Litseen

Zach Wyner
2016-09-29 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Friends,
Please join us for an evening of literary-laced bonhomie to celebrate Zach Wyner and his debut novel, What We Never Had, Rare Bird Books.
The Where: The Booksmith on September, 29th at 7:30PM.
The What: Join us for a rolling conversation and reading by two Bay Area debut novelists.
Zach Wyner and Calder G. Lorenz, One Way Down (Or Another), Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017, will share stories of why they write and what they hope to find at the end of this long road we call publication.
We hope to see you there. And to perhaps share a drink at The Zam Zam after the event.
Check out Zach Wyner’s debut novel, What We Never Had, either at your local independent bookstore, or on Indiebound or Amazon. Your support really makes a difference.

Incidents of Travel in Poetry: The Poems of Frank Lima
2016-09-30 19:00 - 20:00 | Folio Books, 3957 24th St, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Join City Lights’ Poetry Editor Garrett Caples, and Berkeley-based poet, Julien Poirier, for a presentation from their co-edited, posthumous Frank Lima anthology, Incidents of Travel in Poetry. A classically trained chef, born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, Lima’s poems are steeped in the pain and playfulness of the urban milieu in which they were created. Caples and Poirier will also read from their own works, including Caples’ new collection Power Ballads, published this month by Wave Books.

Tanya Holtland, Jennifer S. Cheng, + Maxwell Shanley
2016-09-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Join Seattle-based poet Tanya Holtland and featured poets Jennifer S. Cheng (HOUSE A, forthcoming from Omnidawn) and Maxwell Shanley (THERE ARE TREES I SEE MY DEATH IN, forthcoming from Drop Leaf Press) to celebrate the release of Holtland’s chapbook, INNER RIVER, available now from Drop Leaf Press.
Drop Leaf Press’ first chapbook series launches with Tanya Holtland’s INNER RIVER, whose unusual format carries us across the breadth of the page and into the depths of our darkest and saturated currents of being. In verse both formal and experimental, Holtland interposes the geographies and geometries of natural landscapes with the metaphysical processes of memory and the building (and re-building) of a self.
About Our Readers:
TANYA HOLTLAND is a poet with roots in California and many other places. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in The Collagist, Statement Magazine, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, OXALIS, and elsewhere. She holds English and Creative Writing degrees from San Francisco State University. Currently she makes a home in Seattle, where there is so much water.
JENNIFER S. CHENG is the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, forthcoming this October. A Fulbright scholar, Kundiman fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee, she has an image-text chapbook, Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press), and her work appears in Tin House, AGNI, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, The Volta, and elsewhere. Having grown up in Texas, Hong Kong, and Connecticut, she currently lives in San Francisco, where she is a founding editor of Drop Leaf Press. www.jenniferscheng.com
MAXWELL SHANLEY lives in San Francisco, where he works as a bookseller. He is currently completing an MFA at San Francisco State University.

Mark Thompson Memorial Reading
2016-09-30 19:00 - 20:30 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Mark Thompson lived until August 9, 2016 as a gay man, author, activist, proud leatherman, and lover. He wrote or edited several landmark Queer books, including the trilogy Gay Spirit, Gay Soul, and Gay Body as well as the books The Fire in the Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries; Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice; and Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement.
Come together Friday, September 30 at 7pm to celebrate Mark’s words and life at Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro St. in San Francisco. Free admission and free refreshments. Copies of a selection of Mark’s books will be available for purchase.
Readers include Joey Cain, Brendan Cook, Ganymede, Trebor Healey, Rick May, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Carol Queen, Andrew Ramer, Will Roscoe, Sister Merry Peter, Karen Sundheim, Justin Tanis, Jim Van Buskirk, and Ken White. Trebor Healey and Rick May will mc.

Descent Into Madness (Book of the Un Release Party)
2016-10-01 20:00 - 2016-10-02 02:00 | Minna Alley, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco , CA, 94105, United States
Come celebrate the release of the Book Of The Un, my sequel to the Book of the Is, Fail to Win. Essays in engineered disperfection! The Book of the Un is a book about Control. It’s about the patterns that I’ve witnessed over decades of experience with emerging art organizations. It deconstructs the systems that foster the Chaos that creates the ecology that makes the kind of art that changes the world. What works and what doesn’t. It’s a fascinating topic, and so we are roping off Minna street and throwing a parade in 3 acts with all the fabulous costumes from the Fallen Cosmos and tons of interactive art and shenannigans.
Admission to this party is included for those that supported my kickstarter. If you’d like to attend this party, you can buy tickets which includes a copy of the book) here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/descent-into-madness-release-party-for-the-book-of-the-un-tickets-26850023142
Imagine all of the art and the performances overflowing from the 111 Minna Gallery onto the street… Interact with the strange characters from the Fallen Cosmos (with a potential guest appearance from the one and only Lee Von Lear!)… See what other psycho-shitshow-curiosities we have in store!
Here is a video that KQED produced when we did the street party 5 years ago for the release of the Book of the Is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuwM6v6aG-M
… What will we do this time?!

Bazaar Writers Salon
2016-10-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Bazaar Writers Salon
Readings by Ari Banias, James J. Siegel, Meryl Natchez, and Noah Warren
Hosted by Peter Kline
Sunday, October 2nd, 2016, 6:00 p.m.
Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St., San Francisco

The WordParty Returns!
2016-10-03 19:00 - 21:00 | PianoFight, 144 Taylor St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
The WordParty Poetry & Jazz series returns from hiatus to a new venue! Come on down to PianoFight, in the front room and join us for dinner, drinks and read your poem live with the Nova Jazz band.
Hosted by Jennifer Barone and Ingrid Keir with special guests.
Free admission, all ages, full menu and bar.
Open Mic open to poets and poetry only – 3min time limit, one really good poem to read with live jazz accompaniment.
Register for the event on Eventbrite here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-wordparty-tickets-27296319025?aff=pfcal&_eboga=2068039441.1472079537

Eowyn Ivey
2016-10-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn’t return–once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there’s no telling what awaits him.
The Wolverine River Valley is not only breathtaking and forbidding but also terrifying in ways that the colonel and his men never could have imagined. As they map the territory and gather information on the native tribes, whose understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they have ever encountered, Forrester and his men discover the blurred lines between human and wild animal, the living and the dead. And while the men knew they would face starvation and danger, they cannot escape the sense that some greater, mysterious force threatens their lives.
Meanwhile, on her own at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie chafes under the social restrictions and yearns to travel alongside her husband. She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it does her husband, that both her courage and faith will be tested to the breaking point. Can her exploration of nature through the new art of photography help her to rediscover her sense of beauty and wonder?
In To the Bright Edge of the World, the truths that Allen and Sophie discover over the course of that fateful year change both of their lives — and the lives of those who hear their stories long after they’re gone — forever.
Eowyn LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She received her BA in journalism and minor in creative writing through the honors program at Western Washington University, studied creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage graduate program, and worked for nearly 10 years as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Snow Child.

Josefine Klougart
2016-10-04 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for Josefine Klougart:
“Scandinavia now has its own Virginia Woolf. Few get as close to the human mind as Klougart.” —VG

About One of Us is Sleeping:
The English-language debut from one of Denmark’s most exciting, celebrated young writers, “One of Us Is Sleeping “is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms.
Working in the vein of Anne Carson, Josefine Klougart’s novel is both true-to-life and incredibly poetic in its relating of a brief, intense love affair and the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. While she recounts the time with her lover, the narrator is also heading back home, where her mother is dying of cancer. This contrast between recollection and the belief that certain things will always be present in your life your parents, your childhood home, your love and the fact that life is a continual series of endings runs throughout the book, underpinning the striking imagery and magnificent prose.
A powerful novel that earned Klougart numerous accolades and several award nominations including the Readers Book Award “One of Us Is Sleeping “marks the launch of a major new voice in world literature.
Josefine Klougart has been hailed as one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary writers. She is the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She’s been compared to a range of authors, including Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.

Anne Raeff + Anthony Marra
2016-10-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for The Jungle Around Us
“This masterful collection records the long psychic toll of the twentieth century’s traumas, offering portraits of people in various kinds of exile: displaced from their countries, or uneasy in their hometowns, or somehow alien in their own bodies and minds. Anne Raeff’s exquisite stories are remarkable for their combination of intimacy and reverence for the mysteries and private griefs her characters fold their lives around. Seldom have I read work so confident in the power of what’s left unspoken and in the deep eloquence of gesture. The Jungle Around Us is a haunting and breathtakingly beautiful book.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“The stories in The Jungle Around Us do not try to make sense of the world–they are the world. A world of uncanny sharpness that is as bold as it is striking in its uncompromising, haunting depictions of longing and uncertainty and grief and bliss. The jungle Anne Raeff proposes us to enter is, in reality, not around us, in the intricated destinations of displacement where this book takes place–from Bolivia to Austria, from Leningrad to Albuquerque, from Harlem to El Tambor–but within ourselves. The protagonists in these stories are commanded by loss and desire and uprootedness and the scalding need for human connection, but unlike those from any other work of fiction that might be too self-conscious of its own ambitions, they struggle handling these emotions. Raeff’s characters are too complex, too fully fleshed out, too human to know what step to take next, and this is, perhaps, the biggest feat of many she has achieved with this ravishing collection. Her talent is rare and transfixing, and this book marks the arrival of a marvelous new voice.” —Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs

While struggling with fear, danger, and displacement, the characters of “The Jungle around Us” form strange and powerful bonds in distant and unlikely places. A family that has escaped Vienna ends up on the edge of the Amazon, where the parents fight yellow fever and the daughter falls in love with a village boy. Two sisters learn lessons about race and war during the Columbia University riots of1968. A young girl confronts death when her former babysitter is mysteriously murdered. In Paraguay, two adult sisters confront their loneliness while their precocious young charge faces off with a monkey. Raeff’s stories are about embracing the world though the world contains everything we fear.

Anne Raeff is a high school teacher at East Palo Alto Academy, where she teaches English and history. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among others. Her first novel is Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia.

Anthony Marra is the New York Times-bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award.

iO Tillett Wright
2016-10-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Second Act, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
iO Tillett Wright presents Darling Days, an extraordinary coming of age memoir set in the urban bohemia of 1980s New York’s Lower East Side, where punk, poverty, heroin, and art ruled the roost. Raised by single mother Rhona, a mercurial Glamazon showgirl, iO was encouraged from an early age to break boundaries. When a group of boys refuse to let six-year-old iO play ball, iO instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy, a choice Rhona celebrates. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years, and the beginning of a life invented and reinvented at every step. Harrowing and hilarious, Darling Days is a provocative examination of culture and identity, and of the courage and resilience of each child’s unique expression.
iO Tillett Wright is an artist, activist, actor, speaker, TV host and writer. iO’s work deals with identity, be it through photography and the Self Evident Truths Project/We Are You campaign or on television as the co-host of MTV’s Suspect. iO has exhibited artwork in New York and Tokyo and was a featured contributor on Underground Culture to T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her photography has been featured in GQ, Elle, New York Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. iO is a regular speaker at universities, discussing expanding one’s circle of normalcy and embracing those that are different than you. A native New Yorker, iO is now based in Los Angeles.

Vanessa Hua Book Launch
2016-10-05 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Vanessa Hua presents her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, in conversation withZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon. The characters in these stories vividly illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change: a Hong Kong movie idol flees a sex scandal; an obedient daughter lies about attending Stanford; a Chinatown elder is summoned to his ancestral village, and a Korean-American pastor hides a secret agenda. Hua explores the clash of cultures and the complex, shifting allegiances we carry with us as we make our way forward in a new land. Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable new writer.
Vanessa Hua has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, FRONTLINE/World,Washington Post, and elsewhere. Previously, she was a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and has filed stories from China, South Korea, Panama, Burma and Ecuador. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s Phelan Award for Fiction, and is a former Steinbeck Fellow in Fiction at San Jose State University. Her novel, A River of Stars, is forthcoming from Ballantine.
Oscar Villalon is the managing editor of ZYZZVA, the former books editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Believer.

California Dreamin': A night of poetry celebrating the golden state w/ Gioia, Ahmed, + Lindenberg
2016-10-06 18:00 - 20:00 | a.Muse art gallery & meeting place, 614 Alabama Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
A reading with California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia and McSweeney’s poets Zubair Ahmed and Rebecca Lindenberg.
Three poets coming together to read their work and share their favorite poems capturing the California ethos. There will be a wine reception and book signing. Readings to commence at 6:30.

Best American Non-Required Reading 2016
2016-10-06 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Anthony Marra, Kyle Boelte, and student contributors Isaac Schott-Rosenfield, Sian Ee, and Emma Hardison join us to celebrate the 12th annual installment of the annual Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology.

About The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016
If you need to fall in love with reading again or just want a reminder that high school students deserve a lot more than their reading lists give them then this is the book for you. “Best” Guest editor Rachel Kushner, author of “The Flamethrowers, ” works with a group of high school students out of 826 Valencia to select “The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016.” The BANR Committee gathers weekly in the basement of a small publishing house in San Francisco to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, blogs, transcripts, and anything else that strikes their fancy. They are assisted by a group of 826 students that meet in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

You're Going to Die: Poetry, Prose, & Everything Goes
2016-10-06 19:30 - 22:30 | The Lost Church, 65 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Doors at 7:30pm
Show at 8:15pm
Tickets at http://www.ticketfly.com/event/1293673
$10 in advance and $10 day of show online and at the door.
YOU’RE GOING TO DIE: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes
is a total open mic event, with no set or featured performers,
but only 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.
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.

Bae Suah + Deborah Smith
2016-10-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for Bae Suah:
“A compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change…an easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial—a very full story. Impressive, and well worthwhile.” —The Complete Review on Nowhere to be Found

About A Greater Music:
Near the beginning of “A Greater Music,” the narrator, a young Korean writer, falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, where she’s been housesitting for her on-off boyfriend Joachim. This sets into motion a series of memories that move between the hazily defined present and the period three years ago when she first lived in Berlin. Throughout, the narrator’s relationship with Joachim, a rough-and-ready metalworker, is contrasted with her friendship with a woman called M, an ultra-refined music-loving German teacher who was once her lover.
A novel of memories and wandering, “A Greater Music” “blends riffs on music, language, and literature with a gut-punch of an emotional ending, establishing Bae Suah as one of the most exciting novelists working today.

About Bae Suah:
Bae Suah, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors, has published more than a dozen works and won several prestigious awards. She has also translated several books from the German, including works by W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her first book to appear in English, “Nowhere to be Found,” was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize.
About Deborah Smith:
Deborah Smith’s literary translations from the Korean include two novels by the Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang (“The Vegetarian “and “Human Acts”), and two by Bae Suah, (“A Greater Music “and “Recitation”).

City Arts & Lectures: Billy Collins
2016-10-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Billy Collins is the first poet since Robert Frost who has managed to combine high critical acclaim with broad popular appeal. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, and most recently, Horoscopes for the Dead, and Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013. Collins was United States Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, and was New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.

APAture 2016 Literary Showcase: Jade Cho
2016-10-07 20:00 - 22:00 | Kearny Street Workshop, 1246 Folsom St, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
APAture 2016: Here
Literary Arts Showcase
Kearny Street Workshop, the Bay Area’s hub for Asian Pacific American arts, proudly presents APAture, a multi-day, multidisciplinary arts festival featuring a lineup of some of today’s most exciting emerging artists from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Literary Showcase
at Arc Gallery & Studios, 1246 Folsom St., San Francisco
Friday, October 7th, 7 – 10pm
Co-presented by Lantern Review
Featured Artist: Jade Cho
Showcase Artists: TBA
Curators: Jason Bayani, Kazumi Chin, Michelle Lin
Admission: $5 presale, $7–$10 at the door
Buy your tickets today! events.sparxo.com/APAture2016
Invest in the future of APAture through our Indiegogo campaign:igg.me/at/APAture2016

Book Party!
2016-10-08 19:00 - 22:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join Couch Press (Portland), Big Lucks (Austin), and Atelos (Berkeley) in celebrating three new books: <<(())>> by Lindsey Boldt, The Good Life by Brandon Brown, and Merry Hell by Sara Larsen at Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th Street in the Mission, on Saturday October 8th at 7:00 p.m. We’ll have some wine, all the books will be there for sale, and all three writers will give short readings.

Perks, Treadwell, + Lee
2016-10-08 19:30 - 21:30 | Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Writers With Drinks presents
Micah Perks (What Becomes Us)
Elizabeth Treadwell (Holocene)
Lorelei Lee (Coming Out Like a Porn Star)
Cost: $5 to $20, no-one turned away
All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.
At The Make Out Room 3225 22nd St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM.

Gears Turning Poetry: Brady, Cohen, + Raphael w/ Dang
2016-10-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Dan Brady has been featured in the Poet’s Eleven Series and S.F. Peace and Hope’s anthology. He has ties with the Bay Area Poet’s Coalition and the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He’s led workshops and hosts the Wednesday series at Sacred Grounds ”Good food and fine poetry since 1972.” His books are Orphan City, (i)n((s(i)gh)t) to;(r(io)t) and Haiku: Infolded Meaning.
Susan Cohen is an award-winning journalist and poet who lives in Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Poetry International, River Styx, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry among many other publications. Her second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press which issued it in June.
A long-time Portland resident, Dan Raphael’s been active in the Northwest as poet, performer, publisher and reading host. Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid, his 19th book, came out this June from Last Word Press; previous books include The State I’m In (nine muses press) and Impulse & Warp: The Selected 20th Century Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon). His poems have appeared in over 300 magazines, websites and anthologies including Caliban, Big Bridge, Otoliths, Rattapllax, Make it True, Cordite, Unlikely Stories and Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry. He has given over 200 readings, in places like Bumbershoot, Wordstock, Powell’s Books, Reed College, Ellliot Bay Books, Penofin Jazz Festival and 80 different places in Portland. For 13 years he ran a monthly reading series at a downtown books store, then curated Poetland—80 poets at 8 different venues over an 8 hour stretch.

Perfectly Queer Fall Fiction
2016-10-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Novelists Laura J. Merrell, Kate Jessica Raphael, and Hilary A. Zaid read from new fiction at Perfectly Queer Fall Fiction Monday, October 10, 7pm at Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro St. in San Francisco. Free admission, door prizes, and refreshments. A book signing will follow the readings.
Laura J. Merrell grew up in southeast Indiana during the sad-sack seventies and anal eighties. During her senior year, she was voted “girl most likely to be locked in the attic by her relatives.” About her writing, Laura says, “I’ve written ever since I knew how to because I’m a pathological storyteller.” Her blog is blackwhitepress.wordpress.com. In her novel The Hedge Tree, the year is 1972, Tricky Dick is in the White House, and four-year-old Charity has managed to offend the better part of Roosevelt County, Indiana, by not crying at her mother’s funeral. Charity grows into a random weed that can’t find a squat in the garden. But, if the entire world is outside the garden, maybe it’s not all bad.
Kate Jessica Raphael is a feminist, queer activist, writer, and radio journalist, who makes her living as a law firm word processor. She lived in Palestine for eighteen months as a member of the International Women’s Peace Service and spent five weeks in an Israeli prison for her activism. In 2011, she won a residency at Hedgebrook writer’s colony. She has contributed footage to several films about Palestine and was featured in the film “Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War.” Her debut novel Murder Under The Bridge: A Palestine Mystery won the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) silver medal for mystery. It is the first in a series. Visit her website: www.kateraphael.com.
Hilary A. Zaid is an alumna of the Tin House and Squaw Valley writers workshops. Her short fiction has appeared in Lilith Magazine, The Southwest Review, The UTNE Reader and CALYX, among other periodicals. Her story “My Triple X Valentine’s at the Far Point Senior Villas” will be the feature story in the October 19 issue of Amazon’s Day One, and her fiction is also forthcoming in the winter issue of The Tahoma Literary Review. Her prose chapbook The Dark Between the Stars was selected as the BLOOM Literary Magazine chapbook winner by judge Lucy Jane Bledsoe. See author website at www.hilaryzaid.com.

Life During Wartime
2016-10-10 20:00 - 22:00 | Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa St, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
It’s our annual installment of Porchquake! That’s when Porchlight teams up with the Litquake Literary Festival and presents an evening of stories told by authors.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
Our theme is ripped from the Talking Heads song and involves tales of explosive scenarios, epic struggles, and living each day like it could be your last.
With Jack Boulware, Greg Milner, Laurie Notaro, Bucky Sinister, Eric Spitznagel, D. Watkins, and Pamela Alma Weymouth. Doors open at 7 pm.
Emceed by Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick
Music by Marc Capelle

Lines & Lyrics: Cheng, Rock, + Shiferraw w/ Miss Erma
2016-10-11 12:30 - 13:30 | Jessie Square; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 220 Stevenson St, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
Lines and lyrics from Litquake Nation! Enjoy line breaks during your lunch break, as some of the Bay Area’s best poets and musicians share their work in the great outdoors.
Scott Brownlee is the author of Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which won the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize and the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, as well as three prize-winning chapbooks.
Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in Tin House, AGNI, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Drop Leaf Press.
Martin Rock is the author of Residuum, winner of the 2015 Editor’s Choice Award for CSU Poetry Center’s first book prize. He is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Houston and lives in Oakland.
Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet and visual artist who grew up in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her work has been published in various literary journals. She was the recipient of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for her collection, FUCHSIA. She received her MFA from Vermont College.
Musical guest Miss Erma blends ancestry and tradition into a confident, distinct musical voice of her own. She carries herself with a precocious self-possession reminiscent of an early Fiona Apple (if that young talent had heeded Tom Robbins’ advice to “Lighten up!”).
Part of YBG Festival’s Poetic Tuesdays series. For our full summer schedule visit www.ybgfestival.org

An evening w/ Masande Ntshanga
2016-10-12 18:00 - 20:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his acclaimed new novel
The Reactive
from Two Dollar Radio
Heralded in the author’s native South Africa as “the hottest novel of the year,” The Reactive is a clear-eyed and compassionate depiction of a young HIV+ man grappling with the sudden death of his younger brother, for which he feels unduly responsible.
Lindanathi and his friends—Cecelia and Ruan—make their living working low-paying jobs and selling anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift in and out of parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town, where they observe the grave material disparities of their country. A mysterious masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that would present the three with the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path, and finally, his past.
With brilliant, shimmering prose, Ntshanga has delivered a redemptive, ambitious, and unforgettable first novel.
Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.
Critical Praise for the work of Masande Ntshanga:
*Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize Finalist
*Etisalat Prize for Literature Longlist
*One of the Best Books of the Year —City Press, The Sunday Times, The Star, This is Africa, Africa’s a Country, Sunday World
“[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government’s fatal policies on HIV & AIDS.”
—Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers
“Woozy, touching… a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory. The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves.”
—Marian Ryan, Slate

Litquake Presents a Julio Cortázar Celebration
2016-10-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
City Lights and the Center for the Art of Translation join us for a celebration of the legendary Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.
With readings by:
Mauro Javier Cardenas
Silvia Oviedo
Katherine Silver
and more

Praise for Julio Cortázar:
“Anyone who doesn’t read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder . . . and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.” —Pablo Neruda
“Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortázar’s poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown.” ––Enrique Vila-Matas on Save Twilight
“The most magnificent novel I have ever read, and one to which I shall return again and again.” —C.D.B. Bryan, The New York Times Book Review on Hopscotch

About Julio Cortázar:
Julio Cortázar was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. He has been called both a “modern master of the short story” and, by Carlos Fuentes, “the Simón Bolívar of the novel.”
Read Cortázar’s Art of Fiction interview in the Paris Review.

About Stephen Kessler’s translation of Save Twilight:
The power of Eros, the enduring beauty of art, a love-hate nostalgia for his Argentine homeland, the bonds of friendship and the tragic folly of politics are some of the themes of Save Twilight. Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, and most of his own emotional geography, Cortázar’s poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinean sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian Romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life.

Good Girls Marry Doctors
2016-10-13 18:30 - 21:00 | Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Featuring:
Ayesha Mattu · Piyali Bhattacharya · Nayomi Munaweera
Neelanjana Banjerjee · Tanzila Ahmed · Tara Dorabji
Moderated by:
Barnali Ghosh
Join editor Piyali Bhattacharya and several contributors to the new anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors as they read and discuss the cultural, political, and social burdens (along with the assorted hilarious moments) that come with being a South Asian American daughter.
Refreshments will be provided. Books will be available for purchase. You can also purchase a copy from our website. Southern Exposure is ADA accessible. This event is free and open to the public.
Street parking is limited at this venue. We suggest taking Muni (nearby lines: 9, 12, 27, 33), BART (16th street or 24th street), or taxi.
Doors open at 6:30 pm. Event begins at 7 pm.
Stay tuned for more information about this event!
Questions? Please email us at marketing@auntlute.com.

Variny Yim
2016-10-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Please join Green Apple Books on Clement street Thursday, October 13th at 7:00 p.m., as we welcome Author Variny Yim as she reads from and discusses her book The Immigrant Princess.

Book Description: When three generations of women from the Cambodian royal family live as immigrants in the U.S., they struggle to find meaning and relevance in a new country that challenges their traditions and forces them to build a new life. Career-driven Sophea Lim, the oldest granddaughter, is saddled with the cultural responsibility of taking care of her mother and grandmother. However, when she loses both a promotion and her American boyfriend, she blames it on her traditional Cambodian upbringing and starts a war in her close-knit family. Although Sophea has an ally in her younger sister Ravy, her mother and grandmother find her first-world complaints trivial compared to the real-world suffering of two-million Cambodians who perished at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge including her father. Turmoil erupts when Ravy encourages Sophea to move out of the house she shares with her mother and grandmother. Will Sophea shirk her responsibility to take care of her elders? Is her quest for independence worth hurting the two people she loves most?

As always, this in store event is free and open to the public.

Jade Chang w/ Chloe Veltman
2016-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, San Francisco , CA, 94107, United States
Journalist and editor Jade Chang discusses her much-buzzed debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World. Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he’s just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands and his pride.Charles pulls Andrew, his aspiring comedian son, and Grace, his style-obsessed daughter, out of schools he can no longer afford. Together with their stepmother, Barbra, they embark on a cross-country road trip from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the upstate New York hideout of the eldest daughter, disgraced art world it-girl Saina. But with his son waylaid by a temptress in New Orleans, his wife ready to defect for a set of 1,000-thread-count sheets, and an epic smash-up in North Carolina, Charles may have to choose between the old world and the new, between keeping his family intact and finally fulfilling his dream of starting anew in China.Outrageously funny and full of charm, The Wangs vs. the World is an entirely fresh look at what it means to belong in America and how going from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings one family together in a way money never could.

North Beach Stories w/ Ray Hanna
2016-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
A COMICAL & MUSICAL JOURNEY
THROUGH SAN FRANCISCO’S GOLDEN AGE
North Beach Stories is Ray Hanna’s searing comical and musical journey through the nightlife of the West Coast. Master storyteller, musician, and shameless name-dropper, Ray Hanna has seen it all, on the streets of North Beach and beyond—all the sleaze, drugs, trailblazing strippers, and punks acting out, Timothy Leary performing at a Broadway nightclub, sheer rock-and-roll madness at the Mabuhay—all in a night’s work in Hanna’s world. He was also in San Francisco to encounter Lenny Bruce’s legacy, and shares the real story behind Lenny’s most outrageous moment, purported to have occurred right above the Beat Museum. It’s all here—all true, all first-person and verified accounts of real showbiz Babylon tales compiled over the past 45 years by musician/comedian/actor Ray Hanna. He remembers, “I was so lucky to be here at a golden age and time. It was a wild, wide-open, rip-roaring kind of town. This city was luring people with ideas, a cosmopolitan place filled with performers and bon vivants from all over the world who had seen a lot. All these comics, musicians, and actors relocating here to develop and do the work, artists re-inventing ourselves in front of your eyes.”
Drawing on his current one-man show 50 Songs; his play The Devil and Lenny Bruce, co-written with Lou Gottlieb; and his book Screams from the Road, Hanna fills the evening with his own oddly detailed perspective on a lifetime in and around San Francisco, including his encounters with the famous and the near-famous. Based in the city, Ray headlined comedy, cabaret, and theatre venues all over the world, logging some 6000 appearances over 24 years. North Beach Stories marks Hanna’s first Bay Area appearance of any kind in over 20 years. During the last two decades, Ray has upped his commitment to the music, and has appeared regularly with a number of working rock bands in Oregon; for the past 11 years leading the Reckless Rockhounds. Ray remembers, “In the comedy clubs, I was known as the ‘piano guy’. Since then, I have worked very hard at the humbling process of removing the quotation marks from piano guy.”
An awe-struck seeker, a father, and a worldly-wise, but not-yet-jaded troubadour with a lifetime of experiences, Ray Hanna delivers the emotional truth behind a remarkable era in San Francisco.
