BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Litseen - ECPv6.15.11//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://litseen.com
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Litseen
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:UTC
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZOFFSETTO:+0000
TZNAME:UTC
DTSTART:20170101T000000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180809T190000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180809T210000
DTSTAMP:20260516T094405
CREATED:20180719T010830Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180719T010830Z
UID:46883-1533841200-1533848400@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Stephen Kessler
DESCRIPTION:Stephen Kessler joins us on Thursday\, August 9th to read from his collection\, Garage Elegies. \n\nAbout Garage Elegies \nIn Garage Elegies\, Stephen Kessler records with grief and wit\, documentary realism and ranging imagination\, poignancy and irony\, a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime.  From the twenty-four numbered poems of the title (composed in the poet’s garage) to fanciful inventions like “My Gym at Midnight\,” passionate meditations like “River Lovers” and nightmarish visions like “Bedless in Bedlam\,” his emotional honesty\, conversational lyricism and wry melancholy are at once dazzling and down to earth\, heart-opening and consciousness-wrenching\, retro-romantic and totally contemporary.  Open this book to any page and find an unmistakably authentic voice.  \n  \nStephen Kessler’s poems\, translations\, essays\, criticism\, and journalism have appeared over the last fifty years in hundreds of literary magazines\, newspapers\, anthologies and books. His translations of Luis Cernuda have received the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Poetry\, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets\, and the PEN Center USA Translation Award. His version of Save Twilight: Selected Poems by Julio Cortázar received a Northern California Book Award. He has edited numerous magazines and newspapers\, most notably Alcatraz\, an international journal; The Sun\, a Santa Cruz newsweekly; and The Redwood Coast Review\, four-time winner of the California Library Association’s PR Excellence Award. He is also the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges\, and the author of a novel\, The Mental Traveler.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/stephen-kessler/
LOCATION:Green Apple Books\, 506 Clement St\, San Francisco \, CA\, 94118\, United States
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Kessler.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180809T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180809T210000
DTSTAMP:20260516T094405
CREATED:20180605T212058Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180605T212058Z
UID:46202-1533843000-1533848400@litseen.com
SUMMARY:BINDERY: Keith Gessen / A Terrible Country
DESCRIPTION:The Bindery hosts All the Sad Young Literary Men author Keith Gessen for his new novel A Terrible Country. With Keith in conversation will be The Millions’ Lydia Kiesling. Please join us! \n  \nWhen Andrei Kaplan’s older brother Dima insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother\, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008\, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn\, packs up his hockey stuff\, and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother\, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia’s violent capitalist transformation\, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Andrei into her home\, even if she can’t always remember who he is. \n  \nAndrei learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow\, still the city of his birth\, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly–but surprisingly sharp!–grandmother\, finds a place to play hockey\, a café to send emails\, and eventually some friends\, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Over the course of the year\, his grandmother’s health declines and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists\, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested\, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid. \n  \nA wise\, sensitive novel about Russia\, exile\, family\, love\, history and fate\, A Terrible County asks what you owe the place you were born\, and what it owes you. Writing with grace and humor\, Keith Gessen gives us a brilliant and mature novel that is sure to mark him as one of the most talented novelists of his generation. \n  \n\n  \n“A cause for celebration: big-hearted\, witty\, warm\, compulsively readable\, earnest\, funny\, full of that kind of joyful sadness I associate with Russia and its writers.” – George Saunders\, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo \n  \n“Keith Gessen is one of my favorite writers and A Terrible Country is even better than I hoped. By turns sad\, funny\, bewildering\, revelatory\, and then sad again\, it recreates the historical-psychological experience of returning\, for twenty-first-century reasons\, to a country one’s parents left in the twentieth century. It’s at once an old-fashioned novel about the interplay between generational roles\, family fates\, and political ideology\, and a kind of global detective mystery about neoliberalism (plus a secret map of Moscow in terms of pickup hockey). Gessen is a master journalist and essayist\, as well as a storyteller with a scary grasp on the human heartstrings\, and A Terrible Country unites the personal and political as only the best novels do.” – Elif Batuman\, author of The Idiot and The Possessed \n  \n“A Terrible Country is an engaging and entertaining novel\, full of humor and humility\, and always after one thing–the truth of contemporary life. Gessen gives us the people of Moscow–businessmen\, anarchists\, grandmothers\, dissidents\, baristas\, hockey goalies\, prostitutes\, and FSB agents–not as fanciful characters but with the full force of the real. His affectionate\, clear-eyed portrait of one terrible country has plenty to teach us about our own.” – Chad Harbach\, author of The Art of Fielding \n  \n\n  \nKeith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator\, from Russian\, of a collection of short stories\, a book of poems\, and a work of oral history\, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books\, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and son. \n  \nLydia Kiesling is the editor of The Millions and the author of The Golden State\, a novel publishing September from FSG/MCD. Her essays and criticism have appeared at outlets including The New York Times Magazine\, The Guardian\, Slate\, and The New Yorker online\, and have been recognized in Best American Essays 2016. She lives in San Francisco with her family. Author photo by Andria Lo. \n  \n  \n  \nRSVP appreciated but not required. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of A Terrible Country and/or any of Keith’s books\, order below and put your request in the comments field. \n  \nThis is an all ages event. The bar opens at 7\, event begins at 7:30pm. \n  \nPlease note: this event will be at The Bindery\, 1727 Haight.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/bindery-keith-gessen-a-terrible-country-2/
LOCATION:The Bindery\, 1727 Haight St\, San Francisco \, 94117\, United States
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/terrible.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180809T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180809T213000
DTSTAMP:20260516T094405
CREATED:20180712T221348Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180712T221348Z
UID:46701-1533843000-1533850200@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Jason Morris / Levon Helm
DESCRIPTION:Booksmith is proud to host the San Francisco launch for Jason Morris‘ first full-length collection of poetry\, Levon Helm. Reading with Jason is the poet Nicholas James Whittington. Please join us! \n  \nLevon Helm is Jason Morris’ first full-length collection\, a picaresque situated in the drum and voice of mind. Like the drummer-singer with whom it shares a name\, its influences are broad but firmly American. Along with bits torn from the edges of Moby-Dick and The Maltese Falcon\, it mines the margins of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. As it takes stock of the immediacy and scale of places in the American West like Pinnacles and the Puget Sound\, its psychic roots dig a haunted\, old New England. These lyric poems are takes on human memory in geological time\, as interested in their own asides and parentheticals as they are in the elements. \n  \n\n  \nAn excerpt\, courtesy Ugly Duckling Presse: \n  \nThin newsprint\, a little ripped\non which you wrote\nLANGUAGE IS THE THRONE OF THE OTHER\nI was able to get inside of the building\nbut I’d lost the piece of paper\non which I’d written all of the codes\noutside the day’s grays and greens\na fluid human movement we slipped into\nI grew confused & trusted in you\nyour honesty formed the spine\nof my mysterious neutrality\nThere are no vipers in this poem\nwe continued walking until\nwe were way out in the cuts\, collecting\nwildflowers by the highway abutment\nI’d gotten stuff for sandwiches\nyou were talking about feeling like\nyou should want something beyond\neven poetry or love\, can you\nname what that something is\nwanting to not want is more accurately\nreligious\, how now we’re where we were \n  \n\n  \n“With the publication of Levon Helm\, San Francisco poet Jason Morris’ long-awaited full length debut\, Ugly Duckling Presse has gifted clamoring fans and soon-to-be-fans a keen\, generous artifact of the life of a poet in the 21st century. A voracious reader of his daily surroundings and of the life of the mind\, Morris attends to landscapes both urban and wild with a relaxed yet exacting eye. These poems display a flowering generosity of attention very much in the present (“looking directly – / as poets often are – at what you name”). Each poem is a kind of gemlike honing amidst the “perpetual and beautifully obscene continuance” we call living\, now. It is a pleasure to be with Jason Morris “in this looking”. As the book itself astutely warns\, “You only get to read it / for the first time once: Slow down.” – Alli Warren \n  \n“Why didn’t I think of writing a book called Levon Helm? Go\, Jason! And thanks.” – Clark Coolidge \n  \n“Levon Helm reminds me of late Holderlin sculpture – its compact images\, spiritual fragments\, and shimmed\, crisp wording speak of an attainable fluidity between heartbeat and carved page\, where its map legends and state lines describe a divine closeness and granularity of detail\, all heart and repair. Humble\, gracious\, Morris knows that “wanting to not want is more accurately / religious\, how now we’re where we were.” This book is jagged and smooth\, its endurance\, overdue. I’ve often endeavored to see myself through Morris’ poems\, in its decades\, page by page; his is a truth I’ve craved and always known – applied for selfish purposes as a double to compare my own lines\, mind\, and heart. Spread across pages\, huddled in spots of crisp fuzz and harmony\, lumps taken\, his voice\, I know: “a kid // of crickets & lightning” “as ridiculous as me / welding my desire to your hair.” – John Coletti \n  \n\n  \nJason Morris was born and raised in Vermont and now lives in San Francisco. His chapbooks are Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Press\, 2010)\, From the Golden West Notebooks (Allone Co.\, 2011)\, Local News (Bird & Beckett Books\, 2013)\, Takes (Bootstrap Press\, 2015)\, and Late to Practice (Dirty Swan\, 2017). For seven years\, he was the editor of Big Bell magazine; with J Grabowski\, he founded the small press PUSH. \n  \n  \nNicholas James Whittington is a poet\, scholar\, educator\, editor\, printer\, and publisher born and raised in San Francisco. He now lives in Oakland\, but continues to edit and publish the roughly annual AMERARCANA along with the occasional small book under the auspices of his family bookshop\, Bird & Beckett\, here in the city\, and does letterpress printing and design work at Impart Ink\, an errant studio. His first full-length collection of poetry\, Creances\, is due out this year from Bootstrap Press. Recent chapbooks include Provisions (2017\, from PUSH Press) and Indefinite Sessions (2016\, from Gas Meter Books). \n  \n\n  \nRSVP appreciated but not required. \n  \nIf you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Levon Helm\, order below and put your request in the comments field.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/jason-morris-levon-helm/
LOCATION:The Booksmith\, 1644 Haight St\, San Francisco \, CA\, 94117\, United States
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jason-morris-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR