Litseen

KSW Presents 'All This Wreckage, In Your Own Language'
2018-09-28 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Kearny Street Workshop, 1246 Folsom St, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
KSW Presents “All This Wreckage, In Your Own Language,” a reading featuring two debut novelists-Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree. The reading will be followed by a Q&A with Tayo Literary Magazine co-founder, Melissa Sipin.
The title of this event brings together quotes from both books as their stories begin-when a letter arrives in Fruit of the Drunken Tree, “bringing with it all this wreckage to our doorstep,” and in America Is Not the Heart, when “you can’t remember the last time someone told you to take care of yourself in your own language.”
This is a reading that gives language to the stories and wreckages of war and violence, colonialism and dictatorship, immigration and refuge, family, desperation, and the decisions one makes towards a kind of survival.
ELAINE CASTILLO was born and raised in the Bay Area. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Comparative Literature. She is a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation Fellow, and her writing can be found or is forthcoming from Freeman’s, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Taste Magazine, Bon Appetit, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Her debut novel AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART was published by Viking Books in the US/Canada and Atlantic Books (UK).
INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS is the author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday, 2018), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. She was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. She currently teaches writing to immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing artists into public schools. She is the book columnist for KQED.

TELEGRAPH OPEN MIC (FEATURES: TBD AND TBD)
2018-09-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Nomadic Press: Uptown, 2301 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us at 23rd and Telegraph in Oakland for a six-slot open mic alongside two amazing features. This month’s show features TBD and TBD! Music by TBD!
Telegraph Open Mic takes place every fourth Friday from 7-9:00 PM at our Uptown location. It will have six open-mic slots open to the public. Spots are filled on a first-come, first-serve basis and the list opens at 7:00 PM sharp. As is the case with our musicians and features at all events, open-mic readers from the community will be held to the Nomadic Press Safe Space Statement. Please see below.
Safe Space Statement
Nomadic Press events are safe spaces for those who have been silenced and marginalized. There is no room for racism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia whether in the content of one’s reading or in one’s interactions with members of the community. We will protect the safety of this space by revoking a reader’s access to the microphone if we feel they have violated these guidelines, and we encourage community members to come to us if someone has violated these guidelines away from the microphone. We are a community, and we will work together to ensure that the safety of our most vulnerable members is prioritized above all else.
Come early to sign up for the open mic and share your latest work! Curated and emceed by Rene Vaz.
To help pay for our space and our artists and ensure that we can continue our robust programming series, we are calling for $10 at the door (plus whatever else you may be able to give), but no one turned away for lack of funds. Nomadic Press books, as always, will be for sale at the event.
Wine and Red Bay coffee will be available.

THERE
2018-09-28 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
NEXT THERE: THERE 24 – Friday, September 28, 2018, with a great lineup of writers and musicians to be announced. See you in the fall!
THERE (THe Eastbay Reading Extravaganza) is a reading series showcasing emerging and established writers from Oakland and Berkeley, with the occasional San Franciscan. Doug hosts it on the third Friday of each month at Octopus Literary Salon in Uptown Oakland. It also features a live original musical performance by a local musical artist at “halftime” of each month’s reading, and Doug’s famous original LitQuiz literary trivia contest. It’s from 7:00-9:00pm. THERE has been putting the there back in Oakland since 2015!

Léonora Miano - English Translation Release of "Season of the Shadow"
2018-09-28 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
We’re incredibly excited to be hosting the author, Léonora Miano, in collaboration with the Cultural Services French Embassy in the US. We’ll have more info about the event’s specific program soon!
Léonora Miano is the author of Season of the Shadow, published in the United States by Seagull Books (distributed by the University of Chicago Press) in April 2018 in a translation by Gila Walker.
Born in Cameroon, Léonora Miano moved to France as a student. She has written fourteen books that have been translated into many languages. Miano’s award-winning first novel, L’intérieur de la nuit, was released in 2005 and translated in English by Tasmin Black. Her other books include Contours du jour qui vient, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2006. Upon its release in France in 2013, the book Season of the Shadow won the prestigious Fémina prize and the Grand prix du roman metis.
About the book: Season of the Shadow
(Seagull Books, 2018, Translation by Gila Walker)
This powerful novel recounts the early days of the transatlantic slave trade in the perspective of its first victims, the sub-Saharan population. Léonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing—a pre-colonial civilization with roots that stretch back for centuries. One day, a group of villagers finds twelve of their people missing. Where have they gone? Who is responsible? A collective dream, troubling a group of mothers in a communal dwelling, may hold some of the answers, as the women’s missing sons call to them in terror. At the same time, a thick shadow settles over the huts, blocking out the light of day. It is the shadow of slavery, which will soon grow to blight the whole world.
Miano renders this brutal story in deliberately strange, dreamlike prose, befitting a situation that is, on its face, all but impossible for the villagers to believe.

Christian Kracht
2018-09-27 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Christian Kracht reads from his new novel, The Dead.

Praise for Christian Kracht

“Imperium is astonishing and captivating, a tongue-in-cheek Conradian literary adventure for our time.” ―Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

“To say a word about Christian Kracht’s Imperium would be like engraving Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees into an orange seed. Or perhaps into a coconut? The cocovore on his South Sea isle would consume it at some point, and then the writing would be gone. But then shadowy mountains of fate would still form in the background: the German history behind the dropouts who made it by escaping it, when the evil procession of fate halted for a moment. An adventure novel. No doubt. That there even is still such a thing.”―Elfriede Jelinek, author of The Piano Teacher and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“Reads at times like the best Werner Herzog movie Herzog has yet to make.”―Tobias Carroll, Biographile

About The Dead

In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small.

In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective―to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood’s growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of Nägeli’s film-star fiancée and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin―as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war―soon complicates both Amakasu’s and Nägeli’s plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.

Zulema Renee Summerfield / Every Other Weekend
2018-09-27 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith hosts Zulema Renee Summerfield for her debut novel, Every Other Weekend. Please join us!

The year is 1988, and America is full of broken homes. The protagonist of this stunning debut novel is eight-year-old Nenny. Her life turns upside down when her parents announce they are getting a divorce. Her weekends are spent shuttling between their homes, watching her mother move on quickly while her father struggles to keep it together. Nenny’s mother soon remarries and moves them into a home with her new husband and his own children. The memories of their former family life have been swept under the rug.

Nenny has always been an anxious child with an overactive imagination but recently has had a creeping premonition that something terrible is going to happen. In her new home, intimations of impending earthquakes (gulp) and neighborhood home invasions converge with ghosts from her stepfather’s days in Vietnam. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her—yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. Indeed, tragedy does come—in the most awful and unexpected way.

Set in the sun-scorched suburbs of California, where teased hair and Bret Michaels mania reign supreme, Every Other Weekend is a story about the surprising ways in which families fracture and reform. It’s a story of love lost and found, and how sometimes the closest bonds we create come in the wake of unimaginable tragedy.

Zulema Renee Summerfield’s short fiction has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her first book, Everything Faces All Ways at Once, is available from Fourteen Hills Press. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she lives in Portland, Oregon.

This event is free and all ages, with mature themes.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

Antena: a language justice and language experimentation collaborative, Jen Hofer and John Pluecker
2018-09-27 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series debuts September 2018 with a two-day series by poet-translator-activists Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, who collectively organize Antena, a language justice and language experimentation collaborative, focusing on writing, art- and book-making, translating, interpreting, and language justice. Hofer and Pluecker, visiting respectively from Los Angeles and Houston, will read from their own work on Wednesday, September 26, at E. M. Wolfman Books in downtown Oakland, then present their work around Antena the following evening, Thursday, September 27, at The Poetry Center. Both events are free and open to the public. Please join us!
Antena is a language justice and literary experimentation collaborative founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, both writers, artists, literary translators, bookmakers and activist interpreters. Antena activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena has exhibited, published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, curated, interpreted, and/or instigated with numerous groups and institutions, including Blaffer Art Museum, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and Project Row Houses. Antena publishes bilingual chapbooks and pamphlets through our Libros Antena Books imprint, and collaborates with BOMB Magazine and Ugly Duckling Presse on the Señal Series of Latin American literature in translation.
John Pluecker is a language worker who writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. In 2010, he co-founded the collaborative Antena and in 2015 the social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. His undisciplinary work is informed by experimental poetics, language justice, and cross-border/cross-language cultural production. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press.

More info at Antena
VIDEOS: Antena: Jen Hofer and John Pluecker at Vimeo
Related event:
Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series
Jen Hofer and John Pluecker
reading from their poetry
Wednesday SEPT 26
7:00pm @ E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore
410 13th Street (one block from 12th Street BART), Oakland
free and open to the public

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Léonora Miano
2018-09-27 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
City Lights in conjunction with the Cultural Services of the Consul General of France in San Francisco present
Léonora Miano
celebrating the release of
Season of the Shadow
Published by Seagull Press
This powerful novel presents the early days of the transatlantic slave trade from a new perspective: that of the sub-Saharan population that became its first victims. Cameroonian novelist Léonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing—a pre-colonial civilization with roots that stretch back for centuries. One day, a group of villagers find twelve of their people missing. Where have they gone? Who is responsible? A collective dream, troubling a group of mothers in a communal dwelling, may have some of the answers, as the women’s missing sons call to them in terror; at the same time, a thick shadow settles over the huts, blocking out the light of day. It is the shadow of slavery, which will soon grow to blight the whole world.
Miano renders this brutal story in deliberately strange, dreamlike prose, befitting a situation that is, on its face, all but impossible for the villagers to believe.
Léonora Miano is a Cameroonian writer who lives in France. She is author of seven novels and two collections of essays. Season of the Shadow is her second book to be translated into English; her debut novel, Dark Heart of the Night, won the prix Femina when it was published in French in 2013.

THE RACKET! #23: The Dark
2018-09-27 19:00 - 20:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
The summer’s over and light is getting dimmer in the evenings. Let’s gather a bunch of writerly souls together to shed a little light on THE DARK.
Details soon!
https://www.facebook.com/events/212401529441541/
Hosted by Noah B. Sanders

An Evening with Sean Penn, Author of 'Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff'
2018-09-26 19:30 - 21:00 | Albert and Janet Schultz Cultural Arts Hall, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto, 94303
“Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” (Atria Books) by two-time Academy Award(R)-winning actor, writer and director Sean Penn, is Mr. Penn’s first novel. The darkly humorous book tells the picaresque story of Bob Honey, a middle-aged, divorced, disillusioned man living in a nondescript house on a nondescript street in Woodview, California. Bob Honey is a man of many trades-sewage specialist, purveyor of pyrotechnics, contract killer for a mysterious government agency that pays in small bills. The novel is a revised and expanded work based on an audiobook (no longer available) narrated by Penn and released in October 2016 under the pseudonym Pappy Pariah.
Penn has been nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Actor for “Dead Man Walking,” “Sweet and Lowdown” and “I Am Sam” and won in 2003 for his searing performance in Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” and his second in 2009 for Gus Van Sant’s “Milk.” He has worked as an actor, writer, producer and director on over 100 theater and film productions.
As a filmmaker, Penn has crafted powerful dramas such as “The Indian Runner” and “Into the Wild,” which garnered him nominations from the Directors Guild Awards and Writers Guild Awards. He also wrote and directed the US contribution to the compilation film “11’09’01” and engages in political and social activism. This includes his criticism of the George W. Bush administration, his contact with the Presidents of Cuba and Venezuela, and his humanitarian work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Each ticket includes a pre-signed copy of “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.” Additional books will be available for sale at the event for $24 plus tax. Book sales provided by Books Inc. Palo Alto.
The evening will be moderated by Anne Elise Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist currently serving as director of strategic communications for Facebook.

Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series: Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, reading from their poetry
2018-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series debuts September 2018 with a two-day series by poet-translator-activists Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, who collectively organize Antena, a language justice and language experimentation collaborative, focusing on writing, art- and book-making, translating, interpreting, and language justice. Hofer and Pluecker, visiting respectively from Los Angeles and Houston, will read from their own work on Wednesday, September 26, at E. M. Wolfman Books in downtown Oakland, then present their work around Antena the following evening, Thursday, September 27, at The Poetry Center. Both events are free and open to the public. Please join us!
Jen Hofer (bio coming)
John Pluecker is a language worker who writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. In 2010, he co-founded the collaborative Antena and in 2015 the social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. His undisciplinary work is informed by experimental poetics, language justice, and cross-border/cross-language cultural production. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press.

More info at johnpluecker.com
Related event:
Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series
Antena: a language justice and language experimentation collaborative
Jen Hofer and John Pluecker
Thursday SEPT 27
7:00pm @ The Poetry Center
HUM 512, SFSU, free and open to the public

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center & E. M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore

Preti Taneja reading from her new novel We That Are Young
2018-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
We That Are Young
published by Alfred Knopf
A stunning debut novel, a modern-day King Lear set in contemporary India: the tale of a battle for power within a turbulent family, for status within a nation in a constant state of transformation, and for the love and respect of a father disappearing into dementia
Jivan Singh, the bastard scion of the Devraj family returns to his New Delhi childhood home at the age of twenty-three after fifteen years in the United States. His arrival coincides with the unexpected resignation of the founder and aging patriarch of the Company–its simple name belying its vast holdings across industry and entertainment, and the family’s national renown. On the same day, Sita, Devraj’s youngest daughter, disappears–refusing to marry the man her father wants for her. Now, Radha and Gargi, Sita’s older sisters, are given the Company–and a brutal struggle for power begins. Set against the backdrop of the anti-corruption protests that spread across India in 2011 and 2012, We That Are Young is brilliant in its fierce, incandescent storytelling and the energy of its prose. It tells a deeply insightful tale of India today, the pace of life in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, the clash of youth and age, and the ever-present specter of death. But more than that, it is a novel about the human heart–and its inevitable breaking point.
PRETI TANEJA was born in the England to Indian parents and spent most of her childhood holidays in New Delhi. She has worked as a human rights reporter and filmmaker in Iraq, Jordan, Rwanda, and Kosovo, and her work has been published in The Guardian and openDemocracy. A fellow at Warwick University, Preti’s 2014 novella, Kumkum Malhotra, won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize. She is also the editor of Visual Verse and was selected as an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker for 2014. We That Are Young has been shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for first-time novelists
Read the UK Guardian Article Here !

H O L L O W A Y : R E A D I N G : S E R I E S Sara Nicholson
2018-09-26 18:30 - 20:30 | Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Sara Nicholson
READINGS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Afternoon Craft Conversation with Tongo Eisen-Martin
2018-09-26 14:30 - 15:30 | Hagerty Lounge, SMC, 1928 Saint Mary's Road, Moraga , CA, 94575, United States
Afternoon Craft Conversation with Tongo Eisen-Martin

DATE & TIME:

Wednesday, September 26, 2018 –
2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

LOCATION:
De La Salle Hall: Hagerty Lounge, 1928 Saint Mary’s Road, Moraga, CA 94575
View a map and get directions.

Kathryn Jordan reads poems from Riding Waves
2018-09-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books on Solano, 1855 Solano Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94707, United States
Tuesday, September 25, 7:30pm
Pegasus Books Solano
Kathryn Jordan reads select poems from her new collection, Riding Waves.
Kathryn Jordan’s Riding Waves is not for the faint of spirit. Do not pick it up unless you are prepared to be jolted by hurts, inspired by survival, and charmed by metaphors that can only come from a wounded place within us.
John Warley, author of A Southern Girl
Kathryn Jordan’s beautiful book reverberates with the beauty and pain of a lost era. Scenes from a fragmented military childhood at the height of the Vietnam War are interspersed with meditations on Nature, family, love, loss, travel and music. It’s a rich tapestry of memory and spiritual inquiry. Jordan finds her way through a tumultuous time by paying rapt attention to the sensory details and small epiphanies that accompanied her on her journey.
Alison Luterman, author of Desire Zoo
A strong book, crafted and elegant, utterly unsparing of hard truths and lit ablaze by the flamed-open heart of saying. These are poems that pull us close with their unflinching presence; roped in, caught up by Kathe Jordan’s work, we turn pages that spill a tough and aching history, broken, bled through, and fraught with beauty.
Judyth Hill, editor, poet, author of Dazzle Wobble
About the Author

At UC Berkeley, Kathryn won the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize for Short Story and has placed narrative non-fiction with The Sun Magazine. She is the winner of the 2016 San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference Prize for Poetry. Her work was selected for Bay Area Generations and chosen to represent B.A.G. at Oakland Beast Crawl in 2016. Her poems have appeared in Roar Magazine and in the anthology, Solamente en San Miguel.

Event date:

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 – 7:30pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Solano
1855 Solano Ave

Berkeley, CA 94704

Dubravka Ugresic
2018-09-25 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic discusses her new novels, Fox and American Fictionary.

Praise for Fox

“Ugresic is also affecting and eloquent, in part because within her quirky, aggressively sweet plot she achieves moments of profundity and evokes the stoicism innate in such moments.”—Mary Gaitskill

“Never has a writer been more aware of how one narrative depends on another.”—Joanna Walsh

“Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives.”—Charles Simic

About Fox

Fox is the story of literary footnotes and “minor” characters―unnoticed people propelled into timelessness through the biographies and novels of others. With Ugresic’s characteristic wit, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, betrayal, and the randomness of human lives.

SPANISH LANGUAGE BOOK CLUB MEETING
2018-09-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join us for a lively discussion about
“Milena o el femur mas bello del Mundo” by Jorge Cepeda Patterson
To join the book group please contact iranyi@me.com

Eileen Truax in conversation with Lauren Markham (moderated by Ian Gordon)
2018-09-25 18:30 - 20:30 | San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco , CA, 94104, United States
discussing the subject of
We Build the Wall: How the US Keeps Out Asylum Seekers from Mexico, Central America and Beyond
by Eileen Truax
from Verso Books
and

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

by Lauren Markham
published by Crown
We Built the Wall is an immersive, engrossing look at the new front in the immigration wars. It follows the gripping stories of people like Saúl Reyes, forced to flee his home after a drug cartel murdered several members of his family, and Delmy Calderón, a forty-two-year-old woman leading an eight-woman hunger strike in an El Paso detention center. Truax tracks the heart-wrenching trials of refugees like Yamil, the husband and father who chose a prison cell over deportation to Mexico, and Rocío Hernández, a nineteen-year-old who spent nearly her entire life in Texas and is now forced to live in a city where narcotraffickers operate with absolute impunity.
Originally from Mexico, Eileen Truax is a journalist and immigrant currently living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Dreamers: An Immigrant Generation’s Fight For Their American Dream.
Lauren Markham is a writer and reporter based in Northern California. She writes fiction, essays and journalism – mostly about migration, youth, the environment, and the state of California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life published in September 2017 by Crown. The Far Away Brothers is the winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, a California Book Award Silver Prize, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics’ Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography. Her essays, fiction and journalism have appeared in outlets such as VQR (where I am a Contributing Editor), Harper’s, The New Yorker.com, The Guardian, The New Republic, Guernica, VICE, Mother Jones, Orion, California Sunday, Narrative Magazine, Pacific Standard, and on This American Life.
Ian Gordon is an investigative journalist the managing editor at Mother Jones Magazine.
critical praise for We Build the Wall:

“Eileen Truax has given us an evocative and human portrait of the so-called immigration crisis, bringing together gripping firsthand narratives of refugees with an incisive analysis of America’s broken asylum policy. With attention to lives that have been put in jeopardy by Mexican and American governments alike, We Built the Wallis the book we need in this time of rising nationalisms—a must-read clarion call for empathy across borders in the age of Trump.”
– Ali Noorani, Executive Director, National Immigration Forum, and the author of There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration

“We Built the Wall combines the flair of a novel and the depth of the best investigative journalism with a passionate commitment to human rights to take readers into the heart of today’s immigration crisis. Truax highlights the voices of people who are fighting for justice on both sides of the border to shed light on the systems that have led to a deeply transnational human rights crisis. Immigration, she makes clear, is the result, not the cause, of this crisis.”
– Aviva Chomsky, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal and “They Take Our Jobs!”: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration

“A lucid account of US asylum policy, both during the Cold War, when it was granted overwhelmingly to people leaving the Soviet Union, Cuba and Vietnam, but withheld from people brutalized by Washington’s allies—in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti—and now in the age of deportation, when Mexicans and Central Americans heading north, including children in fear for their lives, find it almost impossible to obtain refugee status.”
– Jeremy Harding, Contributing Editor at The London Review of Books and author of Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants out of the Rich World

Clara Bingham in conversation with Charles Kaiser
2018-09-24 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Monday, September 24, 7:30pm
Pegasus Books Downtown
Fifty years later, Clara Bingham and Charles Kaiser reflect on 1968: a year which shaped a generation and proved a hinge point in history.
Clara Bingham’s Witness to the Revolution is a riveting story of America in the turbulent year when the 60s ended, and the nation teetered on the edge of revolution. As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. The death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society — from work, family, and capitalism to sex, science, and gender relations. Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham’s unique oral history of that tumultuous time, unveils anew that moment when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long, futile war abroad.
Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America is widely recognized as one of the best historic accounts of the 1960s. Largely based on unpublished interviews and documents (including in-depth conversations with anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and Dylan), this is compulsively readable popular history. Now, fifty years later, and with a new introduction by Hendrik Hertzberg, it is even more clear that this was a uniquely terrible, wonderful, and pivotal year in the story of America.
Free to attend.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Charles Kaiser, the author of 1968 in America, has been a reporter at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. He has also written for Vanity Fair, New York, and The Washington Post. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton, and is the author of The Gay Metropolis, a history of gay life in New York City since 1940.
Clara Bingham is the author of Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law (with Laura Leedy Gansler) and Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress. She is a former NewsweekWhite House correspondent, and her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Talk, The Washington Monthly, Ms., and other publications. Bingham produced the 2011 documentary The Last Mountain. She lives in Manhattan and Brooklyn with her husband, three children, and three stepchildren.

Event date:

Monday, September 24, 2018 – 7:30pm to 8:30pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Ave

Berkeley, CA 94704

Katie Ford with Katie Peterson / If You Have to Go
2018-09-24 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith hosts a special evening with Katie Ford, to celebrate her new poetry collection If You Have to Go. Joining her for a reading and conversation is the poet Katie Peterson! Please join us.

The poems in Katie Ford’s fourth collection implore their audience—the divine and the human—for attention, for revelation, and, perhaps above all, for companionship. The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood—in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss—these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.

“In every poem in If You Have to Go, Katie Ford risks seeing—she must, because from her first book onward, but never more so than here, her poems have been poems that have seen. Here, Ford has seen the end of a marriage, and in her great refusal to make the world weep as she weeps, she finds herself at times almost unbearably at odds with a world she sees unchanged by her suffering, and so she sees the world—‘everyone thrashes / against a wall / in this life.’ Ford becomes stronger with each book, and is among the best poets of our generation.” – Shane McCrae

“With the publication of her first book, Katie Ford established herself as a distinct and powerful voice in American poetry, and in subsequent books her aesthetic has evolved of necessity to meet the demands of new urgencies. Here, she goes to the bottom of loss to explore the relationship between uncertainty, desire, and belief as well as the relationship between faith in the human and faith in a God. At times it seems that only the careful speaking of the heart-made thought stands between this speaker and an abyss. This is a complex, riveting, and heartbreaking book.” – Jane Mead

Katie Ford is the author of three previous poetry collections: Blood Lyrics, Colosseum, and Deposition. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Prize, she teaches at the University of California, Riverside. Katie’s author photo was taken by Helge Brekke.

Katie Peterson is the author of four books of poetry, This One Tree,Permission, and The Accounts. Her fourth collection, A Piece of Good News, will be published by FSG in February 2019. The winner of the Rilke Prize in Poetry from the University of North Texas, she is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. Katie’s author photo was taken by Jackson Frishman.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
2018-09-24 19:30 - 21:30 | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. His epic six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, is a New York Times Best Seller and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. The final volume, Book Six, will be published in the United States in September 2018.

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
In Conversation with Lydia Kiesling
Monday, September 24, 2018, 7:30 pm
Venue: Nourse Theater
Series: “On Arts” Benefiting 826 Valencia Scholarship Program
Buy Tickets | Buy Series Tickets | 415.392.4400

Jackson Burgess
2018-09-23 19:00 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Please join us at Green Apple Books on Clement street Sunday, September 23rd at 7:00 p.m. as we welcome Jackson Burgess as he reads from his newest poetry collection (from Write Bloody Publishig), Atrophy.

Praise for Atrophy
“Jackson Burgess is the most dazzling, urgently urban and unfailingly inventive young chronicler of lost highways and avenues of broken dreams since the early poems of Denis Johnson and the ballads of Tom Waits.” -David St. John, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

“Atrophy is simply shattering–in its apocalyptic intensity, its relentless drive, its urgent music, its desperate tenderness.” -Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia

“Atrophy pulses with love, vodka, and the despair of things lost and things found…I want to gift Atrophy to every human I’ve ever met.” -Ruth Madievsky, author of Emergency Brake

Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018)and the chapbook Pocket Full of Glass, winner of the 2014 Clockwise Competition (Tebot Bach, 2017). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has led workshops at the University of Iowa, Los Angeles Southwest College, and the St. Vincent de Paul Cardinal Manning Center on Skid Row. Jackson lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an editor and educator.

Jane Ira Bloom Quartet - Improvising Emily Dickinson
2018-09-23 18:00 - 20:30 | SFJAZZ Center, 201 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Jazz’s greatest living soprano saxophonist performs with her spectacular quartet including pianist Dawn Clement, bassist Mark Helias, and drummer Bobby Previte. Possessing a painterly style and firm command of electronic textures, Bloom creates music that gives form to mysterious beauty and subconscious emotions. Two performances – 6:00pm & 7:30pm.
Regularly cited as jazz’s foremost master on her wily instrument, she’s distinguished herself over the past 35 years as a resourceful bandleader and a melodically expansive composer particularly inspired by painters and poets. She’s also a tenured professor at The New School and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Bloom’s latest album, 2017’s Wild Lines: Improvising Emily Dickinson (Outline), features the same stellar band she brings to SFJAZZ.

POETRY EVENT!
2018-09-23 17:00 - 18:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Featured readers tba
Curated by Aakash Tyagi

Katya Apekina, Bryan Hurt, and Lisa Locascio
2018-09-23 16:00 - 18:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special afternoon of readings from new books by Katya Apekina (The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish), Bryan Hurt (Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France), and Lisa Locascio (Open Me). Please join us!

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
by Katya Apekina

It’s sixteen year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, fourteen year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success. The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart–Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.

Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor,The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.

“The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish is an engrossing debut — Apekina’s brilliant story of a family in crisis is a remarkable feat of empathy and insight, guided by unpredictable, propulsive storytelling. I was increasingly and helplessly hooked. I can’t believe this remarkable tour de force is a first novel.” – J. Ryan Stradal, author of the New York Times Bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Katya Apekina has had stories published in The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, Joyland, PANK and elsewhere, and has appeared on the Notable List of Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. She translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky, which was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. Born in Moscow, she currently lives in Los Angeles. Poets & Writers recently named Katya a writer to watch and The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish a big fiction debut for the Fall.

Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France
by Bryan Hurt

A seagull, a goat, and a teenage boy enter into a bizarre love triangle that leaves one of them dead and the other two changed forever. A grief-stricken astronaut quits NASA to paint pictures of the moon. A lonely scientist creates stars in his basement and becomes enraged when he discovers that one of his stars harbors life. An eighteenth-century British aristocrat adopts two teenage girls and absconds with them to France, determined to raise one of them to become his perfect wife. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this debut collection offers weird and wonderful stories that illuminate the hidden truths of life.

“Bryan Hurt’s stories are like no one else’s. They are by turns hilarious, whimsical, arresting, and heartbreaking, but what makes them such a delight is the sly simplicity and off-handed charm of their telling.” – T.C. Boyle

Bryan Hurt is the author of Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France, selected by Alissa Nutting as the winner of the 10th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. He is the editor of Watchlist: 32 Sstories by Persons of Interest and Midwest editor for Joyland Magazine. His short stories and essays have been published in The American Reader, Guernica, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and many others. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and named finalist for the Calvino Prize and Horatio Nelson Prize in Fiction. He’s received fellowships from the Sewanee and Tin House Writers’ Conferences. Bryan holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the university of Southern California. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Capital University.

Open Me
by Lisa Locascio

A political and erotically-charged debut that follows a young American woman’s transformative journey during one pivotal summer abroad hailed by Viet Thanh Nguyen as “unflinching in its portrayal of sex, desire, racism, and the excitement and confusion of youth.”

​Roxana Olsen has always dreamed of going to Paris, and after high school graduation finally plans to travel there on a study abroad program — a welcome reprieve from the bruising fallout of her parents’ divorce. But a logistical mix-up brings Roxana to Copenhagen instead, where she’s picked up at the airport by Søren, a twenty-eight year old guide who is meant to be her steward. Instantly drawn to one another, Roxana and Søren’s relationship turns romantic, and when he asks Roxana to accompany him to a small town in the north of Denmark for the rest of the summer, she doesn’t hesitate to accept. There, Roxana’s world narrows and opens as she experiences fantasy, ritual, and the pleasures of her body, a thrilling realm of erotic and domestic bliss. But as their relationship deepens, Søren’s temperament darkens, and Roxana finds herself increasingly drawn to a mysterious local outsider whom she learns is a refugee from the Balkan War.
​
An erotic coming-of-age like no other, from a magnetic new voice in fiction, Open Me is a daringly original and darkly compelling portrait of a young woman discovering her power, her sex, and her voice; and an incisive examination of xenophobia, migration, and what it means to belong.

“Not since Henry James’ Daisy Miller have I been so beguiled by an American abroad. Lisa Locascio’s Roxana Olsen may only be eighteen but she is already a desperate sexual adventurer. Part captivity narrative, part political awakening, Open Me will open you, reminding us that nothing really happens until it happens in the body.” – Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde

Lisa Locascio‘s work has appeared in The Believer, Tin House, n+1, Bookforum, and many other magazines. She is the editor of the anthology Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, co-publisher of Joyland and editor of its West section, as well as of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7x7LA. She is Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.

Please note: this event will be at The Bindery at 1727 Haight.

This is an all ages event. The bar opens with the store at 2, event begins at 4pm.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

Dickson Lam
2018-09-23 08:00 - 17:00 | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Dickson Lam is author of Paper Sons: A Memoir. Lam’s work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Kenyon Review Online, Hyphen Magazine, the Normal School, PANK, the Good Men Project, the Rumpus, and Kartika Review. He is a VONA alum and has been a resident fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Lam is an assistant professor of English at Contra Costa College and lives in Oakland.

BOOK RELEASE: NOMADIC PRESS' FALL 2018 CHAPBOOK COLLECTION
2018-09-22 19:00 - 21:00 | Nomadic Press: Uptown, 2301 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us at our Uptown, Oakland, location for an amazing evening of readings, live music, gnosh / refreshments, and friends of Nomadic Press as we launch seven new chapbooks in our Fall 2018 Chapbook Collection into the universe: TBA!
Readings by all authors and all books will be available for purchase and signing at the event ($10 each). Music by TBA!
Hope to see you there!

THE DAILY
2018-09-21 19:30 - 21:30 | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Michael Barbaro
In Conversation with Kevin Roose
Co-presented with The New York Times
Friday, September 21, 2018, 7:30 pm
Venue: Nourse Theater
Series: Special Events
Buy Tickets | 415.392.4400

Join Michael Barbaro, host and managing editor of The Daily, as he speaks to New York Times “The Shift” columnist Kevin Roose, on the culmination of his 3-part investigation into social media and the Midterm 2018 elections. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, The Times podcast The Daily is hosted by Barbaro in conversation with New York Times journalists exploring a topic of the day.
Advance sales are open to City Arts & Lectures members only starting Thursday, August 2 at 10am. To become a member, click here or call 415-563-2463.
Co-presented with

Valerie Wallace, Daniel Handler and Kevin Simmonds
2018-09-21 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Valerie Wallace discusses her new poetry collection, House of McQueen with Daniel Handler and Kevin Simmonds.

Praise for House of McQueen

“How does a writer begin to capture the wild glory and talent of someone like Lee Alexander McQueen, the high-octane designer of the House of Givenchy and then of his own unmistakable label? One only has to look to Valerie Wallace’s debut collection House of McQueen for an answer. Wallace begins with an in-depth, intuitive knowledge of the designer’s life gleaned from interviews, studies of his ground-breaking collections, visits to exhibitions of his visionary work, and by collecting fragments of words spoken by the man himself as well as some of the famous people he dressed. But it is more than that. The mastery of Wallace’s own poetic art is what rips into the heart of a man who defied all odds by moving from a working class boyhood to the center of 21st century haute couture and the brutality of that game. Wallace captures the genius of McQueen not to memorialize his tragically short life (although she does) or to write a biography or history of the designer, but rather to transform art—his art into a maelstrom of her own poetic brilliance. In the process, we find a book that captures the flair of Valerie herself—as poet, soothsayer, designer, and seeker of the strange and wonderful manifestations of what art can be. This is a book inspired by McQueen, but one that rises into its own thing of beauty and myth.”~ Andrea Witzke Slot, author of TO FIND A NEW BEAUTY

“I cut / a path to / the sacred” and “I am | you are / the voyeur | the mirror.” So declares Alexander McQueen amid these poems of a richly sounded sensorium: of the texture of cloth, the silhouette of a waist, the smell of orange peels, the hook of a fang. If McQueen’s work resulted from the designer thinking with his bare hands, Valerie Wallace’s poems in this arresting collection result from the poet speaking with all five of her senses fully engaged. House of McQueen is a remarkable book.”~ Peter O’Leary, author of THICK AND DAZZLING DARKNESS, THE SAMPO, and others

About House of McQueen

From the publisher: Selected by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize, Valerie Wallace’s HOUSE OF MCQUEEN is a glittering debut by an assured new voice. Inhabiting the life and work of Alexander McQueen, Wallace builds a fantastical world using both original language and excerpts drawn from interviews, supermodels, Shakespeare, and more. At turns fierce and vulnerable, here is a collection that leaps from runway to fairytale to street with wild, brilliant grace.

The story of the Spear of Longinus: Terry Tarnoff discusses his novel "The Thousand Year Journey of Tobias Parker"
2018-09-20 19:30 - 22:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Author Terry Tarnoff discusses his novel The Thousand Year Journey of Tobias Parker with special focus on the story of the Spear of Longinus.
