Litseen

b, Book, and Me Happy Hour
2020-02-13 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | DaDa Bar, 65 Post St., San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States
Join us after work to raise a glass to Two Lines latest from Kim Sagwa, b, Book, and Me, translated from Korean by Sunhee Jeong. There will be readings from Two Lines editors, drinks, and snacks. Entry is free but please rsvp!
More about b, Book, and Me
Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it’s painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang unintentionally tells the whole class about b’s dying sister and how her family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is beyond the part of town where lunatics live—the End.
In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa’s b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.

Author / Kim Sagwa

Kim Sagwa is one of South Korea’s most acclaimed emerging writers. She is the author of several novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for several major South Korean awards, including the Munji Prize and the Young Writers Award. Kim contributes columns to two major Seoul newspapers, and she co-translated John Freeman’s book How to Read a Novelist into Korean.

Translator / Sunhee Jeong

Based in Seoul, Sunhee Jeong is a Korean-English translator and editor of literary and multimedia productions. She is also a scholar of visual studies, intersectionality and critical theory.

Harlem of The West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era
2020-02-13 18:30 | Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post Street, San Francisco, CA, United States
In the 1940s and 50s, a jazz aficionado could find paradise in the nightclubs of San Francisco’s Fillmore District: Billie Holiday sang at the Champagne Supper Club; Chet Baker and Dexter Gordon jammed with the house band at Bop City; and T-Bone Walker rubbed shoulders with the locals at the bar of Texas Playhouse. The Fillmore was one of the few neighborhoods in the Bay Area where people of color could go for entertainment, and so many legendary African American musicians performed there for friends and family that the neighborhood was known as the Harlem of the West. Over a dozen clubs dotted the twenty-block-radius. Filling out the streets were restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and stores, many of them owned and run by African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans. The entire neighborhood was a giant multicultural party pulsing with excitement and music. In 220 lovingly restored images and oral accounts from residents and musicians, Harlem of the West captures a joyful, exciting time in San Francisco, and reveals a momentous part of the country’s African American musical heritage.

Voz Sin Tinta: Bi-lingual poetry reading and open mic night! (Copy) (Copy) at Alley Cat Books
2020-02-13 18:30 - 20:30 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Voz Sin Tinta, our monthly bi-lingual poetry reading and open mic night! Hosted and curated by Rene Vaz and Marguerite Munoz.

Howard Eiland
2020-02-13 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
City Lights in conjunction with the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California at Berkeley present an evening with Howard Eiland
celebrating two new books
Origin of the German Trauerspiel – by Walter Benjamin – (Tr. Howard Eiland) – published by Harvard University Press
and
Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz – by Howard Eiland – published by Spuyten Duyvil
about Origin of the German Trauerspiel

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” but in fact the subject is something else―the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.
Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays―though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal.
Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

about Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz
Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments.
Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. It addresses a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works—elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland’s eloquent writing itself exemplifies this “aesthetic,” if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz.
Howard Eiland is a critic and translator. He received the 2011 James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He is the co-author, with Michael W. Jennings, of the first English-language biography of Walter Benjamin, an influential German writer who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He co-edited three volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings and co-translated Benjamin’s massive Arcades Project, and he has also translated Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, his On Hashish, and his Early Writings: 1910-1917. His recent publications include work on film and jazz. Current projects are “Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness” and “Education as Awakening.”

Red Light Lit: Valentine's Show
2020-02-13 19:00 - 21:00 | PianoFight, 144 Taylor St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Celebrate Valentine’s a day early with Red Light Lit. The show is a mashup of poetry, storytelling, and art set to a live score by Nick Jaina. Featuring the photography of Kim Huynh, the music of Sarah Gagnon, and dancers Kara Davis, Tristan Ching Hartmann & Mackenzie Studebaker. Readers include: Peter Thomas Bullen, Kar Johnson, Lisa Martinovic, Sarah Bethe Nelson, and Thea Matthews.
Tickets are $15 at the door, $20 day of show.

Howard Eiland at City Lights Books
2020-02-13 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States

So This Sucks: A Night of Heartbreak & Disappointment
2020-02-13 19:00 - 22:30 | The Black Box Theater at The Palace of Fine Arts, 3601 Lyon St., San Francisco, CA, 94123-1019, United States
Heartbroken? Join us. Single? Join us. Not single? Well let’s be real, you live in the Bay Area, so chances are you will be VERY soon. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
From the creators of About Last Night – San Francisco’s favorite one night stand storytelling series comes our annual Valentine’s day show: SO THIS SUCKS. Come hear true tales of heartbreak and disappointment from the choppy waters of our favorite subject: Love. You might laugh, you might cry, you might do a little bit of both. But as the old saying goes, broken hearts are way stronger together and laughter truly is the best medicine!
The Black Box Theater At The Palace Of Fine Arts – 3601 Lyon Street
Doors open at 7:00 pm, show begins at 7:30 pm.
Stick around after for the post show Heartbreak cocktail hour from 9:30 – 10:30pm
*21+
PRESALE: $10 & $15
LAST MINUTE / AT DOOR: $20

You're Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes
2020-02-13 19:30 - 22:30 | The Lost Church, 65 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes… Open Mic at The Lost Church – San Francisco w/Ned Buskirk
$10 in advance & at the door.
TICKETS HERE: http://bit.ly/YG2D_Feb13_SF
And support MORE with ticket tiers. You choose the amount.
The tickets tiers are direct ways of offering more support to YG2D, a 501(c)3 Non-profit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death & dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality.
Thank you for any additional help you can offer.
And please contact ned@yg2d.com if you need financial support to be a part of the evening.
Venue: The Lost Church – San Francisco
The Lost Church is CASH ONLY at the door (at this time).
Doors at 7:30pm.
Show at 8:15pm.
All performances end at 10:30pm.
Seating is first come, first served.
We recommend you buy in advance to ensure being a part of the event (parlor shows often sell out), but you can also try purchasing at the door on the night of the show (although, we do NOT set aside a block of tickets for door purchase)
Ages 10 and over are welcome. (Parental discretion is advised for some events).
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes…
is an open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality,
to grieve, bereave & honor those we’ve lost & love… while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Some words from Destiny Grace on her musical offering for the evening: “Music has always been a healer in my life. It’s held me when a body couldn’t; it’s given me the power to alchemize my grief into something beautiful and way less scary or intimidating. For me, creating songs is like choosing specific emotions or memories and building them altars of remembrance that I can return to whenever I need to. Writing & playing music acts as a tool to articulate my sometimes painful emotions into something less abstract and more concrete; something not only I can find catharsis in, but when shared, can also build a bridge to others who have shared experiences.”
Sign-ups will be the night of & the list fills up quickly, so if you want to perform, you’d better get there early…
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And we will hug you when we have to stop you [just to make it easier on you (or harder – depending on your propensity for intimacy)].
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so do whatever you want.
You don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please don’t perform anything with a setup that takes much more time than the time it takes for you to walk onstage. Honestly, plugging things in is endlessly boring. If you need to borrow an instrument, figure it out before you’re called to the stage.
IMPORTANT ::: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY. Come and have fun. The end. Remember. Someday, we won’t exist and neither will the English language. If you choose to take yourself seriously, then take yourself so seriously that it’s stupid. Ridiculousness is encouraged.
You’re Going to Die. No. Really. You are.

CAFÉ SOCIETY PRESENTS ROBERT HASS
2020-02-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Kaleidoscope Coffee, 109 Park Place, Point Richmond, California, 94801, United States
Robert Hass reads from his new collection, Summer Snow, in Point Richmond.
A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide(1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Love Songs for Dyslexic Hearts: A Night of Poetry at Alley Cat Books
2020-02-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Featuring Kim Shuck and the legendary bloodflower. Featuring Jack Hirschman, Rusty Rebar, Wrob Rosenberger, Jack Mellender, James Zealous, and the legendary bloodflower! The second hour is an OPEN MIC so be sure to sign up!

Enter Generations
2020-02-14 20:00 - 21:30 | Counterpulse, 80 Turk St, San Francisco, 94102
ENTER GENERATIONS: A Night of Intergenerational QTPOC Brilliance, curated by Shannon Prasad, Greg Pond, and Dazie Grego-Sykes with the support of Queer Rebels, in their first ever queer inter-generational curatorial residency. Join us for a free night of performances featuring community elders, Maria Medina, Blackberri and Mali. Each of these legends will be collaborating with emerging or mid-career artists to create original performances creating conversations that have been lost throughout our generations. These performers include The Global Street Dance Masquerade, Chibueze Crouch, Gabriel Christian, SNJV, Mirza, Benny Avalos, and Ferny Miguel. Together with our evening’s host, the talented Baruch Porras-Hernandez.
At this critical moment, we feel the urgency in sharing the rich stories and experiences of our QTPoC community. It is vital that we take up space as a community. This multi-generational evening of performance is the beginning of a conversation and a reclaiming of our own Queer Histories.
*Work in Progress Show will be held on Friday Jan 24th 2020 8:00 – 9:00pm at CounterPulse.*
**This event is wheelchair accessible and will have an ASL interpreter.**

A Tribute to Toni Morrison
2020-02-15 08:00 - 17:00 | Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post Street, San Francisco, CA, United States
Join this extraordinary evening to celebrate and honor one of America’s most important authors who gave voice to of the African American experience through the history of slavery, family and community. This program hosted by author Sarah Lapido Manyika (Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun) features acclaimed Bay Area authors including Michael Chabon (Book ends, Pops, Moonglow), Natalie Baszile (Queen Sugar), poet Tongo Eisen-Martin (Heaven Is All Goodbyes) and Professor Ato Quayson of Stanford University. Panelists will engage in a lively conversation about the influence and impact of Morrison’s life and work and read favorite selections.

‘Heartbeat’, A Film by Will Combs featuring Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, ‘Hube the Cube’ and others
2020-02-15 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
As a young film student immersed with the works of Godard and cinema verite’, Will Combs barged into the backyard of the remaining Beats in San Francisco’s North Beach in the mid-1970’s. Using surplus film stock and a spring-wind Bolex, he began to capture the temperament of the Era, kabuki style. HEARTBEAT features rare and personal footage of Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline and Hube the Cube in their environment, infusing poetry with a concise inquiry into the Beat Era.

Clement: Schulkind, McClung, Grafton, & Barnes
2020-02-16 16:00 - 18:00 | Green Apple Books Clement Street, 506 Clement Street, San Francisco, 94118, United States
About the Authors
Lynne Barnes was born in Georgia and moved to New York City in 1968 with a front row ticket
to HAIR, before migrating to San Francisco in 1969, two years after the Summer of Love. She
was part of a commune that thrived for twenty years in the Haight Ashbury. She is a former
psych nurse and librarian. Her beloved partner, Carole, created the cover art for her book.
FALLING INTO FLOWERS was the recipient of the 2017 Rainbow Award for Best Gay and Lesbian
Poetry, a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award, and received Honorable Mention in both
the “Gay” and “Poetry” categories for the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival.
Grace Marie Grafton’s latest book, LENS, from Unsolicited Press, features poems inspired by
the art of California. Six additional collections of her poetry have been published. Her poems
won first prize in the Soul Making contest (PEN women, San Francisco), in Bellingham Review,
and from The National Women’s Book Association, and have twice been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. Ms. Grafton taught with CA Poets in the Schools, earning twelve CA Arts Council
grants for her teaching programs. Recent poems appear in basalt, Sin Fronteras, Pirene’s
Fountain, Canary, Nostos, Ambush, Peacock Journal, and Mezzo Cammin.
Kathleen McClung is the author of two poetry collections, The Typists Play Monopoly and
Almost the Rowboat. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies including Southwest
Review, Naugatuck River Review, Mezzo Cammin, The MacGuffin, Forgotten Women,
Sanctuary, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and elsewhere. Winner of the Rita Dove,
Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust national poetry prizes, she is a Pushcart and
Best of the Net nominee. Associate director of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition, she
has mentored hundreds of writers at Skyline College, The Writing Salon, and other colleges and
has taught/advised student teachers in the credential program at Mills College. For ten years
she has directed Women on Writing: WOW Voices Now on the Skyline campus. In 2018-2019
she is a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Laura Schulkind, an attorney by day, is entrusted with others’ stories. Through poetry she tells
her own. She has two poetry chapbooks, both published by Finishing Line Press, The Long Arc of
Grief (2019) and Lost in Tall Grass (2014). Her writing has also appeared in numerous literary
journals including: The Dallas Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Dos Passos Review, Forge, The
MacGuffin, and Reed Magazine.
Her recent collection The Long Arc of Grief, dedicated to her parents, was impelled by suddenly
finding herself in a world without them. But it also moves beyond grief, exploring how we all
not merely carry on, but live. In telling these stories, she has been described as, “a fearless
truth-teller, shining the light of her poetic language on details we well might have missed
otherwise–the small, miraculous moments of discovery, heartbreak and redemption.” Barbara
Quick (Vivaldi’s Virgins) Her published work, and additional reviews can also be found at:
www.lauraschulkind.com, along with musings on why “lawyer-poet” isn’t an oxymoron.

Dia Felix and Matt Longabucco
2020-02-17 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Come out for an impromptu reading featuring Dia Felix and their longtime pal Matt Longabucco!! Also featuring super surprise guests!! Come for the reading and stay for the surprise!

Gish Jen at The Ruby: Potluck and Discussion!
2020-02-18 12:00 - 13:30 | The Ruby, 23rd and bryant street, san francisco, 94110
Join us for a very special lunchtime conversation with award-winning novelist, Gish Jen. Jen will be in conversation with our very own Mimi Lok about her latest novel, The Resisters (Knopf, February 2020), which Ann Patchett has called ‘a stone-cold masterpiece.’ The Resisters is a dystopian story set in the not-too-distant future in what has become known as AutoAmerica that follows a family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value–as well as their very existence. Books will be available for purchase! NOTE: this event is a potluck so bring a dish to share!
About Gish Jen: Gish Jen has published short work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her newest novel is her eighth book. Called THE RESISTERS, it will be published by Knopf in February 2020.
About Mimi Lok: Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name, published October 2019 by Kaya Press. The title story was a finalist for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, LitHub, Nimrod, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, the South China Morning Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel. Mimi is also the executive director and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit she cofounded that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Typewriter Art: Typestracts, Artyping, and Constellation Poetry
2020-02-18 18:00 - 19:30 | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Before ASCII art there was typewriter art. Taking advantage of a widely available office tool, artists and poets used the typewriter to forge a new genre of art and poetry. Breaking the grid and exploding words, these artists and poets used the limitations and practicalities of the typewriter to create beautiful and thought provoking pieces.

Dennis Baron at City Lights Bookstore
2020-02-18 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She
Published by Liveright

Addressing one of the most pressing cultural questions of our generation, Dennis Baron reveals the untold story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular-they.
Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns along with their majors; corporate conferences print name tags with space to add pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are, however, nothing new. Pioneering linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, noting that Shakespeare used singular-they; women invoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women’s rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she); and people have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie, for centuries. Based on Baron’s own empirical research, What’s Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played—and continue to play—in establishing both our rights and our identities. It is an essential work in understanding how twenty-first-century culture has evolved.
Dennis Baron, professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, has long been a national commentator on language issues, from the Washington Post to NPR and CNN. He is the author of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Champaign, Illinois.

Conor Dougherty: Golden Gates
2020-02-18 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Conor Dougherty discusses his new book Golden Gates: Fighting For Housing in America.
Praise for Golden Gates
“Golden Gates is a careful consideration of the Bay Area’s slow-burning housing crisis and deepening socioeconomic cleft, and a finely reported exploration of some more recent accelerants: political infighting, arcane policy, the strictures and incentives of capitalism, and, of course, the rapid growth and ascendance of Silicon Valley tech corporations. With precision, insight, and flashes of humor, Conor Dougherty delivers intimate glimpses of a region in transition, and a sobering reminder that San Francisco, these days, is not so much an exception as a harbinger of the future for America’s cities.”—Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley
“Golden Gates is a terrific work of explanatory journalism. If you want to understand the colliding forces that have turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a housing powder keg and threaten to engulf many more cities across the country, you need to read this book.”—John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood
“How do we solve a problem like California, with its three-hour commutes and sky-high rents? Deeply-reported and fast-paced, Golden Gates introduces you to the people fighting for and against affordable housing in one of the world’s hottest real estate markets. In following the clashes between political leaders, tenant activists, developers, and working families, Dougherty brings a novel perspective to one of the nation’s most urgent problems.”— Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
About Golden Gates
A stunning, deeply reported investigation into the housing crisis
Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties where the homeless make their homes. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale.
With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty chronicles America’s housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist uprisings that have risen in tandem with housing costs.
To tell this new story of housing, Dougherty follows a struggling math teacher who builds a political movement dedicated to ending single-family-house neighborhoods. A teenaged girl who leads her apartment complex against their rent-raising landlord. A nun who tries to outmaneuver private equity investors by amassing a multimillion-dollar portfolio of affordable homes. A suburban bureaucrat who roguishly embraces density in response to the threat of climate change. A developer who manufactures homeless housing on an assembly line.
Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Golden Gates captures a vast political realignment during a moment of rapid technological and social change.

Vincent Meis Reads at Dog Eared Books Castro
2020-02-19 19:00 - 20:00 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Novelist Vincent Meis reads from his just off the presses new novel, Four Calling Birds, 7pm, Wednesday, February 19 from at Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro St. in San Francisco. The event is free.
The four Burd siblings head to Mexico to heal and regroup after the death of their mother. Midlife crises are revealed. At the age of forty-seven, M wonders if she is too old to transition to the man she has been hiding inside her. Augie has a perfect gay family with a loving husband and an adorable bi-racial son. And yet, something is missing. The charismatic Lio has squandered his marriage and relationship with his daughter in favor of a hedonistic lifestyle. The youngest sibling, AJ, is married to a man emboldened by the election of a fascist bully as president. It takes a kidnapping to shake them out of their self-absorption, sending them on a new journey.
Meis has published four previous novels: Eddie’s Desert Rose (2011), Tio Jorge (2012), and Down in Cuba (2013), and Deluge (2016). Tio Jorge received a Rainbow Award in the category of Bisexual Fiction in 2012. Down in Cuba received two Rainbow Awards in 2013, and Deluge a Rainbow Award in 2016. Recently, his stories have been published in three collections: With: New Gay Fiction, Best Gay Erotica 2015, and Best Gay Erotica, Vol. 1. He has published pieces in publications such as The Advocate, LA Weekly, In Style, and Our World. He lives in San Leandro, California with his husband.

Catana Chetwynd / Snug
2020-02-19 19:00 - 20:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith presents Catana Chetwynd, in San Francisco for the first time to present her new book, Snug. Come meet Catana and her boyfriend John!
Please note: This is a ticketed event, to be held at Booksmith (1644 Haight St.). The price of admission is equal to the cost of Snug and/or Little Moments of Love, which are included with each ticket — it’s also possible, in advance only, to get 2 tickets with just 1 book — please be sure to read the ticketing information closely. Advance tickets are highly encouraged — tickets are not guaranteed to be available at the door.

Why bother getting out of bed when you could stay bundled up with that special someone and a book of cozy, cute comics. From the author of the bestselling Little Moments of Love comes Snug, a collection of comics that perfectly captures the honest, playful, and relatable snapshots of romantic life.
Chetwynds second book has the same charming and inviting style as her first and includes 50 percent new, never-before-shared comics. Snug is a celebration of the quirks and peculiarities of every one of usand the magic that happens when we find our matching puzzle piece.

Catana Chetwynd is a self-taught traditional artist and the enthusiastic author of Catana Comics. She grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she spent her time creating art and pursing an education in psychology until accidentally stumbling into the world of comics. Not only is her boyfriend John the daily inspiration for her drawings, but he was also the one who suggested a comic series about their relationship in the first place. Thanks to his idea and his inspiring daily antics, Catana was able to pursue her childhood dream of being a cartoonist. She currently lives on the East Coast with John and their tiny, angry dog Murph.

** Please note **
– This is an all-ages event.
– The duration of this event is up to the authors.
– Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
– To join the signing line, you must purchase a book from Booksmith — no exceptions. If you already have a copy of Snug and Little Moments of Love, remember that books make great gifts! If you’ve already gifted both of Catana’s books to all of your friends, it’s ok to buy a different book from Booksmith instead — in that case, please write events AT booksmith DOT com.
– Candid photos will be allowed but due to timing we are unable to accommodate requests for posed photos.
– Accessibility is important to us! Please let us know in advance if you have any special needs and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.
– If you can’t attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Snug, order below and be sure to enter your request in the special field.

Word for Word presents: RETABLOS By Octavio Solis
2020-02-19 19:00 - 2020-03-15 21:00 | Z Space, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Featuring the Chapters Retablos, The Way Over, Consuelo, El Judío, La Migra, La Llorona, Nothing Happens, The Quince, Mexican Apology, El Segundo, Neto, My Right Foot, and Jeep in the Water
February 19 – March 15
Directed by Sheila Balter and Jim Cave
Word for Word’s latest full production is from author & playwright Octavio Solis. Retablos is a coming of age memoir; each chapter a memory tale, verging on fable, which paints a dreamlike picture of life in El Paso in the 60’s and ’70’s. Drawing from his own childhood, Solis says that he wrote these stories “to see how that skinny brown kid riding his bike out there in the desert made sense of his complicated, deeply beautiful and troubled world.” Octaviosolis.net

TICKETS

“A retablo is a devotional painting, playwright Octavio Solis tells us. In this poignantly written, heart-warming coming-of-age memoir, Solis pays tribute to those cornerstone moments in his life, negotiating borders at once personal and cultural, with such color that the reader is left spellbound. Astonishing, what more can I say?”
—Greg Sarris, author of How a Mountain Was Made and longtime Word for Word friend

An Evening with Octavio Solis
Join us on February 27. The evening’s performance of Retablos will be followed by a conversation with the author, moderated by Greg Sarris. Both writers are longtime friends of Word for Word. Mr. Solis is a nationally renowned playwright in addition to being a prose author, and Greg Sarris is Tribal Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. The evening includes a reception and book signing to cap off the night.

PURCHASE TICKETS FOR THIS EVENT

Radar: Show Us Your Spines Resident Reading
2020-02-20 18:00 - 20:00 | El Rio, 3158 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
SHOW US YOUR SPINES is a month-long writer residency + reading in collaboration with the SF Public Library’s Hormel Center. For a month QTIPOC writers work with Hormel Center LGBTQIA archives around a specific queer theme, writing/producing a piece that will then be read/presented the following month at a local venue.

FEATURING:
al aguas
Kiyaan Abadani
madhvi trivedi-pathak
Maneo Refiloe Mohale

Catana Chetwynd / Snug
2020-02-20 18:30 - 21:00 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith presents Catana Chetwynd, in San Francisco for the first time to present her new book, Snug. Come meet Catana and her boyfriend John!
PLEASE NOTE:
>> Due to popular demand, we have added a second night with Catana and John! Wed, Feb 19 is completely sold out.
TICKETS ARE NOW FOR SALE HERE for Thurs, Feb 20.
Advance tickets are highly encouraged — tickets are not guaranteed to be available at the door.
We have also moved both events up to a 6:30pm start time, so Catana can have more time with each fan. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at events@booksmith.com.

Why bother getting out of bed when you could stay bundled up with that special someone and a book of cozy, cute comics. From the author of the bestselling Little Moments of Love comes Snug, a collection of comics that perfectly captures the honest, playful, and relatable snapshots of romantic life.
Chetwynds second book has the same charming and inviting style as her first and includes 50 percent new, never-before-shared comics. Snug is a celebration of the quirks and peculiarities of every one of usand the magic that happens when we find our matching puzzle piece.

Catana Chetwynd is a self-taught traditional artist and the enthusiastic author of Catana Comics. She grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she spent her time creating art and pursing an education in psychology until accidentally stumbling into the world of comics. Not only is her boyfriend John the daily inspiration for her drawings, but he was also the one who suggested a comic series about their relationship in the first place. Thanks to his idea and his inspiring daily antics, Catana was able to pursue her childhood dream of being a cartoonist. She currently lives on the East Coast with John and their tiny, angry dog Murph.

** Please note **
– This is an all-ages event.
– The duration of this event is up to the authors.
– Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
– To join the signing line, you must purchase a book from Booksmith — no exceptions. If you already have a copy of Snug and Little Moments of Love, remember that books make great gifts! If you’ve already gifted both of Catana’s books to all of your friends, it’s ok to buy a different book from Booksmith instead — in that case, please write events AT Booksmith DOT com.
– Candid photos will be allowed but due to timing, we are unable to accommodate requests for posed photos.
– Accessibility is important to us! Please let us know in advance if you have any special needs and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.
– If you can’t attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Snug, order below and be sure to enter your request in the special field.

William T. Vollmann
2020-02-20 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his new novel
The Lucky Star: A Novel
published by Viking/Penguin
The National Book Award winning author returns to his original fictional territory–the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco–with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society
In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote of pimps, prostitutes, addicts and homeless dreamers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns there with a story that centers around a woman with magical powers whom everyone loves, and who has to love them all back.
After being initiated into a coven of island witches, Neva begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Her worshippers include Richard, the introverted, alcoholic, occasionally omniscient narrator; a profane, aggressive transgender sex worker named Shantelle; the brisk but motherly barmaid Francine; and the former Frank, who has renamed herself after her idol Judy Garland. When Judy starts to love Neva too much, Judy’s retired policeman boyfriend embarks on a mission of exposure and destruction.
Crafted out of language by turns spiritual and sexually graphic, The Lucky Star aches with compassion as it explores celebrity culture, gender identity, incest, Christian sacrifice and, most of all, the quotidian and sometimes faltering heroism of marginalized people who in the face of humiliation and outright violence seek to love in their own way, and stand up for who they are.
Praise for The Lucky Star
“[A] provocatively playful novel . . . As Neva evolves from an innocent to an icon on par with Marlene Dietrich, at least in the eyes of the Y Bar circle, she guides and mentors their sexual self-discovery, helping define their boundaries and gain confidence . . . Vollmann’s challenging novel is full of memorable moments.” —Publishers Weekly
“Vollmann pours his signature fascination with outcasts, women’s sexuality, violence, and injustice into this gargantuan, omnivorously explicit, ravening orgy of trauma and resilience. Rooted in interviews with women survivors, this is a molten amalgam of cynicism and compassion, horror and beauty.” —Booklist
William T Vollmann is an award winning novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, essayist, and painter. He is the author of ten novels, four short story collections, nine works of non-fiction, and numerous limited special editions. His novel Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award. He has won numerous honors for his work including the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction.

The Racket : Revenge
2020-02-20 19:00 - 20:30 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
There are themes and then there are THEMES and no one is surprised that REVENGE is absolutely a THEME. We imagine tales of murder and lust and backstabbing and danger and excitement and sex (there is has to be sex right?) and for some reason we think everything is covered in thick, red velvet and dimly lit and maybe there’s a vampire because vampires are probably pretty vengeful but maybe that’s just because now we’re thinking thick, red velvet and goblets full of red wine and maybe some of these stories will be set in castles with vampires… Could somebody please dump some ice on us so we can cool down?
Anyways, it’s going to be quite the evening.
Free beer, until it is not around anymore.

In Common Writers Series: Jennifer Bartlett and Denise Leto, reading and in conversation
2020-02-20 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series opens 2020 with a double program featuring two remarkable poet/writers, each with significant work in disability poetics and activism. This event—the first of two evenings with Jennifer Bartlett and Denise Leto—is supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, and is free and open to the public.
Jennifer Bartlett was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Vermont College. She is the author of Hindrances of a Householder (Chax 2016), Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (theenk Books, 2014), lullaby without any music (Chax Press, 2012), and Derivative of the Moving Image (University of New Mexico Press, 2007). Of her work, Nathaniel Tarn writes, “Jennifer Bartlett has created not a new form of surrealism, nor of magical realism, but a kind of supernal realism which leaves room for dreams, visions, and angels as well as the panoplies of both country and urban life.”
Bartlett is currently finishing a biography on the life of Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner. In 2017, she cofounded Zoeglossia, a literary organization pioneering an inclusive space for poets with disabilities. With Sheila Black and Michael Northen, she also coedited Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Bartlett has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsel, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the University of Connecticut, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and she works part-time in the Office of the President of New York City Transit. Here she works with a team on bringing accessibility to the New York City transit system. In addition to being a poet and writer, she is an activist for people with disabilities throughout New York.
Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, writer, editor, and dance dramaturge. She wrote the book of poetry for the collaborative dance performance Your Body is Not a Shark, exploring feminist embodiment, voice, and disability poetics. Her work has appeared in publications such as Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art; The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde; and Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Iowa, Naropa University, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Breadloaf Poetry Fellowship in Sicily, and the Queer Sugarloaf Art Residency. Denise is a member of Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. The collaborative article, “In Practice: A Dancer Poet Creature Conversation” with Sima Belmar was published in the December issue of In Dance. Her current project is an ecopoetic exploration of the San Francisco Bay. New poems are forthcoming in Quarterly West and Rogue Agent.

Related event:
In Common Writers Series
Denise Leto and Jennifer Bartlett
reading from their work
Friday February 21
7:00 pm @ The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street (at Gough), San Francisco
free and open to the public
supported by The Walter & Elise Haas Fund
Featured:
Zoeglossia: A Community for Writers with Disabilities
In Practice: A Dancer Poet Creature Conversation with Denise Leto (with Sima Belmar)

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Paul E. Joseph in conversation with with Dr. Waldo E. Martin Jr. at City Lights Books
2020-02-20 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
published by Basic Books

This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders.
To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement’s militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.
Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan professor of political values and ethics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written several previous books on African American history, including Stokely: A Life. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Dr. Waldo E. Martin Jr. is a life long activist and educator. He is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of numerous important books on African American history which include: “No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America” and as co-author with Joshua Bloom “Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party”,

Jenny Offill: Weather
2020-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Jenny Offill discusses her new novel Weather.
Praise for Weather
“This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy.”–Ocean Vuong
“Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes.”–Sheila Heti
“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.”–Jonathan Dee
About Weather
From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation–one of the New York Times Book Review‘s Ten Best Books of the Year–a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She’s become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience–but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she’s learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in–funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Diane Keaton
2020-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Academy-award winning actress Diane Keaton has starred in some of the most memorable films of the past forty years, including the Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, Manhattan, The First Wives Club, and Something’s Gotta Give. She is the author of the best-selling memoir Then Again and the essay collection Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. Her new memoir, Brother & Sister, explores Keaton’s relationship with her brother, and their divergent life paths. Intertwined with photographs, journal entries, letters, and poetry, this insightful memoir contemplates the inner workings of a family, the ties that hold it together, and the special bond between siblings, even when they are pulled far apart.
