scripture, On Canaan’s Side, and The Temporary Gentleman. Born in Dublin in 1955, he lives in Wicklow with his family.

MPC Members' New Books Celebration
2017-09-14 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Ave, San Rafael , CA, 94901, United States
Join us as we raise a glass to our amazing members who have new books out! We’ll have cake and bubbly! Poems will be read! Books will be for sale! Come help us toast the satisfaction and sweetness of making it through the long slog that leads to publication. If you have a new book or chapbook you’d like to share, published from September 2016 – September 2017, email Francesca Bell at events@marinpoetrycenter.org.

Paul Madonna: Close Enough for the Angels
2017-09-15 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery is excited to present a special evening with Paul Madonna as he introduces his latest release Close Enough for the Angels, along with a gallery showing of his iconic work. Please join us at The Bindery!
Emit Hopper was a one-hit wonder—twice. First as a rock and roller in the 80s, then as a literary darling in the 90s. Now it’s twenty years later, and despite his desire to remain a simple laundromat owner, stardom has found him once again. As he’s drawn back into the limelight he meets Julia, a former celebrity chef with an enigmatic past. But when she disappears while hiking with two other women, Emit finds himself chasing down a mystery that promises to leave him forever changed.
From the artist and author of All Over Coffee and Everything is its own reward, Paul Madonna uses his signature blend of drawing and storytelling to deliver a beautiful and entertaining novel filled with suspense, surprise, and humor.
With over one hundred lush and haunting drawings, this full-length, character-driven story is a fresh and innovative reinvention of the illustrated novel.
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“Madonna captures snapshots in time as he explores the relationship between image and text… that’s so gorgeously rendered in Madonna’s precise yet fluid pen-and-ink style, it feels like it could be anywhere and everywhere.” — Publisher’s Weekly
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Paul Madonna is the award-winning artist and writer. He is the creator of the series All Over Coffee, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for twelve years, and is the author of four books. His drawings and stories have appeared internationally in numerous books and journals as well as in galleries and museums, including the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and an upcoming solo exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Paul is a former editor fortherumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice, even when not asked. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD magazine, for which he proudly received no money.
More info: http://www.booksmith.com/event/paul-madonna-close-enough-angels-bindery

Brutal Conditions of US Agriculture Workers Documented in Photo Essays
2017-09-15 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
The conditions of farm workers have deteriorated greatly since the 1970s and 80s. Taking inflation into account, wages are less than half. In photographs and testimonies, In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte shows that these conditions are provoking a new wave of organizing efforts. It is the first book to do so visually, and in the words of farm workers themselves. It is a completely bilingual book, with extensive captions for all the images and oral histories in accessible narrative form.

“What is distinctive about David Bacon´s work is his persistence and determination to be present at decisive moments in the lives of workers. His photo essays allow us to feel that we are there, observing the events unfolding. We are witnesses to intimate moments of farmers working at dawn in the onion fields. We hear the testimonies of people participating in political action – with the strength of the community filling the air.” Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, professor of Chicano Studies, UCLA David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of several books about migration, including The Children of NAFTA, Communities Without Borders and Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Bacon was a factory worker and union organizer for two decades with the United Farm Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers and other unions. Today he documents the changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His photography has been exhibited in the U.S. Mexico and Europe, and his articles and photoessays have been published widely. As a photojournalist, David Bacon has been documenting through photographs and stories the lives of farm workers since 1988.

THERE 16
2017-09-15 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Berkeley novelist Shanthi Sekaran, Oakland author and Stegner Fellow Ben Hoffman, local author Eanlai Cronin and music TBA.
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 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!

Poets Adrienne Raphel + Alex Walton
2017-09-15 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Have you also been dreaming about being at an Adrienne Raphel and Alex Walton reading? Then promise not to wake up until September 15th, cause this reading’s gonna be amazing!
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays appear in the New Yorker online, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, the Poetry Foundation, and Lana Turner Journal, among other publications. Born in New Jersey and raised in Vermont, Raphel holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a PhD candidate at Harvard. She currently lives in New York.
Alex Walton is currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley. He was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. Some recent work is available in I, The Claudius App, and the PEN America Poetry Series.

The Junkyard 2017 Reading Showcase
2017-09-15 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Simone Herko Felton and Esme Cohen, currently two sophomores at Lowell High school in South San Francisco and the founders of the schools creative writing club and very own literary magazine, Junkyard.
“The whole idea behind it is like finding tools in a Junkyard. In the mess of humanity that is a junkyard or high school, it’s about finding the things that are valuable which can be such a mixture of different things.” -Simone
“The junkyard is all about celebrating the unique things that you find.” -Esme
Come support a group of 12 who are keeping the arts alive and well, at such a young age. Join us at the Beat Musuem to hear this literary staff read their own work featured in the publication.
Will be selling hard copies: $5 for Lowell students and $7 for the public.

Poets Allison Cobb + Arisa White
2017-09-16 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
What if we told you two poets who put out two of our favorite books of 2016 were gonna read together?! Would you be like, “Oh, sweet, Allison Cobb and Arisa White must be reading at Wolfman.” Would you be like, “I’m down.” Would you be like, “That reading is gonna be so good!” Cause you should, be like, that. And, there may be special guests…
Allison Cobb is the author of After We All Died (Ahsahta Press); Green-Wood(Factory School); Plastic: an autobiography (Essay Press EP series); and Born2(Chax Press). The poet Carolyn Forché calls After We All Died“inventive, visionary, hard-thought, and impossible to put down.”
Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates The Switch reading, art, and performance series.
Cobb’s work combines historical and scientific research, essay, and poetry to address issues of landscape, politics, and ecology. She was a 2015 finalist for the National Poetry Series; a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow.
Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White received her MFA from UMass, Amherst, and is the author of Black Pearl, Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, and A Penny Saved. Her recent collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing that Happened, was a nominee for the 29th Lambda Literary Award. “Fish Walking” and Other Bedtime Stories for My Wifewas a winner of Daniel Handler’s inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. She teaches in the low-residency BFA program at Goddard College and is a member of the board of directors for Nomadic Press. Arisa is the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, which is a series of poetic collaborations with QPOC artists, community organizations, and businesses that spotlight the narratives and experiences of queer people of color. arisawhite.com

Magra Books Reading: Paul Vangelisti + Sean Pessin Host
2017-09-17 14:00 - 15:30 UTC | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Celebrating the first two seasons of titles from the independent publisher, Magra Books (magrabooks.com). Gillian Conoley will read from her just published chapbook, Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar, along with Martha Ronk reading from her 2016 title, Unfamiliar Familiar; Art Beck from his new translation, Martial, Epigrams; Dennis Phillips from his Desert Sequence chapbook; and Neeli Cherkovski from his forthcoming Magra chapbook, Odes for Ezra Weston Pound. Part of the presentation will also be a memorial tribute to Ray DiPalma (1943-2016), whose For a Curved Surface is one of Magra’s initial offerings. Based in Los Angeles and Tuscany, Magra Books is a series of chapbooks, printed in editions of 300 copies, featuring unique works by important writers. Each volume, typically 32 pages in length, presents writers who are up to the all-encompassing challenge of producing work that strives to make “news that stays news.” Writers who are passionate about language, language that knows no borders. Hosting the event will be Paul Vangelisti and Sean Pessin, part of Magra Book’s editorial staff.

POETS! - featured readers followed by an open mic
2017-09-18 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA

Lenore Weiss
2017-09-18 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Lenore Weiss is enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Program at San Francisco State University. Her poetry has been published in many journals including WovenTales, Midwood Press, Maple Leaf Review, Kindred, San Francisco Peace and Hope, Cactus Heart, Ghost Town, Poetica, Carbon Culture, BlinkInk, The Portland Review, La Más Tequila Review, Digital Americana, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Nimrod International Journal, Copper Nickel, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Feminist Studies in Religion, and Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. Her books include Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012) and Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014). Her blog resides at www.lenoreweiss.com.

Patty Yumi Cottrell
2017-09-19 17:30 - 19:30 UTC | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Patty Yumi Cottrell was born in South Korea. Ed Park describes her novel, Sorry To Disturb the Peace, as “a sort of Korean-American noir, lean and wry and darkly compelling,” and Danielle Dutton calls it “a beguiling debut: absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad….” Cottrell’s work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review. She lives in New York.

Jeanne Powell + Clyde Always
2017-09-19 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | North Beach, SF Public Library, 850 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA, 94133, United States
Join us every Tuesday evening in the historic literary epicenter of San Francisco to hear poets from near and far read their work!
Tuesdays at North Beach is a highly-respected weekly poetry series celebrating internationally acclaimed poets and showcasing local talent. Past guests have included Jonathan Richman, Diane di Prima, California Poet Laureate Al Young and freshly-discovered poets from our sister program, Poets 11.
The series is presented by Friends and curated by Friends’ Poet-in-Residence, Jack Hirschman.
Interested in reading? Please contact Friends’ Literary Director Byron Spooner at byron.spooner@friendssfpl.org or call (415) 522-8602.

Brontez Purnell
2017-09-19 19:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States

Anne Korkeakivi
2017-09-19 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
Anne Korkeakivi shares her critically-acclaimed new novel, Shining Sea. An arresting and absorbing novel that spans decades, Shining Sea draws readers into the turbulent lives of a family in Southern California after the sudden death of the father. This event will feature a musical performance by critically-acclaimed troubadour Rachel Garlin.

GET LIT #28
2017-09-19 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Ale Industries, 3096 E 10th Street, Oakland, CA, 94601, United States
An amazing gathering of writers will read NEVER-BEFORE-READ material (rough drafts / debuts) within a three-minute time limit.
The emcee for the night will be the one and only NO ‘HARE (Isobel O’Hareand Christine No.)
Beer made by Ale Industries on site and coffee by our good friends next door, Red Bay Coffee.
Donations will be kindly requested, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds. All ages are welcome, though profanity will be present.

Josephine Rowe
2017-09-19 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Josephine Rowe discusses her new novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal.

Praise for A Loving, Faithful Animal

“A subtle and haunting meditation on childhood, escape, the bonds and the limits of family, and the long reach of trauma. Rowe is a serious talent, and her debut novel is both gorgeous and stunning.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“A Loving, Faithful Animal lured me in with astonishing, poetic prose, and a glimpse of an Australia I don’t always see in fiction. But the true thrill of the novel is the carousel of haunting characters Josephine Rowe creates with unbelievable precision. An unflinching look at the ways we fail the people we love, at the cruelty of family, its toxicity, and beauty. The book is a deep, multi-faceted portrait of the inheritance of damage, one that left me aching and inspired.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter
“Josephine Rowe writes like someone who, having been quiet a long time, has thought carefully and viciously about what must be said. In this flinty debut, Rowe fashions a string of refractory surfaces―the family members of a veteran―to remind us just how far, into love and time, the atrocity of war will reach.” ―Kathleen Alcott, author of Infinite Home

About A Loving, Faithful Animal
It is New Year’s Eve 1990, in a small town in southeast Australia. Ru’s father, Jack, one of thousands of Australians once conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War, has disappeared. This time Ru thinks he might be gone for good. As rumors spread of a huge black cat stalking the landscape beyond their door, the rest of the family is barely holding on. Ru’s sister, Lani, is throwing herself into sex, drugs, and dangerous company. Their mother, Evelyn, is escaping into memories of a more vibrant youth. And meanwhile there is Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, who seems to move through their lives like a ghost, earning both trust and suspicion.

A Loving, Faithful Animal is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. Tender, brutal, and heart-stopping in its beauty, this novel marks the arrival in the United States of Josephine Rowe, the winner of the 2016 Elizabeth Jolley Prize and one of Australia’s most extraordinary young writers.

Joyce Maynard
2017-09-20 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn’t mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of.
Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married, Joyce resolved that no one could alter her course of determined independence. Then, just after their one year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the nineteen months that followed, as they battled his illness together, she discovered for the first time what it really meant to be a couple—to be a true partner and to have one.
This is their story. Charting the course through their whirlwind romance, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and Joyce’s return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.
Joyce Maynard is the author of sixteen books including the novels To Die For and Labor Day (both adapted for film) and the bestselling memoir At Home in the World. Her essays and columns have appeared in dozens of publications and numerous collections. She is a frequent performer with The Moth, a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and founder of the Lake Atitlan Writers’ Workshop. She is the mother of three grown children, and makes her home in Lafayette, California.

Jesmyn Ward
2017-09-20 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to have Jesmyn Ward in the store for her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. Please join us!
Carrying the torch of Faulkner and As I Lay Dying, Sing, Unburied, Sing tells the emotional journey taken by Leonie, a single mother addicted to drugs, her son Jojo, 13, and his toddler sister, Kayla—who have been raised by their grandparents Pap, who tries to teach Jojo how to be a man, and Mam, who is sick with cancer—to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary where Jojo and Kayla’s white father is being released from prison. Ghosts and spirits hover over Ward’s narrative, which hums with ambition, complexity, heartache, rich visuals, and violence.
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward shows us life on the gulf coast of Mississippi—lush and menacing and marked by a precise rural vernacular—and life within a family weighted by history and poverty but bonded by love. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, it is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature by a writer at the top of her game.
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novelsWhere the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoirMen We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.
