Litseen

Beast Generation Uprising
2020-10-21 14:00 - 2020-10-22 00:01 (America/Los_Angeles) | online
Beast Generation culture exploded in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 2000s. By 2012, we, Beast Generation writers, lived a never-ending literary feast. We gathered in the Mission, at the street corners (16th and Mission), in a former voodoo and black magic temple Viracocha, Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, in the bars like Amnesia and Make Out Room or Nick’s Lounge in Berkeley. They read poetry and prose, played music and acted at festivals and happenings like Bay Area Generations, Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, Saturday Night Special, Quiet Lightning, Get Lit, Tourette’s Without Regrets, Poetry Flash, Donde Esta Mi Gente, Perfectly Queer, The Naked Bulb, Skinless, Swill, Word Performances, Literary Speakeasy, LitCrawl, Literary Death Match, and organizations like Nomadic Press, Poetry Flash, Small Press Distribution, Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, Kundiman, Kearney St Workshop, Manic D Press, Be About It Press, Milvia Street, Liminal Space, Foglifter Journal, the SF Creative Writing Institute, the East Bay Review, Full of Crow, Pandemonium Press. And with many MANY of these writers taking to the road to read with poets in Seattle, Portland, Cleveland, Kansas City, Pittsburg, Albuquerque New York, Paris, Mexico City, Rabat and others. It was a loud and fun family, with a sense of purpose and belonging.
The Beast Crawl was born in 2012 in Oakland CA to establish an annual gathering of this tribe in one region at one time in the East Bay (pig latin for “Beast”) to celebrate the merging of homegrown literary talent with the other kindred Beasts across the world. With this event, the East Bay emerged as a hotbed of raw, diverse literary talent with venues such as the Awaken Cafe, Bench & Bar, Chapter 510, the Dept. of Make Believe, the Creative Growth Center, Classic Cars West, Era Art Bar, Econojam Records, Feelmore 510, The Legionairre, Telegraph Beer Garden, Farley’s East, EM Wolfman Books, The Golden Bull, Laurel Books, The Layover Lounge, The New Parkway, Oaklandish, Kingston 11, Spice Monkey, The Starline Social Club, Sweet Bar, The Octopus Literary Salon, Radio Bar, and Woods Brewing Company hosting new up and coming authors.
By 2020, with many of the venues closed or out of business, festivals and readings canceled by the pandemic, depression, fires and smoke, the Beasts might have lost a platform but not their voice. We will join forces again on October 24, 2020, and speak up online. Join us for a whole day marathon on a YouTube channel of one of San Francisco’s oldest indie bookstores, Globus Books. The city will live up to its tradition: LitCrawl and Bay Area Poetry festival will be bringing more voices to you that very day. Let’s read like it is 2012!
With a week before the historic election, our country, state and city face a political, economic and environmental crisis. The arts, literature and poetry are here to do what they always do: offer humanity. Our land is on fire, the plague is near and tyrants are at large but our spirits soar and are invincible. Long live Poetry!
This event will be live streaming on the Globus Books YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobusBooksSF/videos. It is free for all. The recording of this show will be serialized and featured on the same channel later. Join us!
Reading:
Youssef Alaoui
Lynn Alexander
Kyrsten Bean
Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Steven Black
Pam Benjamin
Kwan Booth
Mya Byrne
Wolfgang Carstens
MK Chavez
Missy Church
Joe Clifford
Sharon Coleman
Paul Corman-Roberts
Sean Craven
Cassandra Dallett
Rohan DaCosta
Jenee Darden
Natasha Derenstein
Fred Dodsworth
MG Dufresne
Andy Dugas`
Joe Donohoe
Tony DuShane
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Lee Foust
JK Fowler
Bill Gainer
Cassandra Rockwood-Rice Ganem
Charlie Getter
Steve Goldberg
Steven Gray
Dazie Grego-Sykes
Jason Hardung
Hollie Hardy
Nicole Henares
Nazelah Jamison
Maisha Johnson
Nick Johnson
Juba Kalamka
Vernon Keeve III
Yume Kim
Alexandra Kostoulas
Charles Kruger
Allsion Landa
Joel Landmine
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis
RIchard Loranger
Michelle Lyn
Brandon Loberg
Joe Loya
Sean Manzano
Colleen McKee
KR Morrison
Amanda Muniz
Ginger Murray
Alexandra Naughton
Jason Neese
Zephir O’Meara
Dawn Oberg
Patty Orozco-Cronin
Sarah Page
John Alfred Panzer
Lauren Dissident Parker
Indiana Pehlivanova
Rob Pierce
Tom Pitts
Baruch Porras-Hernandez
Roger Porter
HK Rainey
Simon Rogghe
Kim Shuck
Cybele Zufolo Siegel
Jon Siegel
Todd Siegel
Ryan Snellman
Jan Steckel
SB Stokes
John Swain
William Taylor Jr.
Andrew Thomas
Lauren Traetto
Keeley Ann Tulloh
Rene Vaz
Alia Volz
Sandra Wassile
Jason Whitacre
Arisa White
Maw Shein Win
Zarina Zabrisky
James Zealous
Bios coming.

Yotam Ottolenghi - Ottolenghi Flavor (Virtual Event)
2020-10-21 11:30 - 13:30
The New York Times bestselling author of Plenty teams up with Ottolenghi Test Kitchen’s Ixta Belfrage to reveal how flavor is created and amplified through 100+ innovative, super-delicious, plant-based recipes.
Level up your vegetables. In this groundbreaking cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage offer a next-level approach to vegetables that breaks down the fundamentals of cooking into three key elements: process, pairing, and produce. For process, Yotam and Ixta show how easy techniques such as charring and infusing can change the way you think about cooking. Discover how to unlock new depths of flavor by pairing vegetables with sweetness, fat, acidity, or chile heat, and learn to identify the produce that has the innate ability to make dishes shine.
With main courses, sides, desserts, and a whole pantry of “flavor bombs” (homemade condiments), there’s something for any meal, any night of the week, including surefire hits such as Stuffed Eggplant in Curry and Coconut Dal, Spicy Mushroom Lasagne, and Romano Pepper Schnitzels. Chock-full of low-effort, high-impact dishes that pack a punch and standout meals for the relaxed cook, Ottolenghi Flavor is a revolutionary approach to vegetable cooking.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a seven-time New York Times best-selling cookbook author who contributes to the New York Times Food section and has a weekly column in The Guardian. His previous book, Ottolenghi Simple, was selected as a best book of the year by NPR and the New York Times; Jerusalem, written with Sami Tamimi, was awarded Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals and named Best International Cookbook by the James Beard Foundation. He lives in London, where he co-owns an eponymous group of restaurants and the fine-dining destinations Nopi and Rovi.

Writers Who Want to Get Noticed: Online Literary Profiles, with Lyzette Wanzer (via Zoom), Oct. 21
2020-10-21 05:30 - 20:30
WEDNESDAYS, OCT. 21 — DEC. 2 | One of the biggest challenges writers face is getting their work the recognition it deserves. You’ve been sending your work out—stories, articles, poems, plays—and you know it’s good work, but no one’s biting. You’ve applied for grants, travel scholarships, and writers’ conference funding, to no avail. You’d love to be invited to present work at Litquake or another high-profile reading series, or to read at a conference. You’d like to publish in literary journals that pay writers, and you’d like to start winning some writing contests. What’s the missing link? It could well be your online literary presence.

Do you have separate social media accounts reserved and used exclusively for your life as a writer?
Does your online presence offer evidence that you take your writing seriously, and view yourself as a literary professional, whether established or up-and-coming?
When publishers, funders, fellowship committees, and grant panels view your profiles, will they think your presentation is polished? Will they feel your page shows signs of an upward trajectory in your literary accomplishments?

In this workshop, learn why curating your online presence is so crucial, and get down to the work of fashioning new—or redesigning current—profiles in a supportive hands-on environment. This workshop will focus on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Shuffle, and Pinterest.
This class will meet on Zoom. Registered students, please contact the instructor directly for Zoom details.
Lyzette Wanzer’s work appears in over 25 literary journals and books, and she is a contributor to The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie), The Naked Truth, Essay Daily, and San Francisco University High School Journal. A three-time San Francisco Arts Commission and Center for Cultural Innovation grant recipient, Lyzette serves as Judge for the Soul-making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category. She is currently helming an essay anthology entitled Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative.
Contact: AuthorLyzetteWanzer@LyzetteWanzerMFA.com
Number of sessions: 6
Dates: Wednesdays, October 21, 28; November 4, 11, 18 (no class November 25); December 2
Time: 5:30 – 8:00pm Pacific Time
Course fee: $330

Get Lit #65 (Music by: TBA)
2020-10-20 19:00 - 21:30 | Ale Industries, 3096 E 10th Street, Oakland, CA, 94601, United States
12–15 writers reading new work + live music + beer made on site + tacos just down the street: pure magical Get Litness.
We’re headed into our 5th consecutive year at Ale Industries as we celebrate writers taking risks and reading never-before-read work (rough drafts/debuts) within a 3-minute time limit + live music. All ages are welcome. Emceed by Abe Becker.
Doors open at 7:00 PM; show starts at 7:30 PM sharp! Suggested donations of $10-25 will be kindly requested at the door, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds (NOTAFLOF). Donate ahead of time via the Eventbrite ticket link on this event!
Get beer. Get tacos. Get lit.
This month’s performers: TBA
Music by: TBA
Nomadic Press Safe Space Statement
White supremacy and white supremacist-capitalist values permeate this country, including every state, county, city, and political persuasion. This includes the Bay Area. Illustrations of this range from the more obvious neo-nazi hate groups to all-white reading lineups, white terrorist shootings to labeling racial equity work in the literary community as censorship, mass incarceration to the voices most often published. Nomadic Press unequivocally stands against all iterations of white supremacy.
We are works in progress, continually doing the work of internally dismantling white supremacist values that have been inherited by virtue of being in the US. Simultaneous with this internal work, Nomadic Press utilizes a racial equity lense (as proposed by Race Forward) to dismantle white supremacy within publishing and the literary communities in which we work. We are not perfect, and we are always trying to be better.
Nomadic Press events are active, real-time safe spaces for those who have been intentionally silenced and marginalized, and we will work to ensure that the marginalized continue to take their rightful place in our communities.
Direct and timely non-violent communication and de-escalation techniques will be utilized to privately call in instances of racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, or misogyny whether in the content of one’s reading or in one’s interactions with members of the community. If, after being called in privately for a mediation, a community member is unwilling to acknowledge and address the harm they have caused, we will protect the safety of this space by revoking a reader’s access to the microphone. We encourage community members to come to us if someone has violated these guidelines away from the microphone. If the situation warrants (i. e., instances of sexual predation, violence, or threats of violence), we will make the information public to inform our communities of the present danger.
We are communities in progress. We must be better, always, and we ask that we work together to ensure that the safety of our most vulnerable members is prioritized above all else.
Read more about our safe space process here: www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess
Poster by: Jevohn Tyler Newsome

A Witch In Time by Constance Sayers | GGP Online Book Club
2020-10-20 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Constance Sayer’s new novel, A WITCH IN TIME.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86098354351.
You can order a copy in hardcover at http://bit.ly/ggpWitchInTime, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/WitchInTimeAB.
Staff Reviews

The PERFECT diversion for the times we’re living in!
— Kathleen

Description

A witch is cursed to relive a doomed love affair through many lifetimes, as both troubled muse and frustrated artist, in this haunting debut novel.

Helen Lambert has lived several lives-a young piano virtuoso in 1890s Paris, an actress in 1930’s Hollywood, a rock star in 1970s Los Angeles — only she doesn’t know it. Until she meets a strange man who claims he’s watched over her for centuries, bound to her from the beginning.

At first, Helen doesn’t believe him. Her life is as normal as any other modern career woman’s. Then she begins having vivid dreams about ill-fated love and lives cut short.

Caught in a curse, Helen will be forced to relive the same tragic events that ruined her previous lives. But with each rebirth, she’s developed uncanny powers. And as the most powerful version of herself, Helen must find a way to break the curse before her time runs out.

A Witch in Time is a bewitching tale of passion, reincarnation and magic perfect for fans of A Secret History of Witches and Outlander.
About the Author

Constance Sayers received her MA in English from George Mason University and her BA in writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a media executive at Atlantic Media. She has been twice named to Folio’s list of “Top 100 Media People in America” and was included in their list of “Top Women in Media.” She is the co-founder of the Thoughtful Dog literary magazine and lives in Kensington, Maryland.

Praise For…

“A captivating tapestry of a tale, A Witch in Time weaves together the supernatural, historical fiction, and a humorous present day heroine, while traveling the macabre brambles of a dark curse-through lifetimes-with a compass to the heart.”—Gwendolyn Womack, bestselling author of The Fortune Teller & The Time Collector
“Fresh and original… a narrative rich in historical detail, brightened by flashes of humor, and filled with colorful characters and fascinating settings. A most rewarding read!”
—Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches

VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters presents David Livingstone Smith & David P. Barash / On Inhumanity
2020-10-20 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are very pleased to host David Livingstone Smith for his new book On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. He’ll be in conversation with David P. Barash, author of the just-out Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
You can order On Inhumanity here – we’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again-that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche-deeper than prejudice itself-leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. This book looks at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result.
“This brilliant and powerful book is a philosophically sophisticated and prophetically courageous treatment of dehumanization, especially in regard to race. It is timely and needful in our monstrous times! Don’t miss it!” – Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard University, author of Black Prophetic Fire
“This book is firm but gentle, wise but accessible. Its reflections on our worst habits of politics are phrased in such a way that they allow us to see what better habits might be.” – Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“On Inhumanity profoundly interrogates the processes that lead ordinary people to engage in horrific acts of violence against others. Tracing common themes across the Holocaust, lynching, and genocides, Smith identifies dehumanization—seeing human beings as subhuman creatures—as the central feature of these mass atrocities, as well as of everyday forms of racial oppression. Most compelling is that Smith refuses to conclude that dehumanization is our inevitable destiny and instead charts a course for resisting it. On Inhumanity brilliantly provides a chilling warning of repeating the past and a hopeful call to create a more humane future.” – Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, University of Pennsylvania, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century.
You can order On Inhumanity here – we’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He has written or edited nine books, including Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for nonfiction. His work has been translated into seven languages. David is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose publications are cited not only by other philosophers, but also by historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and anthropologists. He has been featured in several prime-time television documentaries, is often interviewed and cited in the national and international media, and was a guest at the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke about dehumanization and mass violence.
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. He’s written more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles on human and animal behavior, and has written, co-authored and edited 39 books, most recently Threats: intimidation and its discontents, which was just published on Oct. 1 by Oxford University Press.
You can order Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents here – we’re offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Gary Kamiya with Paul Madonna
2020-10-20 18:00 - 20:00
celebrating their new book
Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages through the Unknown City
published by Bloomsbury Books
From two bestselling, prizewinning, and critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco comes a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city.
—-
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register (link to be posted soon)
———–
(Click Here) to purchase book (link to be posted soon!)
———–
Gary Kamiya’s Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco was a #1 bestseller and an award winner. Now he joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya’s captivating narratives accompany Madonna’s masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure.
Paul Madonna’s atmospheric images will awe: be amazed by his astonishing wide-angle drawing for a jaw-dropping new perspective on the “crookedest street in the world.” And Kamiya’s engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers fascinating vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of “Dumpville,” the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump.
Handsome and irresistible–much like the city it chronicles–Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city.
Gary Kamiya is a writer, journalist, and historian. He is the author of the bestselling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco and the history column “Portals of the Past” (soon to be a podcast) which appears every other Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the groundbreaking web site Salon.com, and the former executive editor of San Francisco Magazine. He also offers unique walking tours by appointment and is available as a speaker about all things San Francisco. Visit: https://www.garykamiya.com

Paul Madonna is a San Francisco-based artist and writer. He is the creator of the comic series “All Over Coffee” and the author of four books, All Over Coffee, Everything is its own reward, On to the Next Dream, and Close Enough for the Angels. Paul’s work is about pairing elements: text and images; concept and craft; thought and beauty. Paul’s drawings and stories have appeared in numerous international books and journals as well as galleries and museums, including the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Oakland Museum of California. He is the Comics Editor for TheRumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice, even when not asked. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD Magazine (1993-94), for which he proudly received no money.
Visit: www.paulmadonna.com

Tiffany Shlain with Arianna Huffington - 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection (Virtual Event)
2020-10-20 17:00 - 19:00
Winner of The Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award • People’s New Book Worth Reading • Entrepreneur’s 12 Productivity and Time-Management Books to Read
“I’m won over to a day with people, not screens….I tried Shlain’s idea. I highly recommend it.” —The New York Times
“Tiffany Shlain is a modern-day prophet, brilliant and incredibly funny in equal measure…24/6 is timeless and timely wisdom.” — Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author
This eye-opening and “joy to read” (Rosabeth Moss Kanter, bestselling author of Confidence) book demonstrates how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul.
Do you wish you had more time to do what you love, think deeply, and focus on the people and things that matter most? By giving up screens one day a week for over a decade, Internet pioneer and renowned filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and her family have gained more time, productivity, connection, and presence.
Shlain takes us on a thought-provoking and entertaining journey through time and technology, introducing a strategy for flourishing in our 24/7 world. Drawn from the ancient ritual of Shabbat, living 24/6 can work for anyone from any background. With humor and wisdom, Shlain shares her story, offering the accessible lessons she has learned and providing a blueprint for how to do it yourself.
“Bolstered with fascinating and germane facts about neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and the history of the concept of a day of rest” (Publishers Weekly) 24/6 makes the case for incorporating this weekly reset into our 24/7 lives, issuing a call to rebalance ourselves and our society.
Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and founder of The Webby Awards. Tiffany’s films and work have received over eighty awards and distinctions including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation’s Genius: 100 Visions of the Future. NPR named her UC Berkeley address as one of its best commencement speeches and her films have premiered at top festivals including Sundance. She lectures worldwide on the relationship between technology and humanity. Find out more at TiffanyShlain.com and follow @TiffanyShlain.
Arianna Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, the founder of The Huffington Post, and the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. In 2016, she launched Thrive Global, a leading behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live by ending the collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success.

Writing White Fragility: An Editorial Discussion
2020-10-20 15:00 - 16:00 | online
Brandon Taylor, author of Booker Prize finalist Real Life and senior editor of Recommended Reading, talks to Ross Feeler about “Parisian Honeymoon,” a story about a man who discovers that his new wife is a bigot. They will discuss their editing process, and how to write anti-racist stories with racist characters without being morally didactic. Q&A to follow.

Deborah Madison, An Onion in My Pocket
2020-10-19 19:00 - 21:00
Acclaimed and bestselling culinary author Deborah Madison (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) will join us for a virtual event to share An Onion in My Pocket, her warm, bracingly honest memoir that gives us an insider’s look at the vegetarian movement.
Register for this Crowdcast event here!
An Onion in My Pocket is a true delight to read as she uncovers her love for all real foods, peeling off layer by layer like an onion, recounting her own personal, culinary, and gardening experiences, and her adventures with family and friends. It’s a most timely book and a joy to read.” —Lidia Bastianich
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!

Thanks to her beloved cookbooks and groundbreaking work as the chef at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, Deborah Madison, though not a vegetarian herself, has long been revered as this country’s leading authority on vegetables. She profoundly changed the way generations of Americans think about cooking with vegetables, helping to transform “vegetarian” from a dirty word into a mainstream way of eating. But before she became a household name, Madison spent almost twenty years as an ordained Buddhist priest, coming of age in the midst of counterculture San Francisco. In this charmingly intimate and refreshingly frank memoir, she tells her story—and with it the story of the vegetarian movement—for the very first time. From her childhood in Big Ag Northern California to working in the kitchen of the then-new Chez Panisse, and from the birth of food TV to the age of green markets everywhere, An Onion in My Pocket is as much the story of the evolution of American foodways as it is the memoir of the woman at the forefront. It is a deeply personal look at the rise of vegetable-forward cooking, and a manifesto for how to eat well.
DEBORAH MADISON, a graduate of UC Santa Cruz, is the award-winning author of fourteen cookbooks, including The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy. Her books have received four James Beard Foundation awards and five awards from the IACP; in 2016 she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame. She lives in New Mexico.

VIRTUAL: Rebecca Roanhorse in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders / Black Sun
2020-10-19 18:00 - 19:00
Booksmith hosts a virtual event with Rebecca Roanhorse for her new novel Black Sun. She’ll be in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders. Please join us!
** Please note **
> This is a free event, but RSVP is required. RSVP here.
> We’re happy to offer signed bookplates for the first 50 preorders! If you’d like a copy of Black Sun, you can purchase one here, below, or when completing your registration. We are currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn comes the first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.
A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun
In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.
Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.
Crafted with unforgettable characters, Rebecca Roanhorse has created an epic adventure exploring the decadence of power amidst the weight of history and the struggle of individuals swimming against the confines of society and their broken pasts in the most original series debut of the decade.

Rebecca Roanhorse is the New York Times bestselling author of Trail of Lightning, Storm of Locusts, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, and Race to the Sun. She has won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her fiction, and was the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Her forthcoming book, Black Sun, is out in October. She lives in New Mexico with her family.

Charlie Jane Anders is the former editor-in-chief of io9.com, the popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of the highly acclaimed science fiction novel, City in the Middle of the Night. Her debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a Hugo Award finalist. Her story, “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
To have a copy of Black Sun sent to your door, order here or add the book to your cart when you register.

Namwali Serpell with Carmen Maria Machado
2020-10-19 18:00 - 19:00
This event is online.
Exciting literary talent and the author behind 2019’s The Old Drift, Kepler’s is proud to present a discussion with Namwali Serpell for her new book Stranger Faces. This nonfiction essay in five parts covers pieces of culture as broad ranging as Joseph Merrick (the “elephant man”) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. With Stranger Faces, Serpell ask a key question: why do our actions towards one another hinge so much on a quick evaluation of looks? Serpell believes we assign too much meaning to a key physical feature—the face.
Part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Oakland’s Transit Books, this essay is equal parts savvy pop culture and college lecture hall-style, highly-researched thought experiment. The resulting book is a joy for deep thinkers. At its core is a question not only of philosophy, but of our shared humanity.
The face underlies our ideas about personhood. People relate to one another emotionally based on a specific kind of face; a theoretical “ideal” face, easy to recognize and categorize. In conversation with Carmen Maria Machado, Serpell unpacks the problem of this “ideal” in society. She turns our eyes toward faces which thwart quick recognition—disabled faces, racially ambiguous faces, digital faces, the faces of the dead—and imagines a new ethics by relating to these faces differently. The resulting conversation is an unusual look at the picture frame through which we see the world, and through which the world interprets us.
A winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer and Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the celebrated short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She is a recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize, a Lamda Literary Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award.
**Please consider joining with a book or donation to support the production of this event and make it possible for us to continue bringing you great conversations. Registration will close one hour before the event; please reserve your spot early to guarantee access, as registrations are limited.**

Poetry Mentorship with Brian Tierney
2020-10-19
This remote poetry “class” offers a unique opportunity for personal and intimate poetry instruction. Students will work with Brian Tierney one-on-one, via written correspondence over nine weeks, during which students will compile and send one “packet” every three weeks.

Each “packet” will consist of: 1) 3-5 poems for in-depth written feedback from Brian; 2) a small critical engagement with select reading assignments in poetry (which Brian will provide) and which will foster close-reading skills and inform creative practice; and 3) a small “letter” to be addressed to Brian, in which students can discuss their writing and creative life, and pose any relevant questions. Brian will review and respond to these packets in writing, for a total of three packet responses over nine weeks.
This mentorship opportunity is ideal for poets who are craving critical feedback that workshops can provide, but looking for a more comprehensive and focused engagement, where the specific concerns of one’s writing practice and poems can be addressed individually.
Intermediate writers and above recommended.
October 19 – December 18, All day

Conversations with Authors - Lan Cao (Virtual Event)
2020-10-18 16:00 - 18:00
Lan Cao’s dual first-person memoir, Family in Six Tones—co-authored with her American daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao—explores their complicated relationship, culture clash, and how they have grown both as individuals and as a family.
Lan is a Vietnamese American writer who left Saigon for the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is the author of two other novels, Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm. Both novels tell the stories of Vietnamese refugees in America, set against the Vietnam War and its traumatic aftermath for those who are left with its haunting legacy. In both novels, the war is told from a Vietnamese American perspective.
Lan is also a professor of law and has taught at Brooklyn Law School, Michigan Law School, Duke Law School, and William & Mary Law School. She is currently working at Chapman Law School in Orange, CA. She has written numerous articles on public international law, international trade, and rule of law development. Her book Culture in Law and Development: Nurturing Positive Change was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
Isabel Allende—novelist, feminist, and philanthropist—is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her hugely popular first novel, The House of the Spirits. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes.

Colossus: Home Reading
2020-10-17 21:30 - 23:30
Kelliane Parker
Susan Dambroff
Keith M. Gaboury
Daniel Ari
Elaine de Coligny
Phyllis Houseman
noemi rose (Gonzalez-Barillas)

PREMIERE Watch Party & Community Conversation
2020-10-17 17:00 - 20:00
Sponsored by the @Dimond Improvment Association and Oakland’s awesome @Oaktoberfest Street festival, the premiere event (on ZOOM & Vimeo) will include an exclusive viewing of the new animated film, a talk with the auteur, and a community conversation afterwards. Guests will receive an email with all the links the morning of the event.

Conversations with Authors - Pico Iyer (Virtual Event)
2020-10-17 16:00 - 18:00
Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan draws on his years of experience—his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections—to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. His Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells is a moving elegy on the passage of time and the passing of loved ones, including Pico’s Japanese father-in-law.
Pico is a British-born essayist and novelist, often known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications. He has travelled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing thirteen works of non-fiction and two novels. Since 1992 Pico has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.
Michael Shapiro writes about travel, food, entertainment, art, and environmental issues for magazines and newspapers. A former staff reporter and editor at newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s the author of The Creative Spark, a collection of interviews with many of the world’s most creative people, as well as A Sense of Place featuring conversations with leading travel writers. His stories appear in National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications.

Chinatown Pretty Book Talk
2020-10-17 13:00 - 14:00
Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns located in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver. Andria Lo and Valerie Luu have been interviewing and photographing Chinatown’s most fashionable elders on their blog and Instagram, Chinatown Pretty, since 2014.
RSVP to receive the Zoom link to participate in the live Q&A! The event will also be streamed via YouTube Live.
This event is presented by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center (OACC) in partnership with Eastwind Books of Berkeley.
—
About the Authors:
Valerie Luu is a writer and one-half of the Vietnamese pop-up restaurant Rice Paper Scissors. She lives in San Francisco.
Andria Lo is a freelance photographer whose work has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and Wired. She lives in Berkeley.
About the host:
Janie Chen was born and raised in Oakland where she spent most of her Sunday afternoons at Chinatown strolling through the markets and eating dim sum with her grandparents. She currently studies ethnic studies and sociology at UC Berkeley.
—
Follow the authors at @chinatownpretty (IG) and www.chinatownpretty.com.
Check out the book’s cool trailer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHNfV5RNDo
Pre-order your copy from Eastwind Books of Berkeley today!1

Poetry for Life with Katharine Harer
2020-10-17 10:00 - 13:00
“Poetry is a life companion,” says instructor Katharine Harer. “People come and go, pets die, places change, but poetry doesn’t go away because it’s already inside you. It keeps you company through life’s ups and downs and, above all, it connects you to yourself, guiding you through the maze of your thoughts and feelings.”
In this half-day class, we will read and discuss poems by writers such as Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Lucille Clifton and Li-Young Lee. We’ll talk about what “works” for us in the poems, and Katharine will identify some of the elements of craft poets use to help both the reader, and the poet, create connection. We’ll do several in-class writing activities, starting with freeing-up exercises and moving on to poetry writing prompts that will help you discover new ways to express what’s going on inside and outside of you.
When the class ends, you’ll take away some helpful tools and strategies for continuing to write poetry on your own as well as new drafts of poems that got their start in our class.

Life in Space: Translation of a Poetry Book by Galina Rymbu
2020-10-17 10:00 - 11:30
Globus Books is honored to present a new book LIFE IN SPACE, by Galina Rymbu (Галина Рымбу), translated by Joan Brooks and with the foreword by Eugene Ostashevsky, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in October 2020. Galina Rymbu will read her poetry and take part in the discussion, along with translators, poets and publishers Eric Amling of After Hours, Charles Bernstein, Ida Börjel, Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich. This event is in Russian and English will be held on Zoom on October 17, 2020, at 8 pm by Lviv time, 10.00 AM PST (SF), 1 pm EST (NY), 7 pm Berlin. There will be a limited number of seats; please contact Globus Books via FB messenger to register. We will also be live streaming the event on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobusBooksSF/videos) and later will share the edited version of the program.
Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy. Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work.
Life in Space is translated by Joan Brooks, and includes additional material translated by Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein and Kevin M.F. Platt, and Anastasiya Osipova (with Marijeta Bozovic, Catherine Ciepiela, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Pavel Khazanov, Mila Nazyrova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Val Vinokur, and Michael Wachtel), and a preface by Eugene Ostashevsky.
This book is a co-production with After Hours Editions, who published Rymbu’s first English-language chapbook, White Bread.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Galina Rymbu was born in 1990 in the city of Omsk (Siberia, Russia) and lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, as well as Gryoza, a website for contemporary poetry. She is the co-founder and co-curator of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize for emerging Russian-language poets. She has published three books of poems in Russia: Moving Space of the Revolution (Argo-Risk), Time of the Earth (kntxt), and Life in Space (NLO). Her essays on cinema, literature, and sexuality have appeared on Séance, Colta, Your Art, and other journals. English translations of her work have appeared in The White Review, Arc Poetry, Berlin Quarterly, Music & Literature, n+1, Asymptote, Powder Keg, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as in the chapbook White Bread (After Hours Editions). Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages and stand-alone collections of her work have been published in Latvian, Dutch, Swedish, and Romanian.
The bios of participants are forthcoming.
This program is hosted and produced by Zarina Zabrisky.
Глобус представляет перевод новой книги Галина Рымбу, “Жизнь в простанстве”, в переводе Джоан Брукв, вышедший в октябре 2020 в издательстве Ugly Duckling Presse, представляют Эрик Алминг, Чарльз Бернстин, Ида Бёрьел, Eugene Ostashevsky и Matvei Yankelevich. Галина Рымбу прочтет свои стихи и примет участие в обсуждении. Событие состоится в конференции Zoom 17 октября в 20.00 во Львиве, 10.00 в Сан-Франциско, 13.00 в Нью-Йорке, 19.00 в Берлине. Количество мест ограничено. Присылайте запрос на почту Глобуса в ФБ. Мы также будет транслировать live streaming на канале Глобуса в YouTube, и позже отредактированная программа будет размещена там же. (https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobusBooksSF/videos)
Биографии участников будут размещены здесь скоро!

ACCENTED | She Who Has No Master(s): Would That
2020-10-16 19:30 - 21:00
The She Who Has No Master(s) Collective will discuss their virtual exhibit “Would That” at the George S. & Dolores Dore Eccles Art Gallery
The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents ACCENTED: Dialogues in Diaspora , a virtual series of programs that will feature a variety of writers, poets, artists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural producers from the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora.
—
This installation of ACCENTED: Dialogues in Diaspora will be Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 7:30pm PST , hosted by the She Who Has No Master(s) Collective, featuring Dao Strom, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Sophia Terazawa, Vi Khi Nao, and Vina Vo. The conversation will center around the collective’s ongoing virtual exhibit in collaboration with Salt Lake City Community College and the George S. & Dolores Dore Eccles Art Gallery.
She Who Has No Master(s) : Would That gathers into poetic concert the voices of: Angie Chau / Lan Duong / Vi Khi Nao / Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen / Diana Khoi Nguyen / Hoa Nguyen / Isabelle Thuy Pelaud / Aimee Phan / Abbigail N. Rosewood / Dao Strom / Sophia Terazawa / Stacey Tran / Julie Thi Underhill
As women/womxn of the Vietnamese diaspora, our bodies hold many would thats: hungers, silences, absences, wonder(ings)s, and wound(er)ings. There are many things we might wonder would that be, would that have been, would we be—other/not Other(ed) than we are or have been? However, in the Vietnamese language—which we stem from but here do not write in—there is no such thing as the subjective tense, which, if it is to be conveyed in Vietnamese must rely on the context—the surrounding environment—of its adjoining words; what surrounds the action or description places it in or out of time. Which may be to say, what surrounds us is what places us in relation to: history, inheritance, the present, possible futures. We have migrated through time and across geographies, and time and contexts in varying ways have migrated with and within us. As bodies, we know ourselves to be repositories of no-longer-present actions and events, of many layers of witness and memory, of inheritances both evident and abstract, of potential futures too—desires, fears, unknowns. But what if we dis-place our (kn)own bodies from the seeable backgrounds, and what if we re-make those bodies? What if we absent our enfigured selves and ask you instead to (learn to) read anew the spaces left behind? This exhibit explores those spaces of the self, and self-conception/s, and challenges how you will read us, how you will see us, as a cohesive yet collective, diasporic, multi-voiced, Vietnamese-feminine descended entity.
About the Guests:
DAO STROM is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015), and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003). She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, Literary Arts, RACC, NEA, and others. She is co-founder of the art collective, She Who Has No Master(s).
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes. In addition to winning the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of two chapbooks: I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona, and her favorite color is purple.
VI KHI NAO is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative art and writing process this project brings together voices of women/womxn writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. She Who Has No Master(s) initiated in 2015 as a group of Vietnamese women writers (and we include in this designation: cis, queer, trans, nonbinary) who in coming together aim to express the diversity and complexity of our diasporic experiences and perspectives. This collective-collaborative process roots itself in the literary art form, but expresses the literary in hybrid and multiple modalities to create “multi-voice” and hybrid-poetic artworks. Each piece and/or series will always engage different formations and numbers of “voices” with the belief that this poly-vocality, while honoring the nuances of individual visions and beings, also expresses the dynamic plurality and connectivity that exists within our diaspora. // She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).
About the Host:
Vina Vo is a writer, storyteller, community building consultant and facilitator living in the Bay Area. She is the co-editor of the anthology this is my body (Nomadic Press, 2019). She is consistently envisioning a world where people can create their way to freedom through her community work and also her work as co-founder of the Novalia Collective: novaliacollective.com
About the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network
DVAN is partnering with Eastwind Books of Berkeley for all book sales and shipping, and books from featured authors will be available on https://asiabookcenter.com for a discounted price.
All funds raised for ACCENTED will go towards supporting DVAN’s mission to promote voices and stories of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora and connect them to diasporic communities all over the globe.
This program is sponsored by the DVAN@SFSU Project of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.
For more information about the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) please visit our website at https://dvan.org or follow us on Instagram (@weare_dvan)
DVAN believes that the stories, imaginaries, and poetics of a thriving Vietnamese diaspora can unite our global community. Our mission is to celebrate and foster diasporic Vietnamese voices. DVAN presents nonfiction, fiction, and poetry to empower Vietnamese artists in the diaspora and to promote understanding and dialogue within our community, and with others. Our complex and diverse stories must be championed and passed on to current and future generations. We are refugees, immigrants, survivors, and descendants, and our stories must be heard.

Terry Tempest Williams
2020-10-16 19:00 - 21:00
Bestselling author Terry Tempest Williams joins us to discuss her lastest book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Picador).
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel. REGISTER HERE.
About Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Terry Tempest Williams’s fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?”
We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument—sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which “oil rigs light up the horizon.” And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.
These essays are Williams’s call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory—emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.
Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone.
About Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; and When Women Were Birds, among other books. Her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah.

THE RACKET : TOTAL RECALL w/ Héctor Tobar
2020-10-16 19:00 - 20:30 | ZOOOM
THE RACKET READING SERIES:
TOTAL RECALL w/ HECTOR TOBAR
ZOOM LINK TO COME!
We’re doing a weekly reading series.
And this week, oooooh weeee, are we excited. Hector Tobar – author of Deep Down Dark and The Last Great Road Bum and much, much more – is joining us for TOTAL RECALL. It’ll be a night of nostalgic, memory, tricks of memory, not being able to remember things and so on and so on.
Doors @ 7:00PM. Show @ 7:15PM.
LINK TO COME.

THE READERS (for now):
Héctor Tobar
Sage Curtis
Claire Calderón
Danielle Truppi

Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic
2020-10-15 20:00 - 22:00 | Nomadic Press/Fairmount, 111 Fairmount Ave, Oakland, CA, 94611
A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic that happens every third Thursday (unless otherwise noted) in “The Chapel” at Nomadic Press. Decolonized beats provided by the one-and-only L7. Hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.
This month’s features are TBA.
Donations will be kindly requested to help pay the features and cover the cost of the space.
The 10-slot open mic list opens at 7:30 PM and fills up pretty quick so if you plan on reading get there early
Free parking in the back of the building and the closest BART station is 19th Street BART in Oakland (about a 15-minute walk straight down Broadway).

Susan Wiggs Discussing The Lost and Found Bookshop | Virtual Author Chat on Zoom
2020-10-15 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for an online discussion with author Susan Wiggs discussing her new novel, THE LOST AND FOUND BOOKSHOP.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87385059906.
(Order your copy of THE LOST AND FOUND BOOKSHOP at https://bit.ly/GGPLostFound, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at https://bit.ly/LostFoundAB.)
Staff Reviews

I really loved THE LOST AND FOUND BOOKSHOP by Susan Wiggs!
It resonated with me on several levels!
1. Natalie inherits the book store after her mother dies unexpectedly. I inherited GGP fifteen years ago when my friend Debi Echlin died unexpectedly.
2. She moved down from Sonoma and so did I.
3. And like Natalie, I discovered the book store was everything I never knew I wanted and, or, fundamentally needed.
4. She discovered the book store really belonged to the community, she was lucky enough to get to be it’s steward-I’ve learned the same lesson!
5. She also discovers in order to have an awesome book store you need to surround yourself with the best staff, which I can say I’m lucky to have the BEST staff!
Throw in financial challenges, a few good men, a long lost book and a store full of hand sellers and you have the perfect summer read!
— Kathleen

July 2020 Indie Next List

“This is an absolutely splendid novel that spoke volumes to me. You have a girl who experiences a tragedy that leads to a better life, despite issues and hardship along the way, and a guy right in front of her who is perfect for her though she assumes he is not. I highlighted so many passages in this book to savor and remember. This is a perfect story for bookstore lovers and lovers of books.”
— Patty Reed, Ferguson Books & More, Grand Forks, ND
Description

“A wonderful exploration of the past and the future and, most importantly, of what it means to be present in the here and now. Full of the love of words, the love of family, and the love of falling in love, The Lost and Found Bookshop is a big-hearted gem of a novel that will satisfy and entertain readers from all walks of life. Lovely!”—Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing In The Rain
In this thought-provoking, wise and emotionally rich novel, New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs explores the meaning of happiness, trust, and faith in oneself as she asks the question, “If you had to start over, what would you do and who would you be?”
There is a book for everything . . .
Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly the things she was worrying about.
In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative—not counting her scoundrel father.
But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing. There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do whatever it takes to make his final years happy. Besides, she loves the store and its books provide welcome solace for her overwhelming grief.
After she moves into the small studio apartment above the shop, Natalie carries out her grandfather’s request and hires contractor Peach Gallagher to do the necessary and ongoing repairs. His young daughter, Dorothy, also becomes a regular at the store, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works.
To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart.

About the Author

Susan Wiggs’s life is all about family, friends…and fiction. She lives at the water’s edge on an island in Puget Sound, and in good weather, she commutes to her writers’ group in a 21-foot motorboat. She’s been featured in the national media, including NPR, PRI, and USA Today, has given programs for the US Embassies in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and is a popular speaker locally, nationally, internationally, and on the high seas.
From the very start, her writings have illuminated the everyday dramas of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. Her books celebrate the power of love, the timeless bonds of family and the fascinating nuances of human nature. Today, she is an international best-selling, award-winning author, with millions of copies of her books in print in numerous countries and languages. According to Publishers Weekly, Wiggs writes with “refreshingly honest emotion,” and the Salem Statesman Journal adds that she is “one of our best observers of stories of the heart [who] knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.” Booklist characterizes her books as “real and true and unforgettable.”
Her novels have appeared in the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have captured readers’ hearts around the globe with translations into more than 20 languages and 30 countries. She is a three-time winner of the RITA Award,. Her recent novel, The Apple Orchard, is currently being made into a film, and The Lakeshore Chronicles has been optioned for adaptation into a series.
The author is a former teacher, a Harvard graduate, an avid hiker, an amateur photographer, a good skier and terrible golfer, yet her favorite form of exercise is curling up with a good book. She lives on an island in Puget Sound, where she divides her time between sleeping and waking.

Hugh Raffles In conversation with Stephen Sparks about The Book of Unconformities
2020-10-15 19:00 - 21:00
Hugh Raffles is joined in conversation by the bookstore’s Stephen Sparks to discuss The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (Pantheon).
Visit our Crowdcast channel to register for this event.
About The Book of Unconformities
When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own.
A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897.
As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.
“A spellbinding time travelogue . . . Raffles’s dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in metamorphic rock . . . Mesmerizing.” —Harpers Magazine
About Hugh Raffles
Hugh Raffles is the author of Insectopedia, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and of In Amazonia: A Natural History which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Granta, Orion, and The New York Times, and he is the recipientof the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.

San Francisco's Chinatown- Dick Evans and Kathy Chin Leong in conversation with Ben Fong Torres
2020-10-15 19:00 - 20:00 | online
San Francisco’s Chinatown is the third in a series of contemporary documentary photography books by San Francisco resident and photographer Dick Evans – following his initial book in 2014 of Haight Ashbury and his 2017 award winning book on the The Mission. His approach in each case has been to develop an in-depth understanding of each neighborhood through close collaboration with leading non-profits, community organizations, artists and local businesses. In this book he collaborates with freelance writer Kathy Chin Leong, who has conducted over 100 interviews in the course of writing the text, captions and sidebar stories that provide context to the images. Dick Evans and Kathy Chin Leong will be in conversation with Ben Fong-Torres, author and journalist.
All revenue from book sales will be donated to collaborating non-profit organizations.
Dick Evans is a San Francisco–based photographer with an interest in documenting the colorful and rapidly changing neighborhoods of the city. Born into a ranching family in Eugene, Oregon, he graduated as an engineer from Oregon State University and subsequently obtained a master’s in management from Stanford. He has spent his fifty-year career in the global metals sector, living in five countries and multiple locations in Africa, Europe, and North America. It was during these travels that he developed an appreciation for the diversity and richness of different cultures—both global and local—and an interest in documentary photography.
Kathy Chin Leong is an award-winning journalist with articles published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Books, Sunset Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. As a second-generation ABC (American-born Chinese), she grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset district, and spent nearly every weekend in Chinatown visiting her grandmother and helping her mother shop for groceries. While she has travelled the globe to Lebanon, France, Thailand, and Canada, rediscovering her Chinatown roots through collaboration on this book has been a journey of a lifetime. Kathy lives in Sunnyvale, California with her devoted husband Frank Leong Jr. and is the proud mother of two grown children, Gwendolyn and Aaron.
Ben Fong-Torres began contributing to Rolling Stone in spring 1968, just months after it began. In over a decade there, he became senior editor and wrote more than 30 cover stories. He was portrayed in Almost Famous. Ben also is a broadcaster, from KSAN in the ‘70s to Moonalice Radio today and has won 5 Emmys for co-anchoring the Chinese New Year Parade on KTVU. He is the author of a dozen books, including his best-selling memoir, The Rice Room.
Connect
San Francisco’s Chinatown the book – Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Heyday Books – Website | Twitter | Instagram
Kathy Chin Leong – Instagram | Facebook
Ben Fong-Torres – Website
Zoom Reservation
SFPL YouTube Live
–

The Memoir of Childhood: Memoir Workshop with Tommy Mouton
2020-10-15 18:00 - 20:00
We understand the sheer power of our respective childhood and adolescent memories. But how can we harness this power to propel a narrative as well as capture a reader’s attention?
In this four-week extensive workshop, we will delve into the basic psychology of memories and their stages, memory and imagination, image and feeling, “emotional truth versus factual truth,” character and voice, form and meaning—in an attempt to begin drafting (and/or revising) a memoir that is steeped in childhood/adolescent memories as its creative foundation.
Whether your childhood/adolescent memories are heartbreaking or ironically humorous, whether you are a seasoned writer or a novice, this workshop’s weekly writing exercises, formal and informal workshops, and readings (Bell Hooks, Annie Dillard, Natasha Trethewey, Jeannette Walls, Jesmyn Ward, among others) will leave you inspired and invigorated.
So, come and write (and share) your childhood/adolescent memories with us, their joys, failures, and mysteries.

Dates: 4 Thursdays, October 15 – November 5
Time: 6 – 8 pm
Instructor: Tommy Mouton
​Ages: Adult
​Genre: Nonfiction
​Price: $245

C PAM ZHANG IN CONVERSATION WITH CBC HOST JOHN FREEMAN
2020-10-15 17:00 - 18:00
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
BY C PAM ZHANG

How the gold rush hasn’t been the subject of better novels is a question worth putting to West Coast literature. To grow up in California in the 1980s was to encounter this period in history books as one of heroism and hucksterism, as if 300,000 people coming to a state in search of gold over five years—that would be 120 million in today’s population—wasn’t more than a rush. These were not tourists. Many became permanent residents who dug in, created camps, and drove Indigenous people from their land. The ’49ers permanently altered the state’s landscape and—with more than half of them coming from outside the United States—its demographics. Nearly 30,000 arrived from China, bringing with them history and culture and food and family. They were often met by “frontier justice,” as it was euphemistically called. What couldn’t be done by outright force was eventually upheld by law, with legislation directly aimed at Chinese migrants to make prospecting prohibitively expensive or shut down immigration for them all together.
At last there is a novel that looks right into this history and imagines it from within. It might be a stretch to call it California’s Beloved, but C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold moves with the same rough magic and has a similar relationship to history as Toni Morrison’s haunted and beautiful book. Only here history, too, becomes a ghost. We never hear the word “California” in this novel, and it’s nearly 100 pages before the word “gold” is seen. Still, by tilting this period through a refractive lens, Zhang has powerfully evoked the precarious existence many of its residents lived and allows us to inhabit the bodies of two girls: Lucy, 12, and Sam, who is 11. They’ve lost their mother, Ma, already, and their father, Ba, soon follows. Broke, hungry, and aware that their situation is not safe, the sisters saddle up a stolen horse and carry their father’s body on the run. Their behavior quickly begins to map onto the skittery emigration pattern their father charted when he brought them to these hills with dreams of gold, land, a farm, good living. That was before drink and miner brutality and grief waylaid him. Sam has a lot of her father in her; she learns to sneak out and prospect at a young age and is ready for a fight. She wants to take chances. Lucy is cautious, eager to find official paths, to seek approval—even from a dubious East Coast teacher writing a book about people like her family. Lucy hasn’t forgone risk; she simply takes different ones.
Zhang takes a chance herself here, wading into the well-trod territory of the western, but she’s a writer of immense poise. Having grown up and lived in 13 cities, she wrote the first draft of this novel in Bangkok, far away from the golden hills where the book unfolds. Clearly her mind’s eye is lucid, though. She writes lean but sensual prose that vividly conjures the stench and muck and wonder of traveling across a landscape that has been brutally used. The moon hangs high on cold nights. In Zhang’s universe, buffalo might still be alive somewhere, and tigers roam those hills. Each day, the girls find something new, a dying if still hardy prospector needing help one day, a dried-up salt lake where they can preserve their father on another. Zhang creates an epic tale in a small space; her story reaches back and back and then yokes forward the lives Ma and Ba lived before, the incredible journeys they underwent so they could have the privilege of living on the precarious edge of a nearly fictional enterprise. What is gold anyway? Movingly, we hear in flashback how the girls’ father ordered and told the world for his daughters, in fables that move like water. As the sisters come of age in the shadow of this inheritance, the past as evanescent as California rain, Zhang allows us to appreciate how hard it is for them not to be driven one way or the other. Do they move toward great gambles, and, if it’s required, violence, or toward finding ways to know and contain official history, so that they might write it themselves? Taking a risk, as Colson Whitehead did in The Underground Railroad, to imagine history as even stranger than we allow, C Pam Zhang has proved it’s possible to do both.
—John Freeman
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s (the latest issue of which is devoted to California), the author of several books, including The Park, and the host of Alta’s new California Book Club. He last wrote for Alta about establishing a new California curriculum.
Sign up to hear Freeman discuss How Much of These Hills Is Gold with C Pam Zhang at the kickoff event for Alta’s California Book Club, on Thursday, October 15, at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

VIRTUAL: Cory Doctorow / Attack Surface
2020-10-15 17:00 - 18:00
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters host a virtual event with Cory Doctorow for his new book Attack Surface, a standalone novel set in the world of New York Times bestsellers Little Brother and Homeland. Please join us!
Please note:
> This is a free virtual event, but RSVP is required.
> We have an early start time of 5pm PST.

Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she’d chosen the winning side.
In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for an transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene.
Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable.
When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family — including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists — Masha realizes she has to choose.
And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

Cory Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Locus, and many other publications. His award-winning novel Little Brother was a New York Times bestseller, as is its sequel, Homeland. His novella collection Radicalized was a CBC Best Fiction of 2019 selection. Born and raised in Canada, he lives with his family in Los Angeles.
Please note:
> This is a free, all-ages event but RSVP is required.
> To have Attack Surface shipped to your door, order here.
