Litseen

*Postponed* VIRTUAL: Wall + Response: Karla Brundage, Jennifer Hasegawa, Tureeda Mikell & Kim Shuck
2021-02-26 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
*** PLEASE NOTE: due to the new lockdown orders, we are postponing this event until we can faithfully – and safely – record all authors in front of their corresponding murals. We will announce a new date ASAP. Thank you for understanding, and apologies for any inconvenience. ***
Booksmith and The Bindery are proud to host a four-event series presented by Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) called Wall + Response, featuring sixteen Bay Area poets responding to the social/ political/ racial/ justice narratives of four murals on Clarion Alley.
Curated by CAMP artist and organizer Megan Wilson (wall) and poet Maw Shein Win (response), the second event in the series features Karla Brundage, Jennifer Hasegawa, Tureeda Mikell and Kim Shuck responding to the mural We Want Respect, Freedom, Land, Housing, Justice, Peace, Bread by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / Remix by CUBA, D8, MACE.
We Want Respect, Freedom, Land, Housing, Justice, Peace, Bread (2011) by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / remix by CUBA D8, MACE reflects the legacy of the Black Panthers and their core work towards social, political, racial, economic, and food justice. The mural, based on a design by Emory Douglas with elements from the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program is a remix painted by graffiti artists CUBA (Clarence Robbs), D8 (David Petrelli), and MACE (Alex Douhovnikoff). The artists ensure the work is maintained and periodically add messaging based on critical needs of the moment. These gestures of care and thoughtfulness reflect the intent of the original work and support the ongoing movement to secure the demands stated in What We Want Now!.
This virtual event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
– ABOUT THE PROJECT –
Wall + Response was originally conceived to culminate in four quarterly public events to be presented on Clarion Alley. However, due to the pandemic the poets will instead be filmed by videographer Mahima Kotian reading their work in front of the murals on Clarion Alley. Kotian will be creating videos for each series that will be presented as part of live online events (of which this is the first). All the events are free and open to the public.
The poets are creating new poems in response to the murals, and will be reading those and other selected works at the events. The specific dates for each event will be announced in the month prior to the event.
Wall + Response is made possible by the generous support of the San Francisco Art Commission and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
– ABOUT THE AUTHORS –
Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. She believes that in order to restore balance and to reclaim our humanity as Black people, this issue of racism and the racist structures that uphold this belief, must be dismantled. Her writing is primarily for Black women and people disenfranchised by poverty, abuse, neglect or violence. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange and her work can be found at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/ .
Jennifer Hasegawa is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who has sold funeral insurance door-to-door. She was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi and lives in San Francisco. The manuscript for her first book of poetry, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Tule Review, and Vallum and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and jubilat.
Tureeda Mikell, Ture Ade, Story Medicine Woman, an ‘activist for holism, called a ‘word magician,’ an award winning poet, published nationally and internationally. Qigong Healer, workshop leader, storyteller, lyricist, performance artist, BMI and ASCAP member. Published 72 student anthologies with CA Poets in the Schools since 1989. Performed in schools, libraries and universities, Google, Genentech, Aspire, Lawrence Hall, Golden Gate Academy of Sciences, Randall, Oakland, and De Young Museums. 2020, was featured spoken word artist at SOAN [Soul of a Nation] Exhibit, the American Academy of Poets, Fire Thieves, at the De Young, and MoAD’s Lit-Quake Afrofuturism. Featured storyteller for the 50 Year Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, National Association of Black Storytellers, featured poet storyteller celebrating Octavia Butler’s 70th birthday, and Eth-Noh-Tec Nu Wa Delegate storyteller in Beijing, China in collaboration with the University of Beijing, 2018. Latest publication, Synchronicity, The Oracle of Sun Medicine, released 2/2020, by Nomadic Press.
Kim Shuck is the solo author of seven collections of poetry. Fog gazer, collector of odd ends and dreamer, Shuck was born in the 60s in San Francisco. Kim is the seventh poet laureate of that city. In 2019 Shuck was awarded a National Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets and a Censorship Award from PEN Oakland. In 2020 Kim was awarded a Golden Poppy Award from the California Independent Booksellers Association and a Groundbreaker Award from the Northern California Book Awards. Kim’s latest published work is a single poem chapbook Whose Water from Mammoth Publications. Shuck is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

– OTHER PARTICIPATING AUTHORS + EVENTS –
March 26, 2021: Celeste Chan, MK Chavez, Paul Corman-Roberts and Tim Xonnelly responding to the mural Affordable Housing/Vivienda Asequible by the SF Print Collective working with the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP)
June 25, 2021: Youssef Alaoui, Jason Bayani, Genny Lim, and Michael Warr responding to the mural The Will To Live by Art Forces, Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC), and Arab Youth Organizing (AYO)
– ABOUT THE CURATORS –
Megan Wilson is a visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Wilson has been a core organizer of Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) since 2001. In 2018 she co-directed and co-organized (with Christopher Statton and Nano Warsono) CAMP’s second international exchange and residency project, Bangkit /Arise between artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia and San Francisco/Bay Area in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The second phase of the project will take place 2021-22.
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018), and her poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House will be published by Omnidawn in October 2020.
You can read more about CAMP and Wall + Response here.
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This virtual event is free and open to all ages, but RSVP is required.

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If we have to cancel an event, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.

HIGH DAWN 6: LAWRENCE / LEUNG / LOU / BASU
2021-02-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Zoom
Small Press Traffic and UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium present the sixth installment of HIGH DAWN, a reading series featuring poets and musicians from the Bay Area and beyond.
Readings by Stephon Lawrence & Muriel Leung
Introduced by Angie Sijun Lou
Music by Beast Nest
Artist bios below
RSVP for Zoom link: spt-feb.eventbrite.com
Upcoming Small Press Traffic events: https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/upcomingevents

Artist Bios:

Stephon Lawrence is a Brooklyn born & based writer, and artist. She is a graduate of the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute and is co-founder and an editor of The Felt, a journal of otherworldly poetics interested in the creation and cultivation of emancipatory poetic spaces for felt sentiments that have been marginalized, displaced, or estranged from the dominant culture. Her first book u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// is forthcoming from Futurepoem Books. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Horseless Press, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, GlitterMOB, Fanzine & other places. Her micro-chap //GERMZ is available from Ghost City Press. And her chapbook //EVIL TWIN is available from Resolving Host. She is a recipient of a Summer Workshop Scholarship at The Fine Arts Work Center. Stephon spends her free time watching anime and kdramas, training muay thai, yelling about white supremacy, and being cute for the ‘gram. Her work aims to encapsulate all of this. She is almost always online. You can find her on twitter @nnohpetss and instagram @alphaheaux.

Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. Currently, she is a Dornsife fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.

Angie Sijun Lou is a writer from Seattle. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison.

Sharmi Basu (they/them/she/her) is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. They attempt to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi’s primary performing project, utilizes multi-dimensional soundscapes to transmute trauma and suffering into moments of deep presence. They are an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and have worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Their workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. They perform almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. They also founded and hosted an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was a founder of the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. They are on the board of directors for Safer DIY Spaces and Soundwave SF. She is also a certified mediator and much of her multimedia work centers on familial healing, transformative justice, accountability, and the investigation of interpersonal harm.

Lidia Yuknavich in conversation with Lance Olsen
2021-02-25 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
reading from their work and talking about literature
Lidia Yuknavich celebrates the paperback release of
Verge: stories
published by Riverhead Books
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Bustle and Lit Hub
A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer of rare insight into the jagged boundaries between pain and survival. Her characters are scarred by the unchecked hungers of others and themselves, yet determined to find salvation within lives that can feel beyond their control. In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now, in Verge, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins.The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held—and told—by our own individual bodies.

Lance Olsen will also be reading from his recently released novel
My Red Heavenpublished by Dzanc Books
Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters―some historic, some invented―crossing paths on the streets of Berlin.
The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg―as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts.
Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. A terrific read for fans of Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, and of the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novel Dreamlives of Debris. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah, where he directs the creative writing program.

Praise for VERGE:

Praise for Verge:
“At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin.” —Cornelia Channing, The Paris Review
“Full of suspense . . . Young or old, male or female, the characters in Verge will shock and impress themselves onto the reader.” —LitHub
“This book is a gem. . . . A brilliant collection of twenty stories that contain as much compassion as suffering . . . In Yuknavitch’s hands, words are both swords and feathers. . . . She writes with a sensibility that is both blunt and empathic, as if to open the reader’s heart and make it bleed.” —Ms. Magazine
“Diverse and impactful, unlike some collections, where only a few stories shine . . . Verge boldly asks some pressing yet unspoken questions, such as: How is it that Americans can say anything with a straight face? Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or tell them? It also forces us to acknowledge—and even embrace—the unsettling answers.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Dynamite. . . . I don’t know of any other writer who can render the brutality of life with such honesty and dazzle. . . . That Lidia Yuknavitch can create such beauty out of the tragedy of contemporary life is testament to her skill as an artist. Verge is volatile and vital, and it hits where it hurts, in the most oddly pleasurable way.” —Lambda Literary
“Lidia Yuknavitch displays the same gift for exploring the borderland between art, sex, and trauma that readers have come to expect . . . . [turning] her powers toward life on the margins.” —The Millions
“Yuknavitch writes with rare empathy about the repercussions of grief, loss and dislocation.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture
“Disturbing and delightful all at once.” —BookRiot
“With the publication of Verge, Yuknavitch’s writing flies into hyperspace. . . . [Verge is] an act of courage and urgency. The book is historically specific, yet ultimately timeless.” —The Brooklyn Rail
“Brilliant. . . . Consistently incisive, with sharp sentences and a barreling pace. . . . This riveting collection invites readers to see women whose points of view are typically ignored.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Insistently visceral . . . These howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A vertiginous and revelatory book whose characters—sometimes in desperate situations, and sometimes, finally, in a place of safety—have much to say about the world that we live in now. Lidia Yuknavitch is astonishing.”
—Kelly Link
“Verge is a wonderful, challenging book. I know these people. I know their dilemmas, and where I don’t recognize them, I believe them. The passion Lidia Yuknavitch brings to the page is astounding. I am caught up, shaken up, and now and then simply delighted. ‘Listen to this,’ I call out to friends, and then, minutes later: ‘No, wait, listen to this!’”
—Dorothy Allison
Praise for My Red Heaven

“The combined effect of the different styles on display here is virtuosic, but Olsen never loses sight of the bigger scope of history―or the tragedies the future will hold for most of these characters. This novel manages the impressive task of being both experimental and accessible―and thoroughly moving to boot.”
―Kirkus Reviews“Inspired by German artist Otto Freundlich’s painting of the same title, this meditation on the effects of a specific moment in history and the human condition reaches past cultural barriers and time to create a narrative that pushes boundaries and reflects on what is means to dwell in the here and now.”
―Publishers Weekly
“Olsen employs a full suite of experimental techniques to tell the story, including newsreel headlines, screenplay excerpts, poetic verses, and ekphrastic reflections on unsettling scenes of bombed-out and abandoned buildings. But the real draw is Olsen’s supple, exacting prose, which captures the energy of cutting-edge art movements amid impending political uncertainty. There’s an eerie familiarity to the air of technological and social breakthroughs, with fallout or resolution just around the corner.”
―Booklist
“Olsen is a fine, clear stylist. … My Red Heaven captures the eeriness of a city on the brink of an epochal descent into barbarism.”
―Wall Street Journal
“Lance Olsen is as innovative as he is prolific and an irreplaceable figure in avant-garde fiction. … Told in vignettes that are formally daring, yet always musical and accessible, this is a powerful book in every respect and an important one for readers here in this country in 2020.”
―Robert Lopez for The Believer

“The fleeting encounters of the famous and not-so-famous dead, in their own voices, sketch out a vanishing moment in a Berlin on the brink. Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven is a work of necromantic dazzlement.”
―Shelley Jackson, author of Riddance, Half Life, and The Melancholy of Anatomy“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive.”
―Carole Maso, author of Ava and The Art Lover
“In this twenty-four-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It’s fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances…and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It’s a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written.
―Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment.”
―Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song “Where to stand in this original novel as History that unspeakably painfully hurts while montaging all our astonishing, poignant, and gross ironies. Between lives, even our own, that are less here than nearby or elsewhere; between Dietrich and Heisenberg; between, on one hand (literally), Arendt and Heidegger showering and thinking about thinking, and deaths there perhaps are no words for; between what is actually, terribly being evoked and, dissolve after dissolve, an exquisite narrative prose risking again and again an incorrigible lightness. At random, I thought of Wittgenstein in Duffy’s The World as I Found It; dictatorship in Spufford’s Red Plenty; the sculptural work of Joseph Beuys; and, where fact seems all the more fact in a context of fictive documentation, the great Sebald.”
―Joseph McElroy, author of Women and Men and Cannonball

VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Ed Frauenheim / Reinventing Masculinity: The Liberating Power of Compassion and Connection
2021-02-25 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are very pleased to host a virtual event with Ed Frauenheim for his new book Reinventing Masculinity: The Liberating Power of Compassion and Connection, co-authored with Edward M. Adams.
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Reinventing Masculinity here. We’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
In a recent FiveThirtyEight poll, 60 percent of men surveyed said society puts pressure on men to behave in a way that is unhealthy or bad. Men account for 80 percent of suicides in the United States, and three in ten American men have suffered from depression. Ed Adams and Ed Frauenheim say a big part of the problem is a model of masculinity that’s become outmoded and even dangerous, to both men and women.
The conventional notion of what it means to be a man–what Adams and Frauenheim call “Confined Masculinity”–traps men in an emotional straitjacket; steers them toward selfishness, misogyny, and violence; and severely limits their possibilities. As an antidote, they propose a new paradigm: Liberating Masculinity. It builds on traditional masculine roles like the protector and provider, expanding men’s options to include caring, collaboration, emotional expressivity, an inclusive spirit, and environmental stewardship.
Through hopeful stories of men who have freed themselves from the strictures of Confined Masculinity, interviews with both leaders and everyday men, and practical exercises, this book shows the power of a masculinity defined by what the authors call the five Cs: curiosity, courage, compassion, connection, and commitment. Men will discover a way of being that fosters healthy, harmonious relationships at home, at work, and in the world.
About the author
Ed Frauenheim is co-author of several books, including A Great Place to Work For All, Organized Innovation, and Reinventing Masculinity: The Liberating Power of Compassion and Connection.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

VIRTUAL EVENT: LIVING WRITERS SERIES, Tess Taylor & Danusha Laméris
2021-02-25 17:20 - 18:55 | CA
The UCSC Literature Department and Creative Writing Program Present: LIVING WRITERS SERIES WINTER 2021 “Shelter and Place,” a theme about world building when the world seems to be falling apart, about writing about place, about seeking and finding and not finding shelter in stormy times, and of course, what it means to be a writer and a person writing while sheltering in place.
FEBRUARY 25TH FEATURED WRITERS: TESS TAYLOR & DANUSHA LAMÈRIS
Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The Forage House, called “stunning” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Work & Days was named one of The New York Times best books of poetry of 2016. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, hailed as “brilliant” in the LA Times.
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. She’s the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), and the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Danusha teaches poetry independently and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.
Register for this FREE event series here.
The Living Writers Series runs on select Thursdays from 5:20-6:55p.m. Authors’ books available for pick up or delivery via Bookshop Santa Cruz. Find them here.

Lydia Millet Discussing her novel, A Children's Bible
2021-02-24 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Lydia Millet joins us for a virtual event to celebrate the paperback release of A Children’s Bible (W.W. Norton), one of the New York Times “Top Ten Books of 2020”.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
Registration info coming soon.
About A Children’s Bible
Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s sublime new novel—her first since the National Book Award long-listed Sweet Lamb of Heaven—follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion.
Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders—including Eve, who narrates the story—decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.
As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.
A Children’s Bible is a prophetic, heartbreaking story of generational divide—and a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.
About Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award and longlisted for the National Book Award. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.

Anne Corley Baum - Small Mistakes, Big Consequences
2021-02-24 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Small Mistakes, Big Consequences for Interviews is a lighthearted look at the top 20 interviewing mistakes that people make without realizing the potential consequences. Learn how to identify these common character mistakes that can make or break your interview—and hiring prospects. Avoid making these mistakes yourself and learn how to interview and manage these personality types. It also offers advice to the interviewer.
Small Mistakes, Big Consequences: Develop Your Soft Skills to Help You Succeed is a lighthearted look at the top 16 business mistakes that people make without realizing the potential consequences. Readers will learn how to identify these common mistakes that can make or break your relationships as well as learn how to avoid making these mistakes themselves, and learn how to work with and manage people who exhibit these personality types. The book is filled with simple, actionable business tips to help readers succeed. It’s a guide to navigating the speed bumps on the road to the corner office.
Anne Corley Baum is the Lehigh Valley Market President for Capital BlueCross. She has run leadership training programs through her own company Vision Accomplished, that focuses on leadership development. She has spent years serving in leadership roles and teaching leadership to high potential employees on their way to the C -Suite. She is a certified protocol and etiquette consultant and has run programs on perfecting your professional image, leadership, and executive coaching, how to succeed in the international arena, and dining at the corporate table. She has also led programs for young adults including interviewing and job skills and etiquette and dining programs for children and teens. She has been interviewing candidates for over 30 years for various positions.

Daphne A. Brooks
2021-02-24 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
discussing her new book
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
published by Belknap Press / Harvard University Press
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé.
Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?
Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae’s liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.
With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black woman musicians as radical intellectuals.
Daphne A. Brooks is author of Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Bodies in Dissent, winner of the Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American performance studies. A professor at Yale University, she has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell, and Prince, as well as stories for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Pitchfork.

Praise for Liner Notes for the Revolution :

“A spirited study of how Black women musicians and writers have informed each other despite gatekeepers’ neglect and dismissals… A sui generis and essential work on Black music culture destined to launch future investigations.“—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Enlightening…a fresh perspective on more than a century’s worth of Black female musicians… Brooks combines an impressive archive of musical works and the artists’ own words to convincingly reveal how they each impacted popular culture. Music aficionados should take note.“—Publishers Weekly
“Daphne Brooks has written a gloriously polyphonic book. Moving through the tumult of the twentieth century and the millennium, she scores, archives, and curates the history of Black woman musicians and their radical modernities, all created in a culture that presumed they had no voices or minds. What did they do to be so Black, brilliant, and blue? Listen. And read on.”—Margo Jefferson, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Negroland
“Effortlessly poetic, deeply historical, and insistently imaginative, Liner Notes for the Revolution doesn’t merely give voice to unheeded and crucial innovators; it offers a new method for approaching music history itself.”—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty
“Daphne Brooks’s brilliant evocation of what gets lost when women of color don’t speak, let alone sing, is one of the most moving testaments to the power of silence, and what breaking that silence means, that I have ever read. Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations, Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”—Hilton Als, author of White Girls
“For Daphne Brooks, black feminist sound is sensuous thought. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, she feels and shows and says this with such devotion, such critical and emotional intelligence, such archival commitment and dexterity, and such urgent social aspiration that listening itself is new again.”—Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty
“Liner Notes for the Revolution is a groundbreaking and breathtaking volume from one of our leading cultural historians that will forever change the way we write and think about American culture. Daphne Brooks insists upon the genius of black women music-makers, listeners, and critics. This transformative work of intellectual generosity is sure to join the ranks of classic works such as Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne

VIRTUAL EVENT: Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us
2021-02-24 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop Santa Cruz, in partnership with The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, Marcus Books, and the NAACP Santa Cruz County Branch, present author Heather McGhee in conversation with Alicia Garza, Principal at Black Futures Lab and co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter. McGhee’s new book, The Sum of Us, is a powerful exploration about the self-destructive bargain of white supremacy and its rising cost to all of us—including white people—from one of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers.
Register for this free online event by clicking here!
The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, still the richest country in the world, but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. At the heart of the book are the humble stories of Americans yearning to be a part of a better America, including white supremacy’s collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a vision for the future of our country—one whose population has ties to every place on the globe—where we finally realize that life can be so much more than zero-sum.
“Racism is not merely destructive to people of color. It is self-destructive to many white people. Racism is anti-American and anti-human as Heather McGhee expertly and judiciously proves in The Sum of Us. This is the book I’ve been waiting for. The Sum of Us can help us come together to build a nation for us all, with policies that benefit us all.” —Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos, McGhee has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly to news shows including NBC’s Meet the Press. She now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. McGhee holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Alicia Garza believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve — to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An author, political strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, Alicia founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. She is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and is a co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media and frequently contributes thoughtful opinion pieces and expert commentary on politics, race and more to outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times. She has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World issue and being named to Bloomberg’s 50 and Politico’s 50 lists. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World Penguin Random House), and she warns you — hashtags don’t start movements. People do.

Afternoon Literary Seminar: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
2021-02-24 13:00 - 14:30 | CA
THIS SESSION IS ONLINE
4.50 from Paddington, Agatha Christie
At long last! Join Kimberly to see why Agatha Christie is just so much fun to read. The most best-selling author of all time, Christie will delight you not just with well-structured problems to solve, but with clever, well-drawn, lovable characters, charming description of British mid-century life, quite a bit of social satire and much wry humor.
4.50 has the advantage of showcasing Christie’s wise and unassuming Miss Marple, along with a cast of strong and unforgettable women.
Whether you’re a long-time devotee, or have never read Christie, join the group for a delightful, unique reading experience.

Book Launch Pajama Party with Mitali Perkins
2021-02-23 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Join us for a special pajama party with local author Mitali Perkins and her dog to celebrate the launch of Mitali’s new picture book, Home is in Between! Bring your pet or favorite stuffy and cozy up for a virtual bedtime story. See you there! Book is recommended for ages 3-7. Pre-register to save a spot!
This event will take place live on Crowdcast. Pre-registration required. Click here to save your spot.
Pre-order signed copies of Home Is In Between below.

Tuesday, February 23, 2021 – 7:00pm

Shanti misses the warm monsoon rains in India. Now in America, she watches fall leaves fly past her feet.
Still, her family’s apartment feels like a village: Mama cooking luchi, funny stories in Bangla, and Baba’s big laugh. But outside, everything is different – trick-or-treating, ballet class, and English books.
Back and forth, Shanti trudges between her two worlds. She remembers her village and learns her new town. She watches Bollywood movies at home and Hollywood movies with her friends. She is Indian. She is also American. How should she define home?
Mitali Perkins has written several books for young readers, including Between Us and Abuela, Forward Me Back to You, You Bring the Distant Near (a National Book Award Nominee, a Walter Honor Book, a South Asia Book Award Winner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and a Shelf Awareness 2017 Best Book of the Year), Rickshaw Girl (a NYPL Top 100 Book), and Bamboo People (an ALA Top 10 YA novel). Mitali was born in India and currently resides in Northern California.

VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters presents the launch for Dr. Euan Angus Ashley / The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them
2021-02-23 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are very pleased to host a virtual event with Dr. Euan Angus Ashley for his new book The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them.
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order The Genome Odyssey here. We’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
Since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, the price of genome sequencing has dropped at a staggering rate. It’s as if the price of a Ferrari went from $350,000 to a mere forty cents. Through breakthroughs made by Dr. Ashley’s team at Stanford and other dedicated groups around the world, analyzing the human genome has decreased from a heroic multibillion dollar effort to a single clinical test costing less than $1,000.
For the first time we have within our grasp the ability to predict our genetic future, to diagnose and prevent disease before it begins, and to decode what it really means to be human.
In The Genome Odyssey, Dr. Ashley details the medicine behind genome sequencing with clarity and accessibility. More than that, with passion for his subject and compassion for his patients, he introduces readers to the dynamic group of researchers and doctor detectives who hunt for answers, and to the pioneering patients who open up their lives to the medical community during their search for diagnoses and cures.
He describes how he led the team that was the first to analyze and interpret a complete human genome, how they broke genome speed records to diagnose and treat a newborn baby girl whose heart stopped five times on the first day of her life, and how they found a boy with tumors growing inside his heart and traced the cause to a missing piece of his genome.
These patients inspire Dr. Ashley and his team as they work to expand the boundaries of our medical capabilities and to envision a future where genome sequencing is available for all, where medicine can be tailored to treat specific diseases and to decode pathogens like viruses at the genomic level, and where our medical system as we know it has been completely revolutionized.
About the author
Euan Ashley is a Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University. He was born in Scotland and graduated from the University of Glasgow. He attended Oxford University, completing a PhD there before moving to Stanford University where he trained in Cardiology. He joined the Stanford faculty, where he led the team that carried out the first medical interpretation of a human genome. Ashley has received awards from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. He was recognized by the Obama White House and received the Medal of Honor from the American Heart Association.
His articles have appeared in the many journals, including Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature and Cell. He appears regularly on local and national radio and TV. He is the founder of three companies and advisor to several Silicon Valley companies. With three young children, he spends his spare time trying to understand American football, play the saxophone, and conduct research on the health benefits of single malt Scotch whisky.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Tanya Selvaratnam - Assume Nothing (Virtual Event)
2021-02-23 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
In Assume Nothing, award-winning filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam bravely recounts the intimate abuse she suffered from former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, using her story as a prism to examine the domestic violence crisis plaguing America.
When Tanya Selvaratnam met then New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, they seemed like the perfect match. Both were Harvard alumni; both studied Chinese; both were interested in spirituality and meditation, both were well-connected rising stars in their professions—Selvaratnam in entertainment and the art world; Schneiderman in law and politics.
Behind closed doors, however, Tanya’s life was anything but ideal. Schneiderman became controlling, mean, and manipulative. He drank heavily and used sedatives. Sex turned violent, and he called Tanya—who was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Southern California—his “brown slave.” He isolated and manipulated her, even threatening to kill her if she tried to leave.
Twenty-five percent of women in America are victims of domestic abuse. Tanya never thought she would be a part of this statistic. Growing up, she witnessed her father physically and emotionally abuse her mother. Tanya knew the patterns and signs of domestic violence, and did not see herself as remotely vulnerable. Yet what seemed impossible was suddenly a terrifying reality: she was trapped in a violent relationship with one of the most powerful men in New York.
Sensitive and nuanced, written with the gripping power of a dark psychological thriller, Assume Nothing details how Tanya’s relationship devolved into abuse, how she found the strength to leave—risking her career, reputation, and life—and how she reclaimed her freedom and her voice. In sharing her story, Tanya analyzes the insidious way women from all walks of life learn to accept abuse, and redefines what it means to be a victim of intimate violence.
Tanya Selvaratnam is the author of The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, Vogue, The Art Newspaper, SheKnows, Glamour, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and on CNN, and she has been a fellow at Yaddo and Blue Mountain Center. She is an Emmy-nominated and Webby-winning Filmmaker, and she has been a producer for Aubin Pictures, For Freedoms, Glamour Women of the Year, the Meteor, Planned Parenthood, and the Vision & Justice Project.
Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and author of the national bestselling book 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection, winner of the Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award. Her spoken cinema performance Dear Human premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Find more at tiffanyshlain.com.

Virtual Event: Lauren Oyler and Anna Wiener
2021-02-22 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22 AT 6PM PT WHEN LAUREN OYLER IS JOINED BY ANNA WIENER TO DISCUSS HER DEBUT NOVEL, FAKE ACCOUNTS, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82633184310
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,82633184310# or +12532158782,,82633184310#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kd9BjI5wzd
Praise for Fake Accounts
“This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it.” —Zadie Smith
“Oyler has written a startlingly lucid account of what it does to a person to live a life filled with lies, why it’s so painful to be unable to trust anything or anyone, including yourself…I laughed a lot while reading this, even when—especially when—I very much saw myself as the joke. What Fake Accounts is ultimately asking, then, is a question we could all do well to pose to ourselves with some frequency: Who do you think you’re fooling?” ––Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year
“Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is such an ensorcelling blend of insight, comedy and suspense, you almost don’t notice yourself being filleted alive in these pages. A note to fellow readers of the twenty-first century: Anyone familiar with the allure of social media will adore this coolly observed novel. A note to fellow writers of the twenty-first century: Oh crap, she did it.” —Sloane Crosley, author of Look Alive Out There and I Was Told There’d Be Cake
About Fake Accounts
A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “incisive” and “funny” debut novel that “brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she’s relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women’s March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.
Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can’t trust anyone—shouldn’t the feeling be mutual?
Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.

Bill Zarchy - Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale (Virtual Event)
2021-02-22 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Equal parts time travel tale, thriller, and baseball saga, Bill Zarchy’s debut novel Finding George Washington: A Time Travel Tale is a gripping, humorous, and entertaining look at what happens when past and present collide in the 9th inning, with the bases loaded and no one warming up in the bullpen.
On a freezing night in 1778, General George Washington vanishes. Walking away from the Valley Forge encampment, he takes a fall and is knocked unconscious, only to reappear at a park near San Francisco—during the summer of 2014. Washington befriends two Berkeley twenty-somethings who help him cope with the astonishing—and often comical—surprises of the twenty-first century.
Washington’s absence from Valley Forge, however, is not without serious consequences. As the world rapidly devolves around them—and their beloved Giants fight to salvage a disappointing season—George, Tim, and Matt are catapulted on a race across America to find a way to get George back to 1778.
“I grew up fascinated by the presidents—and Washington in particular,” recalls author Bill Zarchy. “George became my touchstone for trying to understand the alluring technology of my mid-century boyhood—aviation, photography, trains, cars, rockets, satellites, television, movies: How would I explain this to George Washington, if he were to come back to life right now?” Zarchy continues, “I originally thought of this as a comic, fish-out-of-water story, but as I learned more about my subject, so much emerged about George: A charismatic leader, but a soft-spoken, uninspiring orator. A courageous man, who endured the burden of dental pain throughout his life. A powerful, ambitious man, but a kind, gentle husband and stepfather. A 6’ 2” giant, at a time when most men were much shorter. A skillful horseman, a graceful dancer, a man’s man who enjoyed the company of women. Perhaps most significantly, like most of the Founding Fathers, he was a slave owner, though history establishes that Washington, privately, had at least a dawning awareness that slavery was evil and immoral.”
Bill Zarchy filmed projects on six continents during his 40 years as a cinematographer, captured in his first book, Showdown at Shinagawa: Tales of Filming from Bombay to Brazil. Now he writes novels, takes photos, and talks of many things. His career includes filming three former presidents for the Emmy-winning West Wing Documentary Special, the Grammy-winning Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, feature films Conceiving Ada and Read You Like A Book, PBS science series Closer to Truth, musical performances as diverse as the Grateful Dead, Weird Al Yankovic, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and countless high-end projects for technology and medical companies. His tales from the road, personal essays, and technical articles have appeared in Travelers’ Tales and Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers, and American Cinematographer, Emmy, and other trade magazines. Bill has a BA in Government from Dartmouth and an MA in Film from Stanford. He taught Advanced Cinematography at San Francisco State for twelve years. He is a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of the EPIC Storytelling Program at Stagebridge in Oakland. This is his first novel.

Virtual Event: Lauren Oyler and Anna Wiener
2021-02-22 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Monday, February 22nd at 6pm PT when Lauren Oyler is joined by Anna Weiner to discuss her debut novel, Fake Accounts, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82633184310

Praise for Fake Accounts
“This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it.” —Zadie Smith

“Oyler has written a startlingly lucid account of what it does to a person to live a life filled with lies, why it’s so painful to be unable to trust anything or anyone, including yourself…I laughed a lot while reading this, even when—especially when—I very much saw myself as the joke. What Fake Accounts is ultimately asking, then, is a question we could all do well to pose to ourselves with some frequency: Who do you think you’re fooling?” ––Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year

“Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is such an ensorcelling blend of insight, comedy and suspense, you almost don’t notice yourself being filleted alive in these pages. A note to fellow readers of the twenty-first century: Anyone familiar with the allure of social media will adore this coolly observed novel. A note to fellow writers of the twenty-first century: Oh crap, she did it.” —Sloane Crosley, author of Look Alive Out There and I Was Told There’d Be Cake

About Fake Accounts
A woman in a tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this “incisive” and “funny” debut novel that “brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personae tested in the real world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she’s relieved—he was always a little distant—and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women’s March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can’t trust anyone—shouldn’t the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.

Evening Literary Seminar: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
2021-02-22 17:00 - 18:30 | CA

CWC Speaker Series: Sage Cohen
2021-02-21 13:00 - 15:00 | virtual
Sunday, February 21, 1-3pm Pacific time
When you don’t know what matters most in your writing life, it’s hard to focus-and finish. In this live 60-minute workshop, you will identify your top priority writing project. Then, you’ll create a simple strategic plan for achieving it. 10 key productivity strategies will help you work smarter, accomplish more, and cross each finish line faster.
You’ll create your own productivity blueprint that prepares you to:
1) Put the right (for you) attitudes, habits, and practices in place
2) Leverage your strengths and sustain your momentum
3) Overcome fear, resistance, and procrastination
4) Gain confidence in your process and your work
5) Fulfill your #1 writing goal
Sage Cohen helps writers live well, write well, and make a bigger impact. She is the author of Fierce on the Page, The Productive Writer, and Writing the Life Poetic, all from Writer’s Digest Books, and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. Her Focus + Finish process has helped hundreds of writers around the globe clarify what matters – then make it happen. Since 1995, Sage has been teaching writers at New York University, at writing conferences throughout the US, and online at Sage School. Sage holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s degree in poetry from New York University where she was awarded a full fellowship.
Learn more at www.sagecohen.com.
$10 For Non-Members; $5 For Members.
Presented by California Writers Club – Berkeley.

Children's Book Reading: The Unexpected Friend
2021-02-20 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
Join Eastwind Books of Berkeley online for children’s story time featuring a live read-aloud of The Unexpected Friend: A Rohingya Children’s Story with author Raya Rahman.
The story centers around Faisal, a young Rohingya boy in a Bangladeshi refugee camp, who finds a bird with a broken wing and decides to take care of it with his sisters. Life in the camp is not always easy, so the children are thrilled to have a pet to look after. But as the bird’s wing slowly heals, they are faced with a difficult choice. Can they let go of something they dearly love?
RSVP FOR ACCESS TO ZOOM EVENT
https://unexpectedfriend.eventbrite.com
Copies of The Unexpected Friend: A Rohingya Children’s Story are available for order at www.asiabookcenter.com. Choose to ship your orders to your home or select in-store pick up at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704.
About the Book
In the midst of a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh, Faisal, a young Rohingya boy, finds an injured bird and decides to take care of it with his sisters. Life in the camp is not always easy and the children are thrilled to have a pet to look after. But as the bird’s wing slowly heals, they face the dilemma of holding on to or losing something they dearly love.
Thoughtfully illustrated with detailed imagery, The Unexpected Friend is a fictional story based on the real lives of Rohingya children living in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Their individual stories were compiled through the dedicated work of aid agencies Save the Children, Plan International and World Vision and transformed into a storybook in partnership with Guba Publishing, for the purpose of gifting it to the children in the camps.
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority of 1.3 million, formerly living in the Rakhine State within Myanmar. Risking death by sea or on foot, nearly 700,000 have fled the destruction of their homes and persecution in the northern Rakhine province of Myanmar (Burma) for neighboring Bangladesh since August 2017. Bangladesh now houses 1.1 million Rohingya refugees in the world’s largest refugee camp.
Themed around universal childhood joys that are relatable by all children, the story helps young children to empathize with situations that are different than their own. With artwork that authentically depicts life in a crowded refugee camp, ‘The Unexpected Friend – A Rohingya Children’s Story’ is a fitting book to introduce children to social justice, specifically the worldwide refugee humanitarian crisis. Profits from the sale of this book will be donated to Save the Children’s Rohingya Relief Fund.
About the Author
Raya Rahman is the founder of Guba Publishing. After a decade of working in the corporate world, she now partners with other authors, illustrators and non-profit organizations to publish diverse and multicultural children’s stories and learning resources. Raya lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two spirited daughters, who were her main inspiration for starting a children’s publishing house.
About the Illustrator
Inshra Russell is the founder of a boutique creative services agency called Studio Inku, that works in partnership with Guba Publishing to create high quality picture books for children. Inshra is a multi-platform content creator with a portfolio of projects that includes short films, photography, illustrations, graphic design and video production. She lives in London, U.K. with her husband and their son, Ruben. Find her on www.studioinku.com.
Eastwind Books Multicultural Services (EBMS) is a 501(3)c non-profit dedicated to the promotion and accessibility of Asian American and Ethnic Multicultural Literature. Our events are for educational purposes and we appreciate your tax deductible donations. EBMS is the community education arm of Eastwind Books of Berkeley which is comprised of a dedicated staff of booksellers, artists, poets and community workers.

Prepping to Publish: a workshop for writers of color
2021-02-20 12:00 - 2021-02-21 15:00 | Virtual
Geared toward marginalized writers who may lack access to MFA programs, workshops, and conferences, Prepping to Publish is a six-hour, two-session intensive. Sonora will select 8 to 12 students based on the quality of their submissions, and students will leave the course with a formatted manuscript, a critiqued query letter, and a tailored list of editors, journals, and publishing houses that might be a good home for their work.

Instructor:
SONORA JHA, Ph.D., is an essayist, novelist, and professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of the novel Foreign (Random House India, 2013) and the forthcoming How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of my Family (Sasquatch Books, 2021). She teaches fiction and essay writing for the Richard Hugo House and Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and her writing has garnered many awards and residencies.

This workshop is part of a three-event collaborative project between Aunt Lute Books and POC United in support of writers of color. The events are made possible by funds from the California Arts Council.

For the other events, please visit the links below:

Panel: Creating Our Own Table, Wednesday, April 7th, 2021: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aunt-lute-x-poc-united-presents-the-panel-creating-our-own-table-tickets-133253297199

Reading: Isolation, Thursday, May 13th, 2021: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aunt-lute-x-poc-united-presents-a-reading-isolation-tickets-133266558865

ABOUT POC UNITED:
POC United is a literary safe space of creative play far removed from the white gaze, a place where writers of color can focus on one another in solidarity. To showcase multi-genre works by writers of color, POC United created GRAFFITI, a bestselling anthology, which is a Silver Winner of the 22nd annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Anthologies. For more on POC United, please visit pocunited.com.

Free

https://www.auntlute.com/ marketing@auntlute.com 415-826-1300

Zetta Elliott on Instagram IGTV
2021-02-20 11:00 - 12:00 | CA
reading A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart, a powerful, affirming poem in which a Black child explores his shifting emotions throughout the year.
“A resonant exultation of community and the importance of self-reflection.”–Publishers Weekly
Join us on Instagram IGTV. Follow along @MRSDALLOWAYS. Videos disappear after 24 hours so be sure to watch!

Saturday, February 20, 2021 – 11:00am

There is a place inside of me
a space deep down inside of me
where all my feelings hide.
Summertime is filled with joy—skateboarding and playing basketball —until his community is deeply wounded by a police shooting. As fall turns to winter and then spring, fear grows into anger, then pride and peace.
In her stunning debut, illustrator Noa Denmon articulates the depth and nuances of a child’s experiences following a police shooting–through grief and protests, healing and community–with washes of color as vibrant as his words.
Here is a groundbreaking narrative that can help all readers–children and adults alike–talk about the feelings hiding deep inside each of us.
Zetta Elliott is an award-winning Black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children. Her poetry has been published in We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, and her picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. She lives in West Philadelphia.

Bill Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (Virtual Event)
2021-02-19 11:00 - 14:00 | CA
Writers Bloc and Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall Present Bill Gates
Friday, February 19, 11:00am PT/2:00pm ET • Tickets: $45 (includes hardcover copy of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster) • Virtual Event
In this urgent, authoritative book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.

Author Daniel Nayeri Discusses Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)
2021-02-18 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 7 PM PST as we welcome author Daniel Nayeri to discuss his new novel, EVERYTHING SAD IS UNTRUE (a true story).
This book is a favorite of GGP’s staff. Donna describes it as “magical, haunting, uplifting, funny, and sad all at once.”
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89898033801.https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89898033801
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpEverythingSadIsUntrue or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/EverythingSadAB.
Staff Reviews

A true refugee story told in a Scheherazade-like format. It’s the most engrossing book I’ve read this year: it’s magical, haunting, uplifting, funny, and sad all at once. I love this boy and I loved learning about his Iranian childhood and one-of-a-kind immigrant experience in Oklahoma. A MUST READ!
— Donna

One of my Top 3 Books of 2020: a rich history of a young Iranian refugee making a life in Oklahoma, his relationship with his parents, and finding an identity.
— Amy

One of my Top 3 Books of 2020: This beautiful book made me laugh and cry. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator’s voice is everything. He uses humor and myths to tell the tale of his Iranian family settling in Oklahoma and though it was written for kids, it is great for all ages.
— Sarah

Description

At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls “Daniel”) stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much.
But Khosrou’s stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy.and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan.
We bounce between a school bus of kids armed with paper clip missiles and spitballs to the heroines and heroes of Khosrou’s family’s past, who ate pastries that made people weep and cry “Akh, Tamar!” and touched carpets woven with precious gems.
Like Scheherazade in a hostile classroom, Daniel weaves a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. And it is (a true story).
It is Daniel’s.
About the Author

Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran and spent a couple of years as a refugee before immigrating to Oklahoma at age eight with his family. He is the publisher of Odd Dot, an imprint of Macmillan, making him one of the youngest publishers in the industry. He has served on the CBC diversity committee and the CBC panel committee.

Virtual Event: Zak Salih and Lydia Kiesling
2021-02-18 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18 AT 6PM PT WHEN ZAK SALIH DISCUSSES HIS DEBUT NOVEL, LET’S GET BACK TO THE PARTY, WITH LYDIA KIESLING ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81593291711
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,81593291711# or +13462487799,,81593291711#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kihUOUm66
Praise for Let’s Get Back to the Party
“With an artist’s eye for beauty and an art historian’s for detail, Zak Salih excavates the lives of his characters and leaves no stone unturned to ask questions about what it means to be a queer individual, to be a queer community, to be queer alone and with others. Let’s Get Back to the Party is a book for those of us who simultaneously adore and abhor the pains and ecstasies of social closeness—which is to say it’s a book for us now, us all.””—Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name
“[A] stirring ode to the many faces of queerness. … What unfolds is an intimate saga that brims with necessary conversations about cultural identity.”—O, The Oprah Magazine: “32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021”
“Let’s Get Back to the Party is a gorgeous, raw, tender, trenchant novel about men figuring out how to live. At once gimlet-eyed and generous to his wonderfully drawn characters–fallible, lovable, and endlessly real–Salih paints a vivid portrait of the paradoxes of queer life in contemporary America, his characters navigating love and friendship in communities shaped both by freedom and fear, and by trauma that is both collective and individual. This is a stellar debut from a huge talent.”—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
About Let’s Get Back to the Party
A Most-Anticipated Book of 2021: BuzzFeed * The Millions * Cosmopolitan * Electric Literature * LGBTQ Reads * Paperback Paris
One of Advocate‘s “22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year”
It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.
When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of belonging Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends coupling off and having babies. For Oscar, conformity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.
While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.
Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party introduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

Virtual Event: Zak Salih and Lydia Kiesling
2021-02-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Thursday, February 18th at 6pm PT when Zak Salih discusses his debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party, with Lydia Kiesling on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81593291711

Praise for Let’s Get Back to the Party
“With an artist’s eye for beauty and an art historian’s for detail, Zak Salih excavates the lives of his characters and leaves no stone unturned to ask questions about what it means to be a queer individual, to be a queer community, to be queer alone and with others. Let’s Get Back to the Party is a book for those of us who simultaneously adore and abhor the pains and ecstasies of social closeness—which is to say it’s a book for us now, us all.””—Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name

“[A] stirring ode to the many faces of queerness. … What unfolds is an intimate saga that brims with necessary conversations about cultural identity.”—O, The Oprah Magazine: “32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021”

“Let’s Get Back to the Party is a gorgeous, raw, tender, trenchant novel about men figuring out how to live. At once gimlet-eyed and generous to his wonderfully drawn characters–fallible, lovable, and endlessly real–Salih paints a vivid portrait of the paradoxes of queer life in contemporary America, his characters navigating love and friendship in communities shaped both by freedom and fear, and by trauma that is both collective and individual. This is a stellar debut from a huge talent.”—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
About Let’s Get Back to the Party

A Most-Anticipated Book of 2021: BuzzFeed * The Millions * Cosmopolitan * Electric Literature * LGBTQ Reads * Paperback Paris
One of Advocate’s “22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year”

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of belonging Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends coupling off and having babies. For Oscar, conformity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.

Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party introduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

This is Now: David Bradford and Carole Robin
2021-02-18 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
This event is online.
In the history of humankind, connecting to others and building strong relationships has never been more complicated.
That was true even before a pandemic and global change shifted social rules as never before. In recent decades a complex digital world, our busy modern lives, and competitive professional landscapes left a lot of highly skilled people simply unclear on how to build stronger, more lasting relationships. Each successive generation reported feeling more disconnected. Enter the famed “Touchy Feely” course at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, lead by esteemed professors David Bradford and Carole Robin. Seeing a need, two professors created a course to help some of the brightest minds in the world build stronger ties.
For an exciting, personal, instructive This Is Now hour, Angie Coiro interviews the experts who made history teaching social skills at a competitive and revered institution of higher education. We’re now so excited to hear from Bradford and Robin as they share those insights in Connect, a guide based on their renowned Interpersonal Dynamics course at Stanford. For thousands of students and leaders, these two brilliant educators have offered clear guidance on the pursuit of deeper, more fulfilling relationships with friends, partners, colleagues, and family.

Strong relationships are crucial to a fulfilling life. An exceptional relationship—one in which we feel understood and supported for who we are—can seem like magic to each person involved. But how is that bond cultivated? According to Bradford and Robin, the process of building magic relationships can be very practically described, learned, and applied. And they make it fun.
Don’t miss this dynamic conversation with Drs. David Bradford and Carole Robin for Connect. How are you connecting to your world lately?
**Get your tickets early, as webinar space is limited! Bring up to one additional friend on a second screen with our “Bring a Friend” option, and turn it into a book club event.**

LILY KING
2021-02-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online
LILY KING
Thursday, February 18, 2021
6:00pm Pacific Time

TICKETS

“Lily King writes with a great generosity of spirit.” – Ann Patchett
Lily King is the award-winning author of five novels. Her 2014 novel, Euphoria, received with widespread critical acclaim, was inspired by the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead. King now returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Written with her trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Photo credit: Winky Lewis

Adam O. Davis & Emma Hine - Index of Haunted Houses & Stay Safe
2021-02-18 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
Join Book Passage in welcoming Adam O. Davis (author of Index of Haunted Houses) and Emma Hine (author of Stay Safe) for a reading and discussion celebrating their debut poetry collections, both of which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and were recently published by Sarabande Books.

Index of Haunted Houses is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of the spirits in haunted houses in the way they tread over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. These poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving the sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. There is, too, an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.
“From ‘the body of New Jersey’ to ‘the desert/like a house of belief,’ the poems of Index of Haunted Houses traverse the entirety of time and space that we call American. In this book, Adam O. Davis means for language as precise as ‘ledgers lavish with loss,’ to lead us to the place within us where history meets landscape. This is a brilliant debut.”
—Jericho Brown

At the center of Emma Hine’s stellar collection are three sisters and their imaginative fear of grief. Their great-uncle was bitten by a shark, their mother has a brain tumor, their neighbor hangs himself from a tree—and to cope with these very real terrors, the oldest sister creates an intimate fantasy world. We hear stories of a mountain lion that slaughters a deer, a transparent body washed up on a beach, a selkie who ventures to shore and becomes their mother: “On land her pelt was heavy / like stewed velvet, so she taught herself / to take it off.” The sisters’ environment of ocean and sand, forests and farmhouses, forms a lush backdrop to many of these poems. But later, as the speaker ages, we find ourselves in the mountains, in an art museum, in a spacecraft where a recorded voice “has the soft accent of someone only a generation or two removed from Earth.” The voice in these poems is the perfect mix of grief and imagination, quiet and explosion. Stay Safe is delicate and extraordinary, a powerful debut.
“Simply said: this is the renewable energy we’ve been waiting for. So attuned are these poems to their introspective nature and terrors of the self, their wild narratives, and linguistic spells, this book begins to feel like its own solar farm: each page, a panel of skyshine and wonderments.”
—Major Jackson

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton poetry prize, which was published by Sarabande Books in September 2020. The recipient of the 2016 George Bogin Memorial award from the Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The Best American Poetry 2021, The Paris Review, and ZYZZYVA. He lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.
Emma Hine is the author of Stay Safe, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in January. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Offing, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review, among others, and she currently works at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Virtual Event: Kink: On & Off the Page
2021-02-17 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17 AT 6PM PT WHEN WE CELEBRATE THE NEW SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGY, KINK, WITH AN EVENING OF READINGS, LIVE DEMONSTRATIONS, AND CONVERSATIONS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KINK.COM!
PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A TICKETED EVENT
About the Event
Kink.com and Green Apple Books are partnering for an exclusive launch party for a new short fiction anthology, KINK. Edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, KINK brings together 15 acclaimed writers and their stories of power, pain, fetish and desire.
This groundbreaking event goes one step further, tying readings by celebrated authors to live demonstrations and conversations with some of the BDSM community’s most respected voices.
Join us as authors and kinksters converge to explore the fact and the fiction in this powerful collection. Featured authors include Vanessa Clark, Garth Greenwell, and R.O. Kwon
About KINK
KINK is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. They explore bondage, power-play, and submissive-dominant relationships; we are taken to private estates, therapists’ offices, underground sex clubs, and even a sex theater in early-20th century Paris. While there are whips and chains, sure, the true power of these stories lies in their beautiful, moving dispatches from across the sexual spectrum of interest and desires, as portrayed by some of today’s most exciting writers, including: Callum Angus, Alexander Chee, Vanessa Clark, Melissa Febos, Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Cara Hoffman, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Mountford, Larissa Pham, and Brandon Taylor, with Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon as editors.
About the Authors
Vanessa Clark is an intersex trans fem author that has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, POPSUGAR, Vice, and Them, and has written articles for Vox. Pronouns: she/they. Even though she lives in New Jersey, she is more likely spending her free time at some of the best indie bookstores, parks, museums, and record shops in New York City. On social media, you can find her on Facebook (@vcerotica) and Twitter (@FoxxyGlamKitty).
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for several other awards. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020. He coedited the anthology Kink, out in 2021. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City.
R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was named a best book of the year by over forty publications and is being translated into seven languages. She coedited the anthology Kink, out in 2021. Kwon is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and her writing is published in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, NPR, and elsewhere.
A Note About This Event
– THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT. Please join from your personal computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
– You must be 18+
– Please log in on time.
– All sales are final.
– A link to join the Zoom meeting will be sent via the email you registered with.
– Please download Zoom immediately to your computer, smartphone or tablet once you receive the link. This will save you time and also ensure that you will be able to join the event on time.

Brontez Purnell in conversation with Melissa Broder
2021-02-17 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
celebrating the launch of Brontez Purnell’s new book
100 Boyfriends
published by MCD x FSG Originals
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero
“It’s like that saying, ‘Where god closes a door, he opens a window,’ but in this particular case the window was on the fifth floor and the house was on fire.”
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and devastatingly funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting—and often losing—the urge to self-sabotage. His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker’s husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.
Armed with a deadpan wit that finds humor in even the lowest of nadirs, Brontez Purnell—a widely acclaimed underground writer, filmmaker, musician, and performance artist—writes with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. From dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell indexes desire, desperation, race, and loneliness with a startling blend of levity and vulnerability. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are a singular and uncompromising vision of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers’ Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels MILK FED (Feb 2, 2021) and THE PISCES, the essay collection SO SAD TODAY, and five poetry collections, including SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems (Summer 2021) and LAST SEXT. Broder has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine‘s The Cut. Her poems appear in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Guernica, Fence, et al. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry.
Praise for 100 Boyfriends:

“This stunning collection of vignettes from artist, punk rocker, and Whiting Award winner Purnell forms a delightfully crass, kaleidoscopic worldview. Each story introduces new heartbreaks and reminders that moments of intimacy often end in loneliness . . . Purnell brilliantly immerses the reader in Black, queer desire with humor, self-awareness, and just the right amount of vulgarity.” —Publishers Weekly
“Each story in 100 Boyfriends is a minor eclipse: stunning in scope, technically blinding, and entirely miraculous. I laughed and I cried and I laughed until I cried—Brontez Purnell is a marvel.“ –Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot
“In the vast history of the universe there is only one Brontez Purnell, and thank god we get him. From cruising to crushes, cumming to closure, 100 Boyfriends is a mandatory read for the funny-sexy lit freaks among us—a candy box of Euro boys and Daddies, blue pills and satanic exes—all told in an addictively-delicious voice by a writer who is somehow both wildly cool and deprecatingly humble at the same time.” —Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and So Sad Today
“Brontez Purnell has such seemingly casual genius that at times you forget you’re reading a book and are transported to some couch/bus/basement where the drugs are really good and your friend is really funny, maybe your weird closeted cousin is on HarlemHookups in the corner, and all of a sudden your friend says some fucking Sappho ass, weird ass, brilliant ass bullshit. I love this slut of a book, it’s a slut ass maker. 100 Boyfriends or no new boyfriends at all, Purnell’s autofiction/memoir/whatever the hell this marvelously sad and intoxicating book is shook me up good with its honesty and blunt-to-face endings, the jokes and stories I didn’t know we were allowed to tell outside of circles of faggots and misfits. But this book is in those circles, makes you tea and steals for you, it invites us in, but would we mind shutting the hell up cause it’s a little hungover? The light is coming through the windows so clear.” —Danez Smith, author of Homie
“No one writes like Brontez Purnell. It’s not just that he is hilariously irreverent, which he is, but that he reserves reverence for that which is deserving. 100 Boyfriends is like a good lover, at turns vulgar and vulnerable, dirty and desperate, and always grinding toward magic.” —Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“Scathingly lucid, filthily pure, this is the most astute, witty, acid-tongued and emotionally generous book about relationships—from one night stands to internet no-no’s to ill-conceived crushes to long-term loves, requited and otherwise—I’ve read. Painfully knowing yet never jaded, 100 Boyfriends dissects, explodes, lambasts, and revels in the ugly beauty of imperfect intimacies with prose that consistently puts its finger on the bleeding pulse of contemporary desire. An unforgettable ode to the heart that beats inside every longing body.”–Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion
“The stories in 100 Boyfriends took me on a journey: They made me laugh. They made me gasp. They made me feel. Brontez Purnell is a vibrant literary voice you won’t soon forget. I love this book.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
