Ali Warren
2020-04-28 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of
Little Hill
published by City Lights Books

Award-winning poet explores new formal terrain in seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment.
The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against.
“[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition.”—Brian Blanchfield, pen.org
Praise for Little Hill:
“In Little Hill Alli Warren’s principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one . . . I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it’s unsparing. Still, it’s a gift.”––Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction
“The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. ‘This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work,’ Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!”––CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
“Reading Alli Warren’s Little Hill, I find it incredible that amidst the relentless circulation of capital and commodities—and despite attempts to make all life yield to the logics of extraction, work, accumulation, and the entrepreneurial self—a remainder is created, that of poetry. Little Hill embodies a poetics of radical uncertainty, one that attends to its horrific condition of possibility and is produced through the unmooring catastrophes that define our present moment: the destruction of the earth, mass imprisonment, late-capitalism—the litany does not end there. ‘I saw the death of the earth in a child’s toy,’ she writes. Everywhere the speaker looks there is ‘congealed shit, sometimes on sale.’ Yet yearning, even as it is raised tentatively, is not crushed. In and against it all, a question is raised—the question of what it means to love in times of terror.”—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism

John Kaag: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
2020-04-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
John Kaag discusses his new book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.
Praise for Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
“Kaag’s reading of James is as elucidating as readers have come to expect from him. Once again, he writes in a clear, focused, and winningly self-aware style that makes friends of James and himself for anyone who wonders if life is worth living. A book in which Kaag further carves out his niche in philosophy: personal, practical, and crucial.”– Kirkus Reviews
“Not since Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance have I read such a mesmerizing confluence of personal experience and formal thought as John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story. That combination is on display again in his Sick Souls, Healthy Minds—a brief and powerful book about one of America’s most profound minds, William James, and what he can teach us about what makes life worth living.”―Robert D. Richardson, author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
“In this beautifully written book, which is filled with bracing insights, John Kaag shows why William James has had a deep, life-altering, therapeutic effect on his readers over the past century—and can continue to have the same effect on new readers today.”—Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
About Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled “Is Life Worth Living?” It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, “James’s entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life”—and that’s why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James’s life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology—and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous—can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.
Kaag tells how James’s experiences as one of what he called the “sick-souled,” those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of “healthy-mindedness”—an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James’s pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James.
Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you’ll ever read.

Aaron Smith: The Book of Daniel
2020-04-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Aaron Smith discusses his new poetry collection, The Book of Daniel, with sam sax and Randall Mann.
Praise for The Book of Daniel
“Smith’s poems expound a complicated and distinctly queer relationship to beauty. . . . He levels a caustic wit at the pantheons of pop culture and modern poetry, but also strikes resounding notes of hurt and rage at homophobia, misogyny, rejection, and loss.”
–The New Yorker
“Aaron Smith writes with arresting, melancholy literalness about bruises, exaltations, arousals, delectations, and defeats. He doesn’t mess around with filigree. He sticks to abject delineation, punchy straightforwardness—a new way of being formal and naked. I believe in these gripping poems, and in their message to the world.”– Wayne Koestenbaum
“‘Does anyone have / a poem to Cher?’ I doubt it’s as honest or fresh as the poems in The Book of Daniel. Can a poet be as well-versed in Plath, Lorde, Olds, and Baraka as he is in celebrity and pop culture? Spoiler alert: hell, yeah. With the gift of a high-speed Internet connection, Smith maneuvers the confusing messages of grief, rejection, and, yes, contemporary poetry. Poets beware: you are not off the hook. Smith brilliantly challenges everything you hold sacred.”– Yona Harvey
About The Book of Daniel
A tour de force, Aaron Smith’s fourth collection of poetry, The Book of Daniel, resists the easy satisfactions of Beauty while managing the contemporary entanglements of art, sex, and grief. Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning, these poems depict not only the complications of representation in the age of social media but a critique of identity. Taking on subjects as diverse as the literary canon, his mother’s incurable cancer diagnosis, gay bashing, celebrity gossip, bigotry, violence on TV, and Alexander McQueen’s suicide, Smith proves that the confessional lyric is not dead. In tangents as wild as they are reigned, with his characteristic blend of directness, vulnerability and humor, these poems take on the world as it is, a world we love even as it resists all intimacy.

Femail: The Art of Sustainable Fashion
2020-04-29 19:30 - 21:00 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
TICKETSTo purchase over the phone: 415-392-4400
This event appears in the series
Special Events

Camilla Carper and Janelle Abbott met at Parsons School of Design in 2008. After college, both returned to their respective homelands on the West Coast: San Francisco and Seattle. Their need to maintain a friendship from afar was resolved with FEMAIL: an art and fashion collaboration conducted remotely by sending work back and forth through the USPS. Each time the pair passes work from one to the next, new scraps and remnants are added, sometimes, things are taken away. They work reactively, intuitively, and with commas, always. In this way, what is created by FEMAIL is a documentation of duo’s conversations and ultimately, their friendship.

Avery Trufelman produces original pieces about architecture and design for the award-winning podcast 99% Invisible by Radiotopia. In September of 2018, she made a six-part series about clothing and fashion called Articles of Interest, which was declared one of the best podcasts of 2018 by the New Yorker, and the finale was called the”best podcast episode of the year” by Vulture.

Rufi Thorpe: The Knockout Queen
2020-04-29 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Rufi Thorpe discusses her new novel, The Knockout Queen.
Praise for The Knockout Queen
“Is it cheesy to say The Knockout Queen knocked me off my feet? I couldn’t put it down, and when I had to, I did so only reluctantly, shakily. With unrelenting humor and terrifying intelligence, Rufi Thorpe tells the story of an unlikely high school friendship—the kind of friendship from which you never recover—with intensity and attentiveness. This captivating, generous book is a moving examination on human motivation, darkness, and love—calling attention to the ways we can be deeply different, and yet so much the same.” – Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
“Fearless, tender, and savagely alive, The Knockout Queen is unlike anything you’ll read this year. Rufi Thorpe’s third novel is about unruly thoughts and unruly bodies, about violence and love, about doing the wrong thing for the right reasons and the drag of human being. You won’t be able to look away. You might even recognize yourself.” – Chloe Benjamin, best-selling author of The Immortalists
“The Knockout Queen is an intense, unflinching examination of friendship, the threads that connect us in such strange ways. Rufi Thorpe navigates this difficult terrain thanks to a masterful use of detail and a wonderfully dark sense of humor that lands at just the right moment. Michael and Bunny are two of the most unique characters I’ve ever met, drawn with such precision that it’s impossible to leave them behind. This is a hypnotic, beautiful novel, and Rufi Thorpe is an unbelievably unique talent.” – Kevin Wilson, best-selling author of Nothing to See Here
About The Knockout Queen
A dazzling and darkly comic novel of love, violence, and friendship in the California suburbs
Bunny Lampert is the princess of North Shore⁠—beautiful, tall, blond, with a rich real-estate-developer father and a swimming pool in her backyard. Michael⁠⁠—with a ponytail down his back and a septum piercing⁠—lives with his aunt in the cramped stucco cottage next door. When Bunny catches Michael smoking in her yard, he discovers that her life is not as perfect as it seems. At six foot three, Bunny towers over their classmates. Even as she dreams of standing out and competing in the Olympics, she is desperate to fit in, to seem normal, and to get a boyfriend, all while hiding her father’s escalating alcoholism. Michael has secrets of his own. At home and at school Michael pretends to be straight, but at night he tries to understand himself by meeting men online for anonymous encounters that both thrill and scare him. When Michael falls in love for the first time, a vicious strain of gossip circulates and a terrible, brutal act becomes the defining feature of both his and Bunny’s futures⁠⁠—and of their friendship. With storytelling as intoxicating as it is intelligent, Rufi Thorpe has created a tragic and unflinching portrait of identity, a fascinating examination of our struggles to exist in our bodies, and an excruciatingly beautiful story of two humans aching for connection.

Robert Mailer Anderson at City Lights Bookstore
2020-04-30 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Windows on the World
Co-authored with Zack Anderson
Illustrations by Jon Sack
published by Fantagraphics Books
Set in a New York City in mourning, this poignant graphic novel explores the push-and-pull between love and obligation.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, an undocumented worker named Balthazar busses tables at New York City’s famous Windows on the World restaurant. Back in Mexico, his family watches their TV screen in horror as the Twin Towers collapse. Refusing to give up hope that Balthazar is alive, his son Fernando embarks on a treacherous journey across the border to New York to find him. Along the way, Fernando learns what it means to be undocumented in America — encountering at turns an indifferent bureaucracy and a supportive group of fellow immigrants who help guide him through his quixotic mission to bring his family back together.
Now a major motion picture!
Robert Mailer Anderson is a San Francisco Library Laureate as well as a novelist, screenwriter, producer, and activist. He is the author of the novel Boonville.
Jon Sack is a US and UK based artist and writer whose comic books include La Lucha and Iraqi Oil For Beginners.

Adam Levin: Bubblegum
2020-05-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Adam Levin discusses his new novel Bubblegum.
Praise for Bubblegum
“Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest, and Bubblegum is a dazzling accomplishment of wit and inventiveness – an irrepressible and insanely entertaining examination of our obsessive culture that doesn’t forget to be fond of that which it is satirizing. Levin’s keen and ornery mind, reveling in the world with vast energy, shows us new ways of loving it.”George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo
“Adam Levin’s brilliant, inventive, fully imagined alternative world gives us insight and clarity about the actual world we live in. We are implicated, warned, but what a hilarious ride. Bubblegum is a wild, ambitious, and original novel. Levin is a wonder.”Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document
“With Bubblegum, Adam Levin has created a cubist painting about consumerism, fetishization, and the increasingly blurred line between life and advertisement in a hyper-materialist, post-IRL society. Levin masterfully creates a world without the internet to examine the impact and insanity it has sewn into the American project, and he does so while gleefully skewering our unraveling vernacular. A freaky marvel of a tome.”Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States, The Answers and Nobody is Ever Missing
About Bubblegum
Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the Internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology–a “flesh-and-bone robot” called the Curio–has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.
At age thirty-eight, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn’t entirely sure are in his head. After Belt’s father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears, as well as his estranged childhood friend Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.

OFFSITE: An Evening with Mikel Jollett / Hollywood Park
2020-05-02 19:00 | First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA, 94109, United States
Booksmith and Quiet Lightningpresent The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett for his only San Francisco/Bay Area. He will be reading from and discussing his memoir, Hollywood Park.

Please note: This ticketed event will be held at First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco: 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94109. Tickets can be purchased in advance here and are not guaranteed to be available at the door. Please read the ticketing information carefully and direct any questions to events@booksmith.com.

We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves. No one told us who we were or what we were or where all our parents went. They would arrive like ghosts, visiting us for a morning, an afternoon. They would sit with us or walk around the grounds, to laugh or cry or toss us in the air while we screamed. Then they’d disappear again, for weeks, for months, for years, leaving us alone with our memories and dreams, our questions and confusion …
So begins Hollywood Park, Mikel Jollett’s remarkable memoir. His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s “School.” After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic.
In his raw, poetic and powerful voice, Jollett portrays a childhood filled with abject poverty, trauma, emotional abuse, delinquency and the lure of drugs and alcohol. Raised by a clinically depressed, narcissistic mother, tormented by his angry older brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled step-fathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician.
Hollywood Park is told at first through the limited perspective of a child, and then broadens as Jollett begins to understand the world around him. Although Mikel Jollett’s story is filled with heartbreak, it is ultimately an unforgettable portrayal of love at its fiercest and most loyal.

Mikel Jollett is the frontman of the indie band The Airborne Toxic Event. Prior to forming the band, Jollett graduated with honors from Stanford University. He was an on-air columnist for NPR’s All Things Considered, an editor-at-large for Men’s Health and an editor at Filter magazine. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s.

This event is held at First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco: 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94109.
Doors at 6:30pm. Program at 7:30. Program includes signing. Duration of event is up to the author.
Important signing and photo details to come.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable. All ticket sales are final.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have any special needs, please write to events@booksmith.com no later than 48 hours before the event and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you.
If you can’t attend the event but would like to order a signed copy of Hollywoord Park, order below and add your request in the special field.
RSVP is not required, but always appreciated.

An Evening with Mikel Jollett / Hollywood Park
2020-05-02 19:00 - 20:30 | First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA, 94109, United States
Booksmith and Quiet Lightning present The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett for his only San Francisco/Bay Area. He will be reading from and discussing his memoir, Hollywood Park.
Please note: This ticketed event will be held at First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco: 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94109. Tickets can be purchased in advance here and are not guaranteed to be available at the door. Please read the ticketing information carefully and direct any questions to events AT booksmith DOT com.
We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves. No one told us who we were or what we were or where all our parents went. They would arrive like ghosts, visiting us for a morning, an afternoon. They would sit with us or walk around the grounds, to laugh or cry or toss us in the air while we screamed. Then they’d disappear again, for weeks, for months, for years, leaving us alone with our memories and dreams, our questions and confusion …
So begins Hollywood Park, Mikel Jollett’s remarkable memoir. His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s “School.” After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic.
In his raw, poetic and powerful voice, Jollett portrays a childhood filled with abject poverty, trauma, emotional abuse, delinquency and the lure of drugs and alcohol. Raised by a clinically depressed, narcissistic mother, tormented by his angry older brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled step-fathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician.
Hollywood Park is told at first through the limited perspective of a child, and then broadens as Jollett begins to understand the world around him. Although Mikel Jollett’s story is filled with heartbreak, it is ultimately an unforgettable portrayal of love at its fiercest and most loyal.

Mikel Jollett is the frontman of the indie band The Airborne Toxic Event. Prior to forming the band, Jollett graduated with honors from Stanford University. He was an on-air columnist for NPR’s All Things Considered, an editor-at-large for Men’s Health and an editor at Filter magazine. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s.

This event is held at First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco: 1187 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA 94109.
Doors at 6:30pm. Program at 7:30. Program includes signing. Duration of event is up to the author.
Important signing and photo details to come.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable. All ticket sales are final.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have any special needs, please write to events@booksmith.com no later than 48 hours before the event and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you.
If you can’t attend the event but would like to order a signed copy of Hollywoord Park, order below and add your request in the special field.
RSVP is not required, but always appreciated.

Ainissa Ramirez
2020-05-03 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing the subject of her new book
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another
from The MIT Press

In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon: a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us.
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.
Ramirez shows how materials were shaped by inventors, but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences—intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors—particularly people of color and women—who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal—whether it’s splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.
Ainissa Ramirez is a materials scientist and sought-after public speaker and science communicator. A Brown and Stanford graduate, she has worked as a research scientist at Bell Labs and held academic positions at Yale University and MIT. She has written for Time, Scientific American, the American Scientist, and Forbes, and makes regular appearances on PBS’s SciTech Now.

Alia Volz in conversation with Paul Yamazaki
2020-05-05 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
by Alia Volz
published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A blazingly funny, heartfelt memoir from the daughter of the larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco—for fans of Armistead Maupin and Patricia Lockwood
During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia’s future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life.
Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.
Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

Alia Volz is a homegrown San Franciscan. Her writing appears in The Best American Essays 2017, the New York Times, Tin House, Threepenny Review, River Teeth, Nowhere magazine, Utne Reader, New England Review and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Writers Reflect on Prince and Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California. A 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, Volz has also been an Artist in Residence with Writing Between the Vines and the Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat. The Squaw Valley Community of Writers awarded her the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice. She was runner-up of The Moth’s GrandSLAM Championship in 2014 and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Paul Yamazaki is the chief book buyer at City Lights Booksellers and has been a life-long booktrade advocate serving on many boards of non-profits and literary organizations.

Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands
2020-05-05 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her new novel Death in Her Hands.
Praise for Death in Her Hands
“When it comes to evoking the jagged edge of contemporary anxiety there might not be a more insightful writer working today than Moshfegh. That is if the boundless dark potential of the human psyche is your thing. If it’s not, this atmospheric, darkly comic tale of a pathologically lonely widow and the thrills lurking in her sylvan retreat might not be for you. But, sophisticated reader that you are, you’re not afraid of the dark. Right?” —The Millions
“Perhaps the most jarring genre of fiction is the kind that takes you deep into the gradual unraveling of a person’s mind. Moshfegh does a masterful job with Death In Her Hands, which follows a protagonist who believes she’s solving a murder. The book moves seamlessly from suspenseful to horrifying, retaining the reader’s attention all the while.” —Marie Claire
“Ottessa Moshfegh is always a must-read, and her latest combines ‘horror, suspense and pitch-black comedy’ to deliver a fascinating tale guided by an unreliable narrator.” —Paste, 25 Most Anticipated Novels of 2020
About Death in Her Hands
From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods that ultimately makes her question everything about her new home
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the nearby forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, having moved here from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she’s a little shaky even on her best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems to be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one–one that strikes closer to home.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.

Karen Tei Yamashita
2020-05-06 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of her new short fiction collection
Sansei and Sensibility
published by Coffee House Press
Generations of Japanese Americans merge with Jane Austen’s characters in these lively stories, pairing uniquely American histories with reimagined classics.
In these buoyant and inventive stories, Japanese Americans shift the boundaries of Jane Austen’s classic tales, questioning what inheritance—familial, cultural, artistic—really means. In ’60s California and beyond, a woman examines the contents of her dead aunt’s freezer, Mr. Darcy is captain of the football team, a dental hygienist collects a community’s gossip while cleaning his neighbors’ teeth, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the transit of the day. These narratives that traverse class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with Yamashita’s signature wit and humor.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Praise for Sansei and Sensibility
“Dazzling. An extraordinarily inventive collection of short stories that takes us from Japan to Brazil to the fractured heart of suburban postwar Japanese America. Whether she is riffing on Jane Austen, channeling Jorge Luis Borges, or meditating on Marie Kondo, Yamashita is a brilliant and often subversive storyteller in superb command of her craft.” —Julie Otsuka
“Through vignettes, recipes, and correspondence, master writer Karen Tei Yamashita takes us through the rabbit hole of Japanese America—in particular, her hometown of Gardena, California, where an ethnic community culturally transformed a middle-class bedroom town. Part Ozu meditation of everyday life, part modern folk tale with colorful characters like a truth-telling dental hygienist, Sansei and Sensibility offers a unique and necessary perspective of what it means to be the aging grandchild of Asian immigrants, wondering what you will leave behind for the next generation. As in all of her books, Yamashita deconstructs form and genre to create a work that both delights and challenges.” —Naomi Hirahara
“This capacious collection is witty, sharp—funny at times, angry at times—always amazing, and never, never dull. I think Jane Austen would be surprised, but delighted. I surely am.” —Karen Joy Fowler
Praise for the work of Karen Tei Yamashita
2010 National Book Award Finalist
2011 American Book Award Winner
“This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense.” —Publishers Weekly
“The extraordinary testimony of a revolutionary past. . . . I Hotel is crammed with detail, with real-life pamphlets, speeches, quotes, and news reports humming and crackling in the background. The whole thing makes for an astonishing, and carefully structured, collage of both local and global movement.” —The Nation
“Immensely entertaining.” —Newsday
“Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.” —Kirkus
“Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Stephanie Danler: Stray
2020-05-06 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Stephanie Danler discusses her new memoir, Stray.
About Stray
From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman’s attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.
After selling her first novel–a dream she’d worked long and hard for–Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she’d left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she’s pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn’t totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it’s possible to change the course of her history.
Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don’t have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it’s like to let go of one’s parents in order to find a peace–and family–of one’s own.

Margaret Randall in conversation with Garrett Caples
2020-05-07 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing the subject of Margaret Randall’s new book
I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary
from Duke University Press
In 1969, poet and revolutionary Margaret Randall was forced underground when the Mexican government cracked down on all those who took part in the 1968 student movement. Needing to leave the country, she sent her four young children alone to Cuba while she scrambled to find safe passage out of Mexico. In I Never Left Home, Randall recounts her harrowing escape and the other extraordinary stories from her life and career.
From living among New York’s abstract expressionists in the mid-1950s as a young woman to working in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture to instill revolutionary values in the media during the Sandinista movement, the story of Randall’s life reads like a Hollywood production. Along the way, she edited a bilingual literary journal in Mexico City, befriended Cuban revolutionaries, raised a family, came out as a lesbian, taught college, and wrote over 150 books. Throughout it all, Randall never wavered from her devotion to social justice.
When she returned to the United States in 1984 after living in Latin America for twenty-three years, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered her to be deported for her “subversive writing.” Over the next five years, and with the support of writers, entertainers, and ordinary people across the country, Randall fought to regain her citizenship, which she won in court in 1989.
As much as I Never Left Home is Randall’s story, it is also the story of the communities of artists, writers, and radicals she belonged to. Randall brings to life scores of creative and courageous people on the front lines of creating a more just world. She also weaves political and social analyses and poetry into the narrative of her life. Moving, captivating, and astonishing, I Never Left Home is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
Praise for the work of Margaret Randall
“A revolutionary woman and remarkable writer places her long journey within the context of her conflicted past and our own divided present. . . . A striking remembrance by an intellectual whose radical, fierce nature is unflappable.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Every Margaret Randall book or poem is a jewel to be savored, but this text may be the best yet. Beautifully written, it is Randall’s first comprehensive memoir. With her moves through the 1950s’ expressionist art world in New York through the 1960s Mexican literary scene, the Cuban Revolution looms large and beckons Randall to participate, which eventually brings the scrutiny of Uncle Sam attempting to strip her of her citizenship. Throughout, Randall’s early and deep feminism is a guiding light.” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Margaret Randall hails from a heroic era when poets aspired to change life. Nominally a memoir, I Never Left Home is really a full-blown autobiography, chronicling her life as a poet, a woman, a feminist, a mother, a lesbian, an incest survivor, and a participant in a quarter century of Latin American social and political revolution. Her experiences as coeditor of one of the 1960s most important international literary magazines are gripping, but it’s her account of the Reagan administration’s attempt to deport her from the land of her birth as an undesirable alien that makes I Never Left Home so necessary in the present moment. Few U.S. poets have dared to dream as big, fight as hard, or accomplish as much.” — Garrett Caples, coeditor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
“Margaret Randall’s life is the story of our twentieth century, with all of its lucid wonder, its dark passages and contradictions. Illuminating and enthralling.” — Achy Obejas, author of The Tower of the Antilles
Garett Caples is the poetry editor at City Lights Books, journalist, and a published poet.

In Common Writers Series: John Yau and Andrew Joron, reading and in conversation
2020-05-07 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
For the final double-program in The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series for Spring 2020, we are delighted to host renowned poet and art critic John Yau, on a rare visit from New York City. He’ll be joined by poet, translator, and SF State faculty member Andrew Joron, reading and in conversation at The Poetry Center on Thursday May 7; then the following night, Friday May 8, we move across the Bay, for John Yau together with poet/performer and editor of SFMOMA’s online magazine Open Space, Claudia La Rocco, reading and in conversation at Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, right downtown (12th Street BART) in Frank Ogawa Plaza. Supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, these events are free and open to the public.
Details soon

Related event:
In Common Writers Series
John Yau and Claudia La Rocco
reading and in conversation
Friday May 8
7:00 pm @ Pro Arts Gallery & Commons
150 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland
free and open to the public
supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Jia Tolentino & Jenna Wortham
2020-05-07 19:30 - 21:00 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
TICKETSTo purchase over the phone: 415-392-4400
This event appears in the series
Social Studies

Called “the best young essayist at work in the United States” by Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino is a staff writer for The New Yorker, covering everything from the viral video app TikTok, to the ubiquitous upscale activewear brand Outdoor Voices, to Edith Wharton’s heroine and the new norm of begging celebrities to run you over with a truck. Her essay collection Trick Mirror examines religion, psychedelic drugs, weddings, the internet, and everything in between, tied together by the logic of an immensely sharp cultural critic observing and thinking hard about the world she exists within. Previously, Tolentino was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. Her criticism has appeared in the Times Magazine, Grantland, the Awl, Pitchfork, The Fader, Time, and Slate.
Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in medical anthropology from the University of Virginia, Wortham moved to San Francisco to work with San Francisco Magazine, Girlfriend Magazine, write for SFist and later, Wired. Wortham joined The New York Times in 2008 and has since covered pop culture, technology, race, and queer identity. Her writing has appeared in Girl Crush Zine, The Morning News, Matter, Vogue, The Awl, Bust, The Hairpin, and The Fader among other publications. In 2016, Wortham started co-hosting the culture podcast Still Processing with Wesley Morris. She is coeditor of the forthcoming visual anthology Black Futures with Kimberly Drew.

Photograph credit: Elena Mudd (left) & Ryan Pfluger (right)

Anne Raeff: Only the River
2020-05-07 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Anne Raeff discusses her new novel Only the River with ZYZZYVA managing editor Oscar Villalon.
Praise for Only the River
“In this novel, Anne Raeff weaves a multigenerational tale of love and war while at the same time casting a magic spell. Her authorial voice is incantatory. Characters and events caught in recent tragedies take on aspects of myth. The novel feels unique, timely, and yet timeless. I couldn’t put it down.” ––Elizabeth Farnsworth, author of A Train Through Time
About Only the River
From California Book Award silver medalist and Simpson Literary Prize finalist author Anne Raeff, comes a novel of two families set in New York and Nicaragua over several generations as their lives collide in mysterious ways.
Fleeing the ravages of wartime Vienna, Pepa and her family find safe harbor in the small town of El Castillo, on the banks of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. There her parents seek to eradicate yellow fever while Pepa falls under the spell of the jungle and the town’s eccentric inhabitants. But Pepa’s life–including her relationship with local boy Guillermo–comes to a halt when her family abruptly moves to New York, leaving the young girl disoriented and heartbroken.
As the years pass, Pepa’s and Guillermo’s lives diverge, and Guillermo’s homeland slips into chaos. Nicaragua soon becomes engulfed in revolutionary fervor as the Sandinista movement vies for the nation’s soul. Guillermo’s daughter transforms into an accidental revolutionary. Pepa’s son defies his parents’ wishes and joins the revolution in Nicaragua, only to disappear into the jungle. It will take decades before the fates of these two families converge again, revealing how love, grief, and passion are intertwined with a nation’s destiny.
Spanning generations and several wars, Only the River explores the way displacement both destroys two families and creates new ones, sparking a revolution that changes their lives in the most unexpected ways.

BERKELEY ARTS & LETTERS: Shaun King / Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future
2020-05-08 19:00 | First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Berkeley Arts & Letters hosts activist and journalist Shaun King for his new book Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future. Please join us!
Please note: This event is ticketed, and will take place at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. Tickets, including discounted book bundles, are available in advance here.

Advance tickets are highly recommended — night-of tickets are not guaranteed. Unless otherwise noted here, general admission tickets will be available at the door.

As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. In Make Change, King offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. By turns infuriating, inspiring, and educational, Make Change will resonate with those who believe that America can — and must — do better.

Shaun King was recently named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most important people in the world online. He covers civil rights issues for the Intercept and is writer-in-residence at the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School. Previously, King served as a pastor, teacher, and full time motivational speaker in Atlanta’s juvenile justice system. In 2019, King launched the media platform The North Star, which has hundreds of thousands of members and subscribers. His podcast The Breakdown has remained one of the most popular news and politics category on Apple with over 100k subscribers. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Please note:
– Duration of event is subject to author’s preference.
– Signing and additional details coming soon.
– This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
– If you can’t attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Make Change, order below and be sure to enter your request in the special field.
– To reserve a seat and a discounted book bundle, get your tickets in advance.
– Facebook RSVP not required, but always appreciated.

In Common Writers Series: John Yau and Claudia La Rocco, reading and in conversation
2020-05-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Pro Arts Gallery, 150 Frank H Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Wrapping up Spring 2020 with another double-program in The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series, we are delighted to host renowned poet and art critic John Yau, on a rare visit from New York City. Following his reading and conversation with poet, translator, and SF State faculty member Andrew Joron, at The Poetry Center on Thursday May 7, we move across the Bay on Friday May 8, for John Yau together with poet/performer and editor of SFMOMA’s online magazine Open Space, Claudia La Rocco, reading and in conversation at Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, right downtown (12th Street BART) in Frank Ogawa Plaza. Supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, these events are free and open to the public.
Details soon

Related event:
In Common Writers Series
John Yau and Andrew Joron
reading and in conversation
Thursday May 7
7:00 pm @ The Poetry Center
Humanities 512, SF State University
free and open to the public
supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center and Pro Arts Gallery & Commons

Rebecca Solnit and Brit Marling
2020-05-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
TICKETSTo purchase over the phone: 415-392-4400
This event appears in the series
Social Studies

Rebecca Solnit is an incisive voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western and indigenous history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has published more than twenty books, including three collections of essays – Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions – as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities and a work of literary criticism on Eadweard Muybridge. Her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence looks back on the formative people, places, and experiences that provided Solnit with her empowering and ever-vital notion of self, and the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women.
In 2011, Brit Marling made an indelible mark at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival as the first female multi-hyphenate to have two films premiere side by side: “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice,” both of which she co-wrote and starred in. Since then, she has appeared in many other films, and Marling currently stars in “The OA,” a critically acclaimed Netflix series that she co-created. After earning a degree in economics (and a leave of absence from college to live in Havana, Cuba and direct a documentary there), Marling worked in finance before pursuing work she found more meaningful: acting and writing. Quickly attuned to the power imbalances in Hollywood, Marling focused on creating projects that would offer counter-narratives to the more common ones diminishing women’s worth. “It’s a powerful moment when courageous people begin speaking about how they have been harmed, which is a deeply difficult thing to do because it means wading through a swamp of shame you’ve been made to feel. I am inspired by them all. We should let their strength guide our way forward, which means beginning a much larger conversation about the role economic inequality often plays in rape culture.”

ODD SALON SF: VIRTUOSO
2020-05-12 18:30 | Public Works, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
Join us for Odd Salon VIRTUOSO on Tues, May 12 at Public Works, San Francisco

VIRTUOSO

Early bird tickets go on sale on April 7 through Friday April 17 only.
~ Salon details and speakers to be announced ~
Tuesday, May 12 at Public Works, San Francisco
Doors open for pre-salon cocktail hour at 6:30, Talks begin at 7:30
Reserved Seats available. General Admission seats are first come, first served.
Odd Salon Members always enjoy discounted Join our growing membership for ticket discounts and Members-only opportunities. Find out more>

Berkeley Noir with Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill
2020-05-12 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of the the new crime fiction anthology
Berkeley Noir
Edited by Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill
published by Akashic Books
Berkeley brings its own unique blend of Bay Area noir, complementing the grit and grime that preceded it in San Francisco Noir and Oakland Noir.
Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.
Brand-new stories by: Barry Gifford, Jim Nisbet, Lexi Pandell, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Mara Faye Lethem, Thomas Burchfield, Shanthi Sekaran, Nick Mamatas, Kimn Neilson, Jason S. Ridler, Susan Dunlap, J.M. Curet, Summer Brenner, Michael David Lukas, Aya de León, and Owen Hill.
Jerry Thompson is a bookseller, poet, playwright, and musician. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and the James White Review. He is the coauthor of Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland. His fiction and prose have appeared in various anthologies including Voices Rising, edited by G. Winston James, and Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, edited by E. Lynn Harris. He is the coeditor of both Oakland Noir
Owen Hill is the author of two crime novels, The Chandler Apartments and The Incredible Double, and he coedited The Annotated Big Sleep with Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. Until recently he lived in the Chandler Building on the corner of Telegraph and Dwight in Berkeley.

Katie Burke: Urban Playground
2020-05-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Katie Burke discusses her new book Urban Playground: What Kids Say about Living in San Francisco.
Praise for Urban Playground
“In this charming, warm-hearted, often very funny book, Katie Burke takes us into the minds of children—a place we should all spend more time! Not only a wonderfully insightful kid’s eye guide to San Francisco, Urban Playground is also an interactive manual for getting into the minds of your own—and your friends’—children. Reading its sweet—and sometimes quirky—interviews, is to see San Francisco with the freshest eyes possible.”—JANIS COOKE NEWMAN, author of A Master Plan for Rescue
“If you’re seeking the honest truth from kids, you will find few better resources than Urban Playground, by San Francisco writer Katie Burke. Burke’s StoryCorps-like interviews, quoting kids on everything from pupusas to Pride Week, reveal that the Bay Area remains a fertile ground for smart, confident, and fun-loving kids. Says a seven-year-old girl who’s on the road to becoming an archaeologist, ‘It usually takes about maybe a month or a year to dig up one dinosaur.’ After reading this book, I wouldn’t be surprised if she or another San Francisco kid figured out how to dig one up sooner!.”—SALLY SMITH, Editor and Co-Publisher, The Noe Valley Voice
“Children make the best tour guides. In Katie Burke’s lively Urban Playground series, young city-dwellers share how they experience all aspects of city life, from restaurants, holidays, people, and parks to pets, schools, sports, shops, and activities. Their observations are moving and thought-provoking, and reveal what makes a city interesting and unique. This book will appeal to adults and kids who wish to see (and re-see) San Francisco.”—CHRISTINA CLANCY, author of The Second Home
About Urban Playground
Rural areas cover 97 percent of the United States–yet more than 80 percent of the US population lives in urban areas. What is life like for the millions of children who populate our nation’s cities?
In Urban Playground, Katie Burke interviews fifty children, ages five to nine, who live in San Francisco. In each conversation, she explores one of ten different themes–family, school, pets, vacation, work, heroes, holidays, favorite foods, talents, and sports–followed by insights on the topic. She rounds out each segment with five questions for adults and kids to discuss after they’ve read it together, encouraging open, honest dialogue about young readers’ thoughts on the subject matter at hand. Future books in the series will expand into other major U.S. cities. Fun, accessible, and interactive, Urban Playground is an important window into the ways children in cities think about and describe the most important aspects of their lives–which is every aspect of their lives.

Rebecca Solnit, Lidia Yuknavitch, & Jaime Cortez For Green Arcade Books
2020-05-13 12:00 | CA
Fundraising Goal: $2000
It’s a tough time for local bookstores, what with the social distancing and the sheltering in place. So we’re raising funds to help local Bay Area bookstores stay in business, with a series of fundraisers. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster. Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). Jaime Cortez is a Northern California writer and visual artist. His book of short stories, entitled “Gordo,” will be published by Grove Atlantic Press in 2021.
This event is hosted by Charlie Jane Anders, organizer of Writers With Drinks.
All proceeds benefit Green Arcade Books. Shop online now!

May 22 at 12 PM
Register at Eventbrite

We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you’ll get an email with the Zoom access code. (Check that Eventbrite is using your current email address.) You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom: The New American
2020-05-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Micheline Aharonian Marcom discusses her new novel The New American with Sara Campos.
Select praise for Micheline Aharonian Marcom
“The fierce beauty of her prose both confronts readers with many breathtaking cruelties and carries us past them.”The New York Times
“Powerful…Marcom’s writing is intensely poetic.”Washington Post
“Lyrical…Marcom is so talented.”Chicago Tribune
“Dazzling and disquieting.”Los Angeles Times
“Marcom’s seamless, ethereal prose is suffused with raw emotion; there is heart-break on every page, but also hope.”San Francisco Chronicle
About The New American
In this timely and emotionally powerful novel, award-winning author Micheline A. Marcom recounts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan-American college student, a “dreamer,” who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California.
Emilio believes he is living the American Dream: his parents, who emigrated from Guatemala to California, sacrifice daily to ensure it. And his life seems relatively normal until he turns sixteen. Like most teenagers, Emilio is determined to get his driver’s license—however, his mother discourages it. When Emilio asks why, his parents reveal a shocking secret: he is undocumented.
Emilio adjusts to his new normal. He attends UC Berkeley. He falls in love. All is going well…until Emilio gets into a car accident and—without a driver’s license or any documentation—the policeman on the scene reports him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE].
Emilio is deported to Guatemala. But he is determined to get back to California, the only home he has ever known. It is an epic journey that takes him across thousands of miles through remote towns, lush jungles, and eventually the Sonoran Desert of the US-Mexico border, meeting thieves and corrupt law enforcement but also kind strangers and new friends.
Inspired in part by interviews with Central American refugees, and told in lyrical prose, Micheline A. Marcom weaves a heart-pounding and heartbreaking tale of adventure. The New American is an important and well-timed novel that asks us what we have in common—across cultures, experiences, and borders—and what makes us not only American, but altogether human.

Voz Sin Tinta Zoom Reading
2020-05-14 18:30 | CA
Folks! Join us Thursday evening for a Zoom open mic! Find the link below!
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclcOivqDsuGN3874bFQ-7kFD56Uvs4cPG4?fbclid=IwAR0ccdL5H4kZSVW4zZZOpl8-4Qah1LVvcxqQ_NSQkiZ6jp68i4ITR16nEsQ

Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves
2020-05-14 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
iller Apps: War, Media, Machine
published by Duke University Press
In Killer Apps Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a detailed account of the rise of automation in warfare, showing how media systems are central to building weapons systems with artificial intelligence in order to more efficiently select and eliminate military targets. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of political and media theorists, Packer and Reeves develop a new theory for understanding how the intersection of media and military strategy drives today’s AI arms race. They address the use of media to search for enemies in their analyses of the history of automated radar systems, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the development of military climate science, which treats the changing earth as an enemy. As the authors demonstrate, contemporary military strategy demands perfect communication in an evolving battlespace that is increasingly inhospitable to human frailties, necessitating humans’ replacement by advanced robotics, machine intelligence, and media systems.
Jeremy Packer is Associate Professor in the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto.
Joshua Reeves is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Oregon State University.
Praise for Killer Apps

“In this crucial new book, Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves offer a provocative, media-centric analysis of automated killing machines. Engaging with an armada of flying sensors, robotic submarines, and AI weapons already in use, they show that big data, computer vision, and super intelligence emerge not just to order and organize the battlefield, but to produce new enemies. Clever and incisive, the book provides a haunting look at warfare of the near future.” — Lisa Parks, coeditor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
“This is an excellent book: well designed, thoroughly engaging, informative and, unfortunately, extremely topical and timely. The authors have gone to great lengths to make Killer Apps relentlessly up to date, providing readers with the latest in weapons developments, including AI drones and ‘swarmanoid’ robotics. With its impressive grounding in theory and hardware, it will become the go-to book for critical understandings of the intersection of warfare, media, and enmity.” — Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, author of Kittler and the Media

Joan Frank: Where You're All Going
2020-05-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Joan Frank discusses her new collection of novellas, Where You’re All Going, with Peg Alford Pursell.
Praise for Where You’re All Going
“Joan Frank’s wonderful novellas are funny, edgy, poignant and true. Attuned to the predicaments of the slight-outsider, and of good people struggling to get by, Frank gives us characters dealing with love lost and love sustained, and the small essential intimacies that make up both. Her prose is vivid, her observations sharp, and everywhere music and song animate the conversation. You’ll feel more alive when you read these stories, and hold closer to you the people you cherish.” —Sylvia Brownrigg
“Joan Frank has an uncanny ability to go deeply into character and with the lightest touch show us how divided we humans are in the most complicated matters of the heart. Where You’re All Going  is a marvel.” —Ann Packer, NYT best-selling author of The Children’s Crusade
“Every novella in this book is, in part, about music, from jazz to classical to Marvin Gaye. One could practically mark the first novella, ‘staccato’; every paragraph begs to be read aloud, to be heard. The stories are, line after line, brimming with a brisk freshness.” —Aimee Bender
About Where You’re All Going
In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities. A young couple navigates a strange friendship and unexpected pregnancy; a woman recalls the bizarre fallout of her former lover’s fame; a lonely widow is drawn to an arrogant young man; a wealthy spiritual seeker grapples with what wealth cannot affect. Witty and humane, Frank taps the riches of the novella form as she writes of loneliness, friendship, loss, and the filaments of intimacy that connect us through time.

Bawdy Storytelling's 'PartyStarter!' (5/14/2020, SF)
2020-05-14 20:00 | Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa St, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Thursday, May 14th, 2020
at the Verdi Club
2424 Mariposa, San Francisco, CA
Remember: Bang-O at 7:00 PM, Stories at 8:00 PM
Want a sample of Bawdy?
Listen to the Bawdy Storytelling podcast at
http://bit.ly/bawdypodcast
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
This Evening of Stories, Songs & Sex Toys features:
❤ Hosted by Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour
❤ Legendary Author/Speaker/Kinkster Race Bannon
❤ Songs by Bawdy’s brilliant cohort, Jefferson Bergey
❤ Pitch your story to Dixie@BawdyStorytelling.com
❤ Play Bang-O & WIN Prizes, just for making new friends
❤ Bang-O Grand Prizes from Good Vibrations
❤ Bawdy’s new merchandise, FINALLY #BawdyGotMeLaid
❤ Reserved Seating puts you right up front
❤ Custom Bawdy Cocktails to help you get your flirt on #CBT #UnicornsButthole #EthicalSlut
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For Millions of Years, Sexual Folklorist & Podcast host Dixie De La Tour has brought the Nation’s Perverrati together & onto the Bawdy Storytelling stage to tell their own infamously true tales of lust, love, kinky collisions, gender redefinition, sexual identity, life-changing hook-ups, educational one-night stands & everything in between.
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The Original Sex + Storytelling series, featuring Real People & Rockstars sharing their Bona Fide Sexual Exploits, Live Onstage
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And we know you’re on FetLife, ya pervert. Join the Bawdy Storytelling group there!
https://fetlife.com/groups/46341
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Performer Bios:
❤ Dixie De La Tour is a sexual folklorist, professional storyteller, podcaster, teacher, coach, community builder and most of all, a facilitator. She is also the Founder, Curator & Host of the Award-winning and NSFW storytelling series, Bawdy Storytelling (“The Moth for Pervs” – LA Weekly, “The Original Sex and Storytelling series” – Playgirl) that’s been lauded for its transformational, relatable, empowering performances. This live stage series is currently headed into its 13th year, the groundbreaking Bawdy Storytelling podcast has had over 1.5 million downloads, plus it’s been acknowledged as a ‘Best Of’ Sex podcast from Forbes, GQ Magazine, Marie Claire, Uproxx, Daily Mail UK, Bustle and (twice!) by Esquire Magazine.
Dixie has been Sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (“Saint Kiss & Make You Tell”) for her work to reduce stigma and eliminate shame, and she recently became a Muppet. Discover more about Dixie De La Tour and Bawdy Storytelling at Facebook.com/BawdyStorytelling, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/bawdystorytelling on Twitter at @Bawdy and always at www.BawdyStorytelling.com
In addition to story and public speaking coaching for her own series, Dixie coaches for TEDx, Women in Technology, offers custom Brand Storytelling coaching, has led storytelling events in Libraries, teaches Storytelling for the Classroom and has been a featured teller for the National Storytelling Conference. Ultimately, this story-loving southerner is passionate about storytelling’s ability to keep people safe, reduce social anxiety and connect us with strangers. Stories help you find your people!
❤ Kinky sex has been one of Race Bannon’s passions as a practitioner, organizer, writer, educator, commentator, activist and leader since his first explorations of the leather world starting in 1973. Race’s accomplishments include co-founder of the Kink Aware Professionals referral service; leader of The DSM Project that began to change how psychotherapy professionals view kink; author of the bestselling Learning The Ropes: A Basic Guide to Safe and Fun BDSM Lovemaking; founder of Daedalus Publishing Company, the first company dedicated to publishing nonfiction leather/SM/fetish books; prolific writer; former sex advice columnist; former producer and host of the first kink internet talk show Bound To Talk; past Board member of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities, NLA International and Avatar Club Los Angeles; co-founder of NLA Los Angeles; and member of Chicago Hellfire Club, The 15 Association, and Society of Janus. Race is currently on the Board of the Leather Hall of Fame. Recently Race was inducted into the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. He is featured in the documentaries Vice and Consent, Out of the Darkness: The Reality of S&M and Folsom Forever, was a BDSM consultant for the movie Exit to Eden, and is currently an Executive Producer for Divine Deviance, an upcoming documentary about the global kink/BDSM/fetish scene. Race is also a popular speaker who has delivered the keynote address for a number of events. He has been awarded the 2006 National Leather Association International’s Lifetime Achievement Award, 2010 Mister Marcus Hernandez Lifetime Achievement Award (Man) Pantheon of Leather Community Service Award, the 2011 Philip M. Turner Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2013 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Creating Change Leather Leadership Award, 2014 San Francisco Bay Area Leather Alliance Co-Man of the Year (tie), and the 2016 NorCal/Northwest Regional Pantheon of Leather Award. You can read some of Race’s writings at www.bannon.com or www.racebannon.com or in the Bay Area Reporter (ebar.com) where he is the leather/kink columnist.
❤ Straddling the line between sentimental and sleazy, Jefferson Bergey blends gritty, soulful pop with elements of folk, blues, and country with a penchant for the ridiculous in his original compositions.
The Oakland based singer-songwriter performs his family-unfriendly music all over the Bay Area. He’s a frequent contributor, writing custom songs for the award-winning, San Francisco based, Bawdy Storytelling. As a solo acoustic act, Bergey’s sound is akin to folky musical theater in a coffee shop…if the coffee shop also sold sex toys and sativa gummy bears. His polite vulgarity may not be for the very young and impressionable or the very old and conservative but he won’t tell you how to raise your kids or upset your grandparents.
He can be seen and heckled every Monday night at his Risqué residency at Scopo Divino in San Francisco. For well over two years straight, he’s put on a unique and interactive show where he plays original music and cover songs suggested by those in attendance who haven’t already left in disgust.
Bergey’s music can be heard on the RISK! and Bawdy Storytelling podcasts. He has performed at The Independent, Sweetwater, Great American Music Hall, Jewish Community Center in SF, John Steinbeck Association, Special Olympics in Long Beach, Punchline SF, and SF Sketchfest.
His newest EP titled ‘Always Up (To Go Down)’ was originally written for Bawdy Storytelling and is flanked by a few of his ‘inter-lewds’, now fleshed out with piano, bass, and pedal steel. It also features the talents of Natalie Smith (Cape Weather) on vocals.
www.jeffersonbergey.com
https://www.patreon.com/jeffersonbergey
https://www.facebook.com/jefferson.bergey
https://www.instagram.com/jeffersonbergey
• No Refunds or Exchanges
• Lineup Subject to Change
• ASL Interpretation available with prior written notice. Contact BawdyStorytelling@gmail.com for more information
• General Admission seating is first come, first served. We recommend you arrive when doors open for best seating (Reserved Seating guarantees you a seat right up front)
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Winner of SFist’s Best Storytelling Show, the SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco & the LA Weekly’s Best Of Los Angeles (for Best Storytelling) & 2 Time Winner of the SF Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay Award (Best Literary Event)
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“The Moth for Pervs” – LA Weekly
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“Dixie De La Tour’s scandalous, over-the-top Bawdy Storytelling series” – SF Weekly
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Want more Bawdy?
www.BawdyStorytelling.com
Twitter: @Bawdy
& at Facebook.com/BawdyStorytelling
