Litseen

YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: POETRY, PROSE & EVERYTHING GOES...
2018-06-07 19:30 - 22:30 UTC | The Lost Church, 65 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Doors at 7:30pm
Show at 8pm
$10 online & at the door…
TICKETSSSSSS: https://ticketf.ly/2rOcW0A
YOU’RE GOING TO DIE: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes…
is an open mic event,
a communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying,
to embrace our losses & mortality,
to grieve, bereave & honor those we’ve lost & love…
while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be the night of & the list fills up quickly, so if you want to perform, you’d better get there early…
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And we will hug you when we have to stop you [just to make it easier on you (or harder – depending on your propensity for intimacy)].
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so do whatever you want.
You don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please don’t perform anything with a setup that takes much more time than the time it takes for you to walk onstage. Honestly, plugging things in is endlessly boring. If you need to borrow an instrument, figure it out before you’re called to the stage.
IMPORTANT ::: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY. Come and have fun. The end. Remember. Someday, we won’t exist and neither will the English language. If you choose to take yourself seriously, then take yourself so seriously that it’s stupid. Ridiculousness is encouraged.
You’re Going to Die. No. Really. You are.

Poe Ballantine
2018-06-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Poe Ballantine discusses his new novel, Whirlaway.
Praise for Poe Ballantine
Poe Ballantine is the most soulful, insightful, funny, and altogether luminous “under-known” writer in America. He knocks my socks off, even when I’m barefoot. —TOM ROBBINS, Tibetan
Peach Pie
Poe Ballantine is brilliant. —CHERYL STRAYED, Wild
Whirlaway is a fever dream of my favorite things: horse racing, records, booze, insanity, and women. What a strange and crazed comedic ride. Ballantine’s writing is like no other. —WILLY
VLAUTIN, The Free
About Whirlaway
Eddie Plum, who insists he’s been unjustifiably committed to a California psychiatric hospital, manages to finally escape after fourteen years of incarceration to start his life anew. On the run, he holes up in a sheltered barrio on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean owned by his wealthy but unsympathetic father. Here he meets Sweets, the telepathic dog, laments the loss of Sofia, his madhouse lover, and plays the horses at the Del Mar Racetrack. Eventually he meets up with an old friend, Shelly Hubbard, a fellow horseplayer, record collector/dealer, and hardcore loner, who tells him about his brother, Donny, dead at the age of eighteen from a tragic dive off a thirty-foot La Jolla sea cliff known as the Clam. Eddie discovers a family secret and wants to help, but by then he’s already embroiled in the psychotic incident with the Tijuana prostitutes, the madhouse lover, and the police, who are hot on his tail. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride has nothing on Whirlaway, a hilarious novel of escaped mental patients, horseplayers, and record collectors.

Clearly Meant presents Bruce H. Feingold
2018-06-09 14:00 - 15:00 | Claremont Branch, Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Berkeley Haiku poet Bruce Feingold will read his poems, then sit for an interview and discussion.

Caroline Arden
2018-06-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Launch for her debut YA novel, The High Climber of Dark Water Bay
“Arden has created the hero we have been waiting for in Young Adult Lit–Lizzie is authentic, relatable and proves herself a force to be reckoned with. Engaging and immersive, [her] writing is clean and crisp. Vivid imagery and concise storytelling combine to create a story for all ages.”–Kathleen Kaufman, author of The Lairdbalor
To reserve your seat, purchase a copy of The High Climber of Dark Water Bay by speaking with a bookseller or ordering from our website.

Saturday, June 9, 2018 – 4:00pm

Twelve-year-old Lizzie is in trouble. She used to live a comfortable life with her loving father, but after the stock market crash of 1929 and his sudden death, she and her family now live in poverty. Lizzie is expected to help support the family, but she can’t even cook without burning food. One day, a letter arrives. Her wealthy uncle has offered her a paying job as a summer governess for her two young cousins at a remote logging camp, so she travels alone into the wilderness of Vancouver, British Columbia. To her horror, she discovers that her uncle is missing from the camp. Penniless and stranded, Lizzie’s worst fears are soon confirmed–she is being held hostage by the camp’s boss. “Accidents are easy to explain in the woods,” he writes in a ransom letter to her uncle. Lizzie learns that in order to survive, she will have to perform the most dangerous job at the camp–the high climber. She has one chance to save herself and return to her family. Her intelligence and bravery will be tested to the limit as she pulls on the climber harness to prove to everyone, including herself, what she is truly capable of.
Caroline Arden holds an MFA in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. As a child she spent her summers at her grandparents’ home at a former logging camp in British Columbia. Now she lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and daughters.

SHAZAM, Linda and Carolyn at Works in Progress Women's Open Mic
2018-06-09 18:30 - 22:00 | Plymouth Jazz and Justice Church, 424 Monte Vista, Oakland, 94611
a WOMEN-ONLY event�
Featuring poets and birthday girls Linda Zeiser and Carolyn Stull-Zeiser as well as singer-songwriter SHAZAM
Hosted by Linda Zeiser
$7 – $10 Admission includes raffle ticket for one of ten copies of THE HORIZONTAL POET by Jan Steckel
6:30 – 7:30 Potluck: bring your favorite dish to share.
7:30 – 10:15 Performance
Produced by Linda Zeiser & Carolyn Stull Zeiser.
To reserve open mic slot, contact Linda at (510) 701-1022, ZeiserpoetMC@aol.com, well in advance.
WIP is a creative space for women’s art: Poets, Musicians, Comediennes, and Performance Artists. All are encouraged to share their works, completed or evolving. Scent free and wheelchair accessible (bathroom unfortunately not completely accessible).

Cynthia Bryant and Cher Wollard
2018-06-09 19:00 - 21:00 | Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru Street, Alameda, 94501, United States
Poetry reading by Cynthia Bryant and Cher Wollard, followed by an open mic, hosted by Jeanne Lupton every second Saturday monthly, Frank Bette and Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru Street, Alameda, 7:00 (510/523-6957, www.frankbettecenter.org

Reading
2018-06-09 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Beloved poet Tinker Greene is being forced to leave San Francisco! Join us for a celebration of his work and contribution to the poetry community . Also featuring Carrie Hunter

Writers With Drinks
2018-06-09 19:30 - 21:30 | Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Adam Smyer (Knucklehead)
Chandler Klang Smith (The Sky Is Yours)
Nitasha Tiku (Wired)
Adam Becker (What Is Real?)
Cost: $5 to $20, no-one turned away
All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.
At The Make Out Room 3225 22nd St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM.

Jennifer Egan
2018-06-09 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Saturday, June 9, 2018 – 7:30pm

This event will be held at our 9th Ave. location.

Jennifer Egan joins us on Saturday, June 9th to celebrate the paperback release of Manhattan Beach.

Praise for Manhattan Beach

“A bounteous miracle that makes you feel that past time, and our time, differently; everything becomes freshly energized, infused with humanity, vital, sad, and full of importance. To see the world through Egan’s eyes is to be moved, through language, to new adoration of the world. I don’t know a better writer working today. There is a generosity in her prose that is vastly enlivening to its reader and brings about that beautiful effect fiction sometimes causes: more, and better-grounded, fondness for reality, just as it is.”—George Saunders

“Manhattan Beach is so rich in detail and atmosphere; such an exploration of underworlds of all kinds, filled with lessons on lifelines and buoyancy and how to bear life’s weight by diving deep into it. Jennifer Egan has masterfully conjured an era we are on the cusp of losing. Her novel is an absorbing story, beautifully written. Its strands of subtle intrigue and quiet heroism make you reluctant to leave each page while eager to get to the next.”—M.L. Stedman

“An unusually well written, well researched, emotionally satisfying page-turner . . . Manhattan Beach is the kind of book you can immerse yourself in happily.” –Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle

About Manhattan Beach

The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.
‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.
With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world. It is a magnificent novel by the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the great writers of our time.

MANHATTAN BEACH (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$17.00
ISBN: 9781476716749
Availability: Coming Soon. Available for Pre-Order Now!
Published: Scribner Book Company – June 5th, 2018

* Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
* Winner of the New York City Book Award
* New York Times Bestseller
* A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year
* A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2017

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$16.00
ISBN: 9780307477477
Availability: On Our Shelves Now. Call store for up-to-the-minute availability.
Published: Anchor Books – March 22nd, 2011

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book

THE KEEP (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$15.95
ISBN: 9781400079742
Availability: On Our Shelves Now. Call store for up-to-the-minute availability.
Published: Anchor Books – July 10th, 2007

Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep -the tower, the last stand -is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

LOOK AT ME (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$16.95
ISBN: 9780385721356
Availability: On Our Shelves Now. Call store for up-to-the-minute availability.
Published: Anchor Books – October 8th, 2002

A National Book Award Finalist

THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$16.95
ISBN: 9780307387523
Availability: NOT on our shelves now. Usually ships 1-10 business days from warehouse. ETA will be updated with email order confirmation.
Published: Anchor Books – October 9th, 2007

In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970.

EMERALD CITY (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer Egan
$15.95
ISBN: 9780307387530
Availability: NOT on our shelves now. Usually ships 1-10 business days from warehouse. ETA will be updated with email order confirmation.
Published: Anchor Books – October 9th, 2007

These eleven masterful stories – the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan – deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters – models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls – are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience.

Follow the Money! The Dennis J. Bernstein KPFA Interviews
2018-06-10 14:00 - 15:30 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Riva Enteen, editor of KPFA radio commentator Dennis J. Bernstein’s new book “Follow the Money: Radio Voices for Peace and Justice,” will host guests who have appeared on Bernstein’s influential and long-running program. “Follow the Money” compiles 66 of Bernstein’s incisive, insightful interviews, all conducted during the Obama era, that provide the writing on the wall for how we got to Trump today. Taken together, these interviews paint a vivid picture of the state of things in present day America.

Poetry Event: GEARS TURNING w/ Kim Shuck
2018-06-10 16:00 - 18:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Details soon!
Sunday, June 10, 2018
4:00 PM 6:00 PM

Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Meg Elison & Ellen Klages
2018-06-10 18:00 - 20:30 | The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
There will be no SF in SF events in May due to convention travel. However, we will be back on June 10th with Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Meg Elison & Ellen Klages. More details to follow once we have our feet back on the ground.
Doors open 6:00PM
Event begins 7:00 PM
The American Bookbinders Museum
355 Clementina
San Francisco, CA

Heather Abel // The Optimistic Decade
2018-06-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage Corte Madera, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Heather Abel will read from her just-released novel, The Optimistic Decade. The Optimistic Decade has received praise from the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, New York Magazine, BBC, People Magazine, EW.com, Buzzfeed, NY Post, Library Journal. Bookpage says: “The Optimistic Decade deserves the elusive accolade of “original” for its believable construction and flawless attention to detail. Within the brilliant, multilayered canopy of the novel’s world, Heather Abel’s writing comes across as a sincere and tender channel for a story that must be told.
Buzzfeed says: “I loved every minute I spent reading Heather Abel’s The Optimistic Decade, a sharply rendered portrait of the United States in 1990. The novel is rich in the conflicting energies of the time — lingering resentments from the previous decade’s stark class divisions, a renewed hope for the decade to come — and these clashes are played out over the course of one summer at a Colorado camp. … The result is an exuberant and nonjudgmental examination of the unique conflicts of the era.”
Pittsburg Post-Gazette says: Writing with both warmth and incisiveness, Ms. Abel has crafted an engaging look at idealism and the difficulties in maintaining it…The Optimistic Decade is an exceptionally timely look at what it means to be politically aware and reminds readers of the intoxicating power of idealism, particularly when we find ourselves on the precipice of independence.”
More info here: http://heatherabel.com/reviews/

THE RACKET! #20
2018-06-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Details soon!
https://www.facebook.com/theracketseries/
Hosted by Noah B. Sanders

David Graeber
2018-06-11 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing the subject of his new book
Bullshit Jobs
from Simon and Schuster
From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.
Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of the bestseller DEBT: The First 5,000 Years, and a contributor to Harper’s, The Guardian, and The Baffler. He was a leading figure in the OCCUPY Wall Street movement, He lives in London.

Janet Mock
2018-06-11 19:30 - 21:30 | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Date of event changed to June 11, 2018
Janet Mock is a writer, TV host, and advocate tackling stigma through storytelling. With a Master’s in journalism from New York University, the Honolulu native began her career as an editor at People.com and went on to write cover stories for Marie Claire, Interview, and The Advocate as well as essays for The New Yorker, TheNew York Times, and Lenny. She produced HBO’s The Trans List, hosts the podcast Never Before, and serves as a columnist for Allure. Called a “fearless new voice” and “trailblazing leader” who “changed my way of thinking” by Oprah Winfrey, Janet was a featured speaker at the historic Women’s March on Washington. She is the author of Surpassing Certainty and the New York Times bestseller Redefining Realness.
Mia Birdsong is an activist, writer, and orator. She is a Family Centered Social Policy Fellow at New America and a Senior Fellow at the Economic Security Project. She is working on her first book, How We Show Up.
This program is a benefit for the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project

Porchlight Open Door
2018-06-12 08:00 - 17:00 | Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk Street, San Francisco , CA, 94109, United States
Porchlight Open Door is a small stage open mic event launched by Porchlight in September
2009. Storytellers add their names to a sign-up sheet, receive a free drink, and then have
five minutes to spiel on the monthly theme. The evening’s top storyteller, as chosen by a
random audience member, receives $50 in cold, hard, United States greenbacks, a bag of
hot nuts, and a pound of coffee from local roaster
Nomadic Ground

Storytelling has never been this potentially lucrative or fun!*

Open Door is back!
Hosted by Arline Klatte and Michael O’Brien
The second Tuesday of the month at The Hemlock Tavern

*Except on various occasions

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Presents Poetic Tuesdays with Litquake
2018-06-12 12:30 - 13:30 | Jessie Square, 736 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Yerba Buena Gardens Festival presents Poetic Tuesdays guest curated by Litquake, Poetic Tuesdays features an array of poets and music.

Turk & Divis / Quiet Lightning album release party
2018-06-12 18:30 - 22:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Turk & Divis (Evan and Miles Karp) launch the Quiet Lightning album, featuring 11 tracks of original music scored to excerpts of 50 Bay Area writers performing live in last year’s QL shows.
Come celebrate! Activities include:
> A listening/screening party
> Performances by a stout list of the album’s contributors: Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Margaret McCarthy, Matt Leibel, Miah Jeffra, AshleyRose Sanchez, Matt Carney, Roberto F. Santiago, Rayan Mustafa, Kristina Ten, Linette Escobar, Riss Rosado, John Panzer, Danielle Bero, Abe Becker, Cassandra Dallett, and Paul Corman-Roberts: performer links and bios can be found here.
> An open mic: sign up to read/perform during an improv set by Turk & Divis (more info soon)
Limited edition lathe cut vinyl and cassettes will be available!
> more info + to pre-order <
Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.

This event is free and all ages. Doors at 6:30, show at 7pm.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

Perfectly Queer: Pride Zine Fest
2018-06-12 19:00 - 20:00 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Guest curator Anand Vedawala presents four Bay Area queer Zine artists: Tyler Cohen, Ajuan Mance, Lee Marrs, and Joshua Trujillo

Alexandra Mattraw with Tiff Dressen and Norman Fischer
2018-06-12 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Alexandra Mattraw with Tiff Dressen and Norman Fischer
Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 7:00 p.m., City Lights Booksellers, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco

Alexandra Mattraw launches her new book small siren with Tiff Dressen and Norman Fischer

About small siren:
small siren believes the inanimate is alive. Here, a speaker navigates music rendered from a terrain of fracture, where emergency and becoming intertwine. A family’s narrative threads and unthreads through the book, as do the ethics of projection. What confrontations arise where people and objects are involuntarily constructed through a mutual process of projection? Truth is slippery but so is the ground. Here, she listens for appendages of herself in nature and in the cities she encounters, where she ritualistically attempts to distinguish between beauty and disaster.
Alexandra Mattraw is a Berkeley poet and fourth generation native of Northern California. Her debut full-length book, small siren, emerges this spring from Brooklyn’s Cultural Society. Alexandra is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm (2017), published with Dancing Girl Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Fourteen Hills, The Poetry Project, VOLT, The Volta, and elsewhere. In Oakland, she curates an art centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen, now in its seventh year.
Tiff Dressen was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. SONGS FROM THE ASTRAL BESTIARY (lyric& Press, 2014) is their first full-length collection of poetry. They recently migrated from Oakland to the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco and work in the Office of Research at UC Berkeley. They are the author of Keeper (Woodland Editions, 2005), Because Icarus-children (WinteRed Press, December 2010) and for Aeolus: variations on the element (co-published by the g.e. collective and Poetry Flash, 2011). Their work has appeared in many journals including New American Writing, VOLT and 26: A journal of poetry and poetics, and YewJournal. They enjoy spending time at the SF Center for the Book honing their typesetting and letterpress printing skills.
Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Zen Buddhist priest. The latest of his more than twenty-five prose and poetry titles are (poetry) any would be if (Chax, 2017) and Magnolias All At Once (Singing Horse, 2015). Forthcoming in 2018 from PURH in France is his serial poem On a Train at Night. And from Talisman the poem Untitled Series: Life As It is. His latest prose works are What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind, and Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language and Religion. He is the founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation (www.everydayzen.org), a network of Zen meditation groups and other projects. His books are distributed by Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA.
Norman Fischer’s new book, On a Train at Night, was published in March 2018 by Presse Universite de Rouen et Havre, in France. This book-length serial poem explores consciousness, meaning, and what can’t be said or written of. June 1 is also the scheduled publication date of Untitled Series:Life As It Is (Talisman Press), also a serial poem in short fragments that describes the hidden, underlying, linguistic shape of ordinary daily events.
Alexandra Mattraw is a Berkeley poet and fourth generation native of Northern California. Her debut full-length book, small siren, emerges this spring from Brooklyn’s Cultural Society. Alexandra is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm (2017), published with Dancing Girl Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Fourteen Hills, The Poetry Project, VOLT, The Volta, and elsewhere. In Oakland, she curates an art centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen, now in its seventh year.
What has been said about small siren:
“When good poetry hits, it animates the actual, it becomes the actual. That’s small siren: a serious romp of constructive music that is what it says. Science and nature unlock their mysteries by being precise; in small siren the words — cut, spliced, compressed — form units of attention enacting the physical world so precisely that even the sun and the moon ride their arcs untroubled. Across cities and seas, Alexandra Mattraw’s language isn’t attached to images; it comes out of them, like a birthright. The authenticity is declarative and unmistakable: ‘A sign is a block, an island, a cloud, a clock.’ She makes it real.”
—Aaron Shurin
“Though cradled by earth, Mattraw’s poems wander through a new human condition. Or are the songs of spirits who won’t tiptoe around their biographers. Through the unregistered versions of ourselves, we can read these poems and worry about having regular bodies later. Here is a beautiful lesson or wager that on a page you can risk your dreams.”
—Tongo Eisen-Martin
“In Alexandra Mattraw’s much-awaited first book, small siren, we encounter a poet of extraordinary observation and inquiry. An enchantment and engagement with the world commences: “when is a voice a piano,’ “repetition needs to believe,’ “what grew before you could speak’ build a kind of groundswell where Mattraw puts her ear to the hardscape of 21st century America and its global environs: Sao Paolo, Iceland, New Zealand. Ultimately, notions of country and categories break down. What we find is heresy, hearsay, and yes, wishes. Throughout, what survives is a relationship of love and courage, of errors and triumph. A human relationship of lovers, of family. This is a book of wonder and awe and strength. When the world goes down, I want to be in Alexandra Mattraw’s boat.”
-Gillian Conoley

Laurie R. King, Island of the Mad
2018-06-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Laurie R. King, Island of the Mad
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 – 7:00pm
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes beloved and best-selling author Laurie R. King back to the store for a reading and signing of her new novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, Island of the Mad.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes untangle the slippery threads of insanity and deadly secrets as they investigate a disappearance in the New York Times bestselling series that Lee Child called “the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.”
A June summer’s evening, on the Sussex Downs, in 1925. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are strolling across their orchard when the telephone rings: an old friend’s beloved aunt has failed to return following a supervised outing from Bedlam. After the previous few weeks–with a bloody murder, a terrible loss, and startling revelations about Holmes–Russell is feeling a bit unbalanced herself. The last thing she wants is to deal with the mad, and yet, she can’t say no.
The Lady Vivian Beaconsfield has spent most of her adult life in one asylum after another, yet she seemed to be improving–or at least, finding a point of balance in her madness. So why did she disappear? Did she take the family’s jewels with her, or did someone else? The Bedlam nurse, perhaps?
The trail leads Russell and Holmes through a lunatic asylum’s stony halls to the warm Venice lagoon, where ethereal beauty is jarred by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, where the gilded Lido set may be tempting a madwoman, and where Cole Porter sits at a piano, playing with ideas…
LAURIE R. KING is the award-winning, bestselling author of fourteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and many acclaimed stand-alone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up an hour before the event begins.
Island of the Mad: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (Hardcover)
By Laurie R. King
$28.00
ISBN: 9780804177962
Availability: Coming Soon – Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Bantam – June 12th, 2018
Island of Mad—GET IT SIGNED!
$28.00
SKU: S9780804177962
Name (optional)
If you cannot attend this event, you can still have a copy of Island of Madsigned at the event. Books must be paid for in advance and can either be shipped or held for pick-up in the store. Internet orders must be placed by Monday, June 11th. After that, please call the store to inquire about signed editions.
Most authors will be happy to add a name to their signature, but this service is at their discretion and isn’t guaranteed.

Weekday Wanderlust
2018-06-12 19:00 - 21:00 | mystic hotel, 417 Stockton St., San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Hello Wanderlusters! It’s coming that time again…the most wanderlust time of the year. Weekday DONderlust. Mark your calendar for Tuesday JUNE 12. It’s our LAST event before our summer hiatus. We will celebrate great travel writing, readings, summer, our fantastic community, and of course the birthday of our own Don George. Champagne toasts and funny Don stories are welcome. Don has invited three of his besties, who happen to be extraordinary writers, too. Please come to welcome Larry Habegger, Amanda Jones, and Jeff Greenwald. There will be stories. There will be laughter. There will be giveaways. This is is Donderlust. Readings start at 7pm but we will be at the bar by 6 pm at the Mystic Hotel (417 Stockton). See you then.

Well-RED with features: ASHA and Joseph Jason Santiago LaCour
2018-06-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Works/San José, 365 S Market St, San Jose, CA, 95113, United States
at Works/San José
365 South Market Street
in downtown San José
doors open 6:30pm
$2 admission, no one turned away
Works is on the Market Street edge of the San Jose Convention Center,
just to the right of the parking garage entrance
An Artist, Educator, and Revolutionary, Asha is an 8th grade teacher in San Jose at Monroe Middle school. She is an international poet, striving to use art to create radical change. Recently on the cover of Content Magazine, a feature at many of the prominent poetry events in the Bay Area, as well as active speaker, emcee and performer at numerous rallies and marches for civil and human rights including both years of the Women’s March and The March For Our Lives, Asha consistently uses her platform to voice out against injustice and to speak up for those who have been marginalized and silenced for centuries.
Joseph Jason Santiago LaCour is a poet, artist, and emcee from the MIdwest now living in Santa Cruz. Born 40 years ago into a Filipino and French Creole fiasco, he has been writing and reciting for more than half his life. In contrast, he has struggled as a young parent–working countless jobs (mostly technology-related) only honing his artistic skills on the side as a means of escape from the rigors of commitment. That storm has passed. Today, his beautiful daughters are grown. He has true love in his life. And he feels compelled to share his art, his heart, with you. As a member of The Legendary Collective and co-curator of The Santa Cruz Word Church, a well-attended, weekly poetry event at The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, he is consciously working to contribute to a strong community of poets and writers in the Bay Area and Central Coast. His first and greatest ever self-published, feature-length book, LEDDITGO: a recollection of poem, verses and visualshas been printed and is available in Bookshop Santa Cruz. He is also releasing an album of songs via CD or download both available through his website www.josephjasonsantiagolacour.com.

This is Now with Angie Coiro presents: Ken Jennings on humor and the media
2018-06-12 19:30 - 20:30 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Ken Jennings grew up in Seoul, South Korea, where he became a daily devotee of the quiz show Jeopardy! In 2004, he successfully auditioned for a spot on the show and went on an unprecedented seventy-four game victory streak worth $2.52 million. Jennings’s book Brainiac, about his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, as were his follow-up books Maphead and Because I Said So! He is also the author of Planet Funny. Jennings lives in Seattle with his wife Mindy and two children.
From John Stewart to Donald Trump, Chaucer to Sumerian Tablets, fart jokes to Cable TV “zingers,” Ken Jennings lends his signature wit and whizzing, encyclopedic perspective to the history of humor and how it came to dominate our modern world. Today, an unprecedented number of people get their news from comedy shows. Newspapers race to find the catchiest headline with an avidity that forgets the need to inform. In our democracy, showmanship has replaced good-nature debate. Jennings looks at the foundations of these current manifestations and what this says for where we might be headed.

Jennifer S. Cheng and Vi Khi Nao
2018-06-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Tuesday, June 12, 2018 – 7:30pm

This event will be held at our 9th Ave. location.

Jennifer S. Cheng and Vi Khi Nao join us on Tuesday June 12th to celebrate the release of their new collections, Moon: Letters, Poems, Maps and Sheep Machine.

Praise for Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems

“What are the secret aspects of a book, which cannot be spoken of and that unfold in ways that nobody can describe to us in advance? In a world where ‘boundaries are slipping,’ what modes of metamorphosis now become possible? Can radical change be read as a ‘map of the body in motion’? I am interested in Cheng’s idea of story as the place where we come to ‘forget something, as much as remember.’ This is a formulation that precipitates the artifacts and deities of the book: ‘the logic of dust cloud, spiral.’ Everything that’s left behind. If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life. ‘I want to mark a new map for a body opening,’ she writes, and then she does.” —Bhanu Kapil

“…What distinguishes this study of the Self in proximity to Other and to the World is the way Cheng refuses to tell stories and instead, insists on asking them. With curiosity and attention, MOON shines its light on inquiry as art, asking as making. In the tradition of Fanny Howe’s poetics of bewilderment, Cheng gives us a poetics of possibility.” —Jennifer Tseng

About Moon: selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards:

Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng’s hybrid collection, MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems, explores the feminine monstrous as it draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang’E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths — with the belief that there is always an underbelly. MOON explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.

Praise for Sheep Machine

“The unglamorous labor of ‘logging’ footage is, like childbirth, often seen as a necessary torment best forgotten once its productive work is done . . . Vi Khi Nao empowers this deceptively objective art of time-coded naming with a wild heart, a deep ethics, and the slant-philosophical poetics that returns me continuously to her gorgeous, necessary (and frankly addictive) work.” —Anna Moschovakis

“Vi Khi Nao’s poetic ekphrasis of Leslie Thornton’s Sheep Machine is a visceral companion to an optical theatre of ordinary and extraordinary images that rub off the burning edge of consciousness . . . This is hallucinatingly generative work.” —Dong Li

About Sheep Machine

SHEEP MACHINE is a textual inscape, a poetically painted nonfictional pasture where mechanical violence and visceral fear coalesce into a kind of science prosody, a post-human panorama whose beauty liesr in the ruins of reality it depicts. Influenced by Leslie Thornton’s film of sheep feeding in a field as a conveyor belt of cable cars ascend and return from a mountain in the Swiss Alps, Vi Khi Nao takes perception into tumultuous terrains, into a pastoral-celestial void in which temporality is transcended, progress is a bourgeois invention, and god is a liability for our life spent in hunger and grazing. Vi Khi Nao’s SHEEP MACHINE is grace said at the ontological last supper.

FISH IN EXILE (PAPERBACK)

By VI Khi Nao
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566894494
Availability: On Our Shelves Now. Call store for up-to-the-minute availability.
Published: Coffee House Press – November 1st, 2016

Praise for Vi Khi Nao:
“Here I was allowed to forget for a while that that is what books aspire to tell, so taken was I by more enthralling and mysterious pleasures.” –Carole Maso

HOUSE A (OMNIDAWN 1ST/2ND BOOK CONTEST) (PAPERBACK)

By Jennifer S. Cheng
$17.95
ISBN: 9781632430236
Availability: On Our Shelves Now. Call store for up-to-the-minute availability.
Published: Omnidawn – October 4th, 2016

House A investigates the tones and textures of immigrant home-building by asking: How is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home, and vice versa?

Darnell L. Moore: Coming of Age Black & Free in America
2018-06-12 19:30 - 21:30 | First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
KPFA Radio 94.1FM and Marcus Books present
DARNELL L. MOORE
“No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America”
Hosted by Greg Bridges
wheelchair access advance tickets: $12 : : T: 800-838-3006 or independent bookstores, $15 door, KPFA benefit
What happens to the black boys who come of age in neglected, heavily policed, and economically desperate cities that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have created? How do they learn to live, love, and grow up? Where should they turn when history rejects their very existence? Darnell explores these questions in NO ASHES IN THE FIRE. When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured gasoline on him. He barely escaped with his life. On many other occasions there were terrifying confrontations, including some within his family…
Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. No Ashes in the Fire is his compelling account of how that bullied, frightened teenager not only survived, but found such a unique calling. An editor-at-large at the content distributor Urban One, and a columnist at Logo, Darnell L. Mooore describes his bold, candid memoir as “snapshots of my life” molded by forces of “brutality, poverty, and self-hatred.”
Darnell L. Moore (born in 1976 in Camden, NJ) is an American writer and activist whose work is characterized by anti-racist, feminist, queer, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. His essays, social commentary, poetry and interviews have appeared in various national and international media venues, including The Feminist Wire, Ebony Magazine, and The Huffington Post.

Heather Abel // The Optimistic Decade
2018-06-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States

Poetic Observations of a Black, Queer Young Man
2018-06-13 19:00 - 20:30 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Southern Migrant Mixtape relays the experiences and observations of a black, queer man from Virginia who thought he was leaving racism and sexual intolerance behind in the regions where he initially experienced them. Plunge heart first into this emotive journey of growth, transformation of pain into armor, and the lessons that can be learned when one is true to themselves.

Vi Khi Nao, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Rita Bullwinkel
2018-06-13 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
7:00 PM 9:00 PM

Come celebrate new books by favorite writers! Jennifer S. Cheng’s “MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS” (Tarpaulin Sky, May 2018) and Vi Khi Nao’s “Sheep Machine” (Black Sun Lit 2018). We might even have more writers releasing more books!
Jennifer S. Cheng writes at the intersection of essay and poetry. Her second book, a hybrid collection MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, was selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. Her writing appears in Tin House, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Literary Hub, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Guernica, Hong Kong 20/20 (a PEN Hong Kong anthology), and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas, Connecticut, and Hong Kong, she lives in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.www.jenniferscheng.com
VI KHI NAO was born in Long Khanh, Vietnam. She is the author, most recently, Umbilical Hospital, and of the forthcoming story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. www.vikhinao.com
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up(forthcoming from A Strange Object May 8th 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and her translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s. She lives in San Francisco. Read more about her here.
