Litseen

Chaney Kwak in conversation with Oscar Villalon
2021-08-03 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online, CA, United States
Cheaney Kwak, author, and Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA will discuss writing, travel, near death experiences and Kwak’s debut novel.
YouTube Live
The Passenger How A Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies From A Sinking Ship is neither straight reported nonfiction, nor straight memoir: it’s a compelling mix of the two that’s both harrowing in its closely reported details and laugh out loud funny in its searing honesty. By the end you’ll agree, you couldn’t ask for a better guide to twenty -seven unforgettable hours aboard a maybe-sinking-ship than Chaney Kwak. – Joshua Bodwell, Editorial Director
Chaney Kwak has written for publications such as The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and a number of National Geographic anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Zyzzyva, Catamaran Literary Review, Gertrude and other literary journals, earning a special mention from the Pushcart Prize.
A winner of the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Awards, Kwak has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Brown Handler Resident.
He teaches nonfiction writing at the Stanford Continuing Studies program.
Oscar Villalon is the managing editor of ZYZZYVA. His writing has been published in several publications, including Freeman’s, Zocalo, The Believer and Lit Hub. He lives in San Francisco.

Connect
Chaney Kwak – Website | Instagram | Twitter
Oscar Villalon – Twitter
ZYZZYVA – Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Author Readings & Lectures

Engage with your favorite writers and discover your next read.

2021 Summer Stride

Summer Stride is the Library’s annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Read and learn with the Library all summer long.

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
2021-08-03 18:00 - 20:00
Presented by City Lights in conjunction with Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, Do No Harm Coalition, Health Justice Commons, and San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibilty

Rupa Marya, Raj Patel and friends
celebrate the launch of their new book
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
published by Farrar Strauss Giroux

INFLAMED reveals the links between health and structural injustices–and to offer a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our world.
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required
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(CLICK HERE) to register. (link to be posted soon!)
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon!)
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The coronavirus pandemic and the shocking racial disparities in its impact. The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body: our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, however, this groundbreaking book illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food that we eat, to the air that we breathe, and to the diversity of microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain development to our immune system. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the trauma endured by our ancestors. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.
Raj Patel, renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonization is to heal what has been divided, reestablishing our relationship to the earth and to each other. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization, the stories of Marya’s work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies but the world.
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, mother, and composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where she practices and teaches Internal Medicine. Her research examines the health impacts of social systems, from agriculture to policing. She is a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. She is the composer and frontwoman for the band Rupa & the April Fishes whose music was described by legend Gil Scott Heron as “Liberation Music.”
Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s department of nutrition, and a Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, he is completing a film on the global food system, and is a leading thinker and organizer around the Green New Deal. He serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and has advised governments on causes and solutions to crises of sustainability worldwide.

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Virtual Event: David Hoon Kim and Kevin Brockmeier
2021-08-03 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Tuesday, August 3 at 6pm PT when David Hoon Kim discusses his debut novel, Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost, with Kevin Brockmeier on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_c6yfSwmBTWa9HbXpzeRuvA
About Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost
In a strangely distorted Paris, a Japanese adoptee is haunted by the woman he once loved.
When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she’s already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik Blatand, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelgänger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of medical students.
Henrik’s inquiry expands beyond Fumiko’s seclusion and death, across the absurd, entropic streets of Paris and the figures that wander them, from a jaded group of Korean expats, to an eccentric French widow, to the indelible woman whom Henrik finds sitting in his place on a train. It drives him into the shadowy corners of his past, where his adoptive Danish parents raised him in a house without mirrors. And it mounts to a charged intimacy shared with his best friend’s precocious daughter, who may be haunted herself.
David Hoon Kim’s debut is a transgressive, darkly comic novel of becoming lost and found in translation. With each successive, echoic chapter, Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost plunges us more deeply beneath the surface of things, to the displacement, exile, grief, and desire that hide in plain sight.
About David Hoon Kim
David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Stegner Program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d’éternité, Le Sabord and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the MacDowell Colony, the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is his first book. He writes in English and in French.

Quiet Lightning / virtual literary mixtape curated by Rhea Dhanbhoora & Mahdis Marzooghian
2021-08-02 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
Quiet Lightning presents a virtual literary mixtape featuring all forms of writing, curated through a blind process by Rhea Dhanbhoora and Mahdis Marzooghian into a one-night only performance in two sets:
Set 1: Ashley Mayne, Amanda Spiller, Steven Gray, Courtney Arnold, D. E. La Valle, Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman, Melissa Flores Anderson, Rietta Parker, Andre Le Mont Wilson, Sarah Plummer, Ada Genavia
Set 2: Sheila Black, Lita Kurth, Colette Chien, Judit Hollos, Charlie Getter, Kate Oksas, Amanda Woodward, Cléo Charpantier, Vince Montague, Susana Praver-Perez, Becca Rose Hall, Mike Horan & Roger Topp
All selected authors will be paid and published in sPARKLE + bLINK 111, featuring cover art by Yerrie Choo!
Please note: this show is free and all ages (with mature content), but RSVP is required.
ABOUT FREE SHOWS
If you’re in a position to support us by making a donation please consider doing so! 100% of our proceeds go directly to local artists and independent businesses, and despite losing out on door monies we’ve decided to keep paying everyone! Thanks for doing what you can to invest in an equitable arts ecosystem. There are two easy ways to support Quiet Lightning:
Make a tax-deductible donation of any amount:
Paypal or Venmo
Or consider supporting us on Patreon!
ABOUT THE BOOKS
If you’d like to purchase the book you can do that for $10 + shipping here, or you can donate $15 or more to Quiet Lightning by Paypal or Venmo and we’ll send you sPARKLE & bLINK 109 + a surprise back issue.
A note about the books: if we don’t sell out before we print our next book, the price will go down to $5/copy. You can order most of our back issues here. You should also know: we make all of our books available to read and watch for free. For virtual events we are printing 75 books/show. 100% of all proceeds, donations or not, go toward local artists and independent businesses.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Rhea Dhanbhoora lives and writes in Upstate NY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including Five on the Fifth, Chronogram, Connecticut Mag, Artsy, Broccoli Mag, sPARKLE & bLINK, and JMWW. She’s currently a freelance writer and editor, reads for literary magazines, is on the Board for Quiet Lightning, and is working on several creative projects, among which is a linked collection about women, based in the underrepresented Parsi Zoroastrian diaspora. Her chapbook, “Sandalwood-Scented Skeletons,” is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. Follow her work at rheadhanbhoora.com.
Mahdis Marzooghian is cofounder and co-Editor-in-Chief of Five on the Fifth. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Screen Fervor. She has a master’s degree in Professional Writing from Towson University and is currently a financial news editor at Money Map Press, based in Baltimore. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Welter Literary Journal, Mud Season Review, Adirondack Review, BULL Fiction Magazine, and Lunch Ticket. Additionally, her short essay, “Collection Connection,” was published in the 2012 series anthology, Miso for Life: A Melting Pot of Thoughts. Mahdis recently finished her debut novel, for which she is currently seeking representation.
Can’t make it? The show will be archived in video and full text, like all of our previous readings! Find them, along with a daily calendar of Bay Area literary events + more, @ Litseen.
Not on our mailing list yet? Sign up for email updates of upcoming Quiet Lightning events and calls for submissions.
Featured images by Yerrie Choo, featured artist for sPARKLE & bLINK 111

Online Intensive Literary Seminar Series - Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
2021-08-02 17:00 - 18:30
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
If you have been looking for a novel that is as sumptuous as Downton Abbey or The Crown—and as smart and satirical as John Oliver, read Brideshead Revisited with us! Named one of the top 100 novels in English by Modern Library, Time, Newsweek and the BBC, Waugh’s magnum opus is the most delicious of escapes.
The work is nostalgic in the best of ways, while also tackling large issues such as religion, classism and sexuality. The novel is amazing enough but as a bonus, the Jeremy Irons TV adaptation (from 1981!) really holds up. Join us for a summer in the English countryside!
Join Kimberly Ford, for this two-part seminar series on Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited. We will be hosting this two-part series on the following dates:
Monday, August 2 – 5:00-6:30 pm
Monday, August 9 – 5:00-6:30 pm
There are several ticket options that include books with purchase, books shipped to home, books picked up at Kepler’s Books or seminar only. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor all shipping costs will be waived for the literary seminars. The books should be read prior to the meeting date.

Poets@Play!
2021-08-01 13:00 - 16:00 | online, CA, United States
After a long absence, Poets@Play is returning! For those not familiar with it, P@P is an informal writing group that meets at the Edwin Markham House at History Park, which is operated by Poetry Center San José.

We plan to meet on the first Sunday afternoon of the month, though there will be months when we do not meet, or switch to another day. We take time to write and share whatever poetry we are working on. The option of coming to just listen is there also.

We are coming back with a cautious approach. We will be requiring masks for all attendees, even those who have been fully vaccinated against SARS-Cov-2. Also we will be limiting this at first to only 7 attendees, including the leader, so that we can provide some level of social distancing. We will not be providing tea/coffee beverage service or snacks; you may bring your own if you wish.

We are making this by RSVP for now, so that we can ensure the 7-person limit. The theme is open this time. You could choose to do some writing/revising about our pandemic experience of the past 16 months, or select something else entirely.

Sunday, August 1, 2021, 1 to 4 pm.
Please send a message to poetsatplay@pcsj.org if you would like to attend, by Friday, July 30.

Writing from the Heart w/ Dr. PELLER MARION
2021-07-31 08:00 - 17:00 | online, CA, United States
An adventurous mix of writing and some art too
This drop-in and on-going Zoom group requires no experience. All you need to bring is a notebook and a pen. Peller will bring the instruction, inspiration, safe space, writing and art prompts.

Find your writing voice.
Dive into your creativity.
Deepen your writing practice.
Share your stories, memories, and inspirations.
Get steady positive affirmation for your work in a community of passionate writers.

First and and fourth Wednesdays each month
1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Contact facilitator Peller Marion via email to get the zoom link
pellermarion@gmail.com
Donations accepted to O’Hanlon Center for the Arts
616 Throckmorton Avenue• Mill Valley• Ca.• 94941

Karla Huebner, Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic
2021-07-31 08:00 - 17:00 | online, CA, United States
Register

Karla Huebner discusses her new book on the surrealist artist Toyen.
Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work.
Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.
YouTube Live
Karla Huebner is a professor of Art History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, whose research focuses on Czech modernism, feminism and gender, surrealism, and visual culture.
Connect – Website | Instagram | Blog | Facebook

Author Readings & Lectures

Engage with your favorite writers and discover your next read.

Art, Architecture & Photography

Learn from world-class designers, artists and experts in their fields.

2021 Summer Stride

Summer Stride is the Library’s annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Read and learn with the Library all summer long.

This program is sponsored by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

ATTENDING PROGRAMS
Questions about the program or problems registering? Contact sfplcpp@sfpl.org. For accommodations (such as ASL interpretation or captioning), call (415) 557-4557 or contact accessibility@sfpl.org. Requesting at least 72 hours in advance will help ensure availability.

PUBLIC NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER
This program uses a third-party website link. By clicking on the third-party website link, you will leave SFPL’s website and enter a website not operated by SFPL. This service may collect personally identifying information about you, such as name, username, email address, and password. This service will treat the information it collects about you pursuant to its own privacy policy. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of each third-party website or service that you visit or use, including those third parties with whom you interact through our Library services. For more information about these third-party links, please see the section of SFPL’s Privacy Policy describing Links to Other Sites.
The views and opinions expressed in programs presented by groups unaffiliated with SFPL do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SFPL or the City.

Babylon Salon: Anna North, Vince Granata, Mia P. Manansala, Tonya M. Foster & Zoe Fitzgerald
2021-07-31 08:00 - 17:00
Babylon Salon presents a special
online performance
Saturday, September 11, 2021
5pm PST / 8pm EST

Zoom Registration coming soon

Anna North
(Outlawed; The Life and Death of Sophie Stark)
A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON BEST OF THE MONTH AND EDITOR’S PICK
“North’s knockout latest chronicles the travails of a midwife’s daughter who joins a group of female and nonbinary outlaws near the end of the 19th century . . . The characters’ struggles for gender nonconformity and LGBTQ rights are tenderly and beautifully conveyed. This feminist western parable is impossible to put down.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“2021 is already a year that could use a little joy. Here to provide some is the scrappy new feminist Western novel Outlawed . . . It’s an absolute romp and contains basically everything I want in a book: witchy nuns, heists, a marriage of convenience, and a midwife trying to build a bomb out of horse dung.” – Vox
Anna North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two previous novels,America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2016 . She has been a writer and editor at Jezebel,BuzzFeed, Salon, and the New York Times, and she is now a senior reporter at Vox. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn.
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Vince Granata
(Everything is Fine)
“Although he writes of an unimaginable family tragedy, Vincent Granata’s Everything is Fine reads like a testament to life itself. Suffused with emotional depth and intellectual inquiry, this is a writer pushing the very limits of what language and love can capture: the suffering, certainly, but more so the astonishing power of forgiveness and survival. This book will never leave you.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
Vince Granata received his BA in history from Yale University and his MFA in creative writing from American University. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation, and residencies from PLAYA and the MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and Fourth Genre, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2018.
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Tonya M. Foster
(A Swarm of Bees in High Court)
Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is an editor at Fence Magazine, and at The African-American Review. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Tonya is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ford and the Mellon Foundations, from NYFA; and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at the Macdowell colony. Her next collections are a cross-genre collection on New Orleans—A Mathematics of Chaos::Thingification (forthcoming from Ugly Presse 2021), and Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthestics, and surveillance. She is an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts.
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Mia P. Manansala
(Arsenic and Adobo)
Mia P. Manansala (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck – Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. She’s also a 2017 Pitch Wars alum and 2018-2020 mentor. Her debut novel, ARSENIC AND ADOBO, came out May 4, 2021 with Berkley/Penguin Random House and is the first in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series.
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with music by
Zoe Fitzgerald Carter
(Imperfect Endings; Waterlines)
“The questions that rise from her story are urgent, important and timely…sharply focused, engaged with essential ethical questions…the end of the book is so full of grace and acceptance that one might forget the memoir began with such urgent, roaring questions.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Zoe FitzGerald Carter is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Vogue. Imperfect Endings won first place in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s literary contest, was excerpted in O magazine and chosen as a finalist for the National MS Society’s Books for a Better Life Awards in the “Inspirational Memoir” category. It was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.
Zoe is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where she teaches memoir. She has also taught (and run) writing workshops from Hawaii to Vermont, and currently teaches memoir and songwriting at Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, CA. In the last couple of years, she’s been focusing on her career as a musician. Her first CD, Waiting for the Earthquake came out in 2017 and can be found on all the streaming platforms. Her new album, Waterlines, was released in 2021.
—
in partnership with our friends at
The Booksmith,
currently offering curbside pickup and in-person browsing
in their new location at
1727 Haight Street, San Francisco
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Free Admission!

Creative Writing Reading Series Jamil Jan Kochai
2021-07-31 08:00 - 17:00 | online, CA, United States
DATE & TIME:

Wednesday, November 3, 2021 – 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

LOCATION:
De La Salle Hall: Hagerty Lounge, 1928 St. Marys Road, Moraga, CA 94575
View a map and get directions.

DESCRIPTION:
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

ADD TO CALENDAR

Jennifer Jewell
2021-07-29 17:00 - 19:00
Jennifer Jewell joins us to celebrate the publication of Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press).
“One of the most inspiring compendiums of exquisitely landscaped gardens we’ve come across in years. Written by Jennifer Jewell and photographed by Caitlin Atkinson, the book is both poetic and practical and celebrates the diversity of garden design throughout the West.” —Sunset
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Under Western Skies
From windswept deserts to misty seaside hills and verdant valleys, the natural landscapes of the American West offer an astounding variety of climates for gardens. Under Western Skies reveals thirty-six of the most innovative designs—all embracing and celebrating the very soul of the land on which they grow.
For the gardeners featured here, nature is the ultimate inspiration rather than something to be dominated, and Under Western Skies shows the strong connection each garden has with its place. Packed with Atkinson’s stunning photographs and illuminated by Jewell’s deep interest in the relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit, Under Western Skies offers page after page of encouraging ingenuity and inventive design for passionate gardeners who call the West home.
About Jennifer Jewell
Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate. Since 2016, she has written and hosted the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place, a coproduction of North State Public Radio in Chico, California. Particularly interested in the intersections between gardens, the native plant environments around them, and human culture, she is the daughter of a garden- and floral-designing mother and a wildlife biologist father. Jennifer has been writing about gardening professionally since 1998, and her work has appeared in Gardens Illustrated, House & Garden, Natural Home, Old House Journal, Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, and Pacific Horticulture.

Matthew Specktor in conversation with Adam Pfahler
2021-07-28 18:00 - 20:00
Matthew Specktor and Adam Pfahler discuss
Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
by Matthew Specktor
published by Tin House
Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register.
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination.
Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives.
At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles. To learn more visit: www.matthewspecktor.com
Adam Pfahler is a founding member of the band Jawbreaker and owner of Blackball Records. He has produced and played on dozens of records over the past three decades. He has a handful of IMDB credits as “Self” but inexplicably no Wikipedia page. He is endorsed by Ludwig Drums, Paiste Cymbals, Promark Drumsticks and Evans Drumheads but still has to pay 30% of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. He is a fourth generation Angeleno and currently lives in San Francisco’s Mission District.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro | GGP Online Book Club
2021-07-27 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85239569569, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/KlaraSunHC, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/KlaraSunAB.
Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!
A magnificent new novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro—author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.
Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro’s books as “novels of great emotional force” and said he has “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Omar El Akkad
2021-07-27 18:00 - 20:00
reading from his new novel
What Strange Paradise
published by Alfred Knopf
From the widely acclaimed, best-selling author of American War: a new novel—beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving—that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required
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(CLICK HERE) to register.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book.
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More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
Praise for What Strange Paradise

“What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad just resuscitated my heart. This novel—following a boy who survives a refugee passage, and a girl whose homeland feels fractured—dares to unite us on the shore of shared human experience, and redefines hope in the face of despair. I want to read this book every single day. I want to live in a world where the beauty of strangers is a heartsong.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge
“It is one thing to put a human face on a migrant crisis and another to do so in so compelling a way that a reader simply cannot put your book down. I read this in one sitting, my heart pounding the whole way—in a strange paradise, you might say. Marvelous.”
—Gish Jen, author of The Resisters
“What an imaginative, touching, and necessary novel Omar El Akkad has brought to us. It reminds us of the human stories behind headlines and statistics, and gives us one of the most memorable children characters, whose story adds urgency and poignancy to that ‘awfully big adventure’ stated by Peter Pan.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Odd Salon + Context Travel: The Frozen North
2021-07-27 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
Journey to the (virtual) Arctic Circle, and a look at the science, culture, and history of exploration at the top of the world. The Arctic has long fascinated people from around the world. Learn how myth compares with reality through the experiences of an Arctic scientist and traveler.
For most people, the Arctic is a distant realm, full of unlikely creatures such as the narwhal as well as fur-clad hunters equally at home on ice floes as on open tundra. Nowadays, the Arctic also makes news for the rapid loss of sea ice and for the increasing development of resources and transportation routes. The changing Arctic affects the world’s weather and climate. Mineral development can disrupt traditional ways of life. China, Russia, and the United States vie for influence and opportunity in the far north. How do these stories intersect?
Henry P. Huntington earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Princeton University and his master’s and a doctorate in Polar Studies at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Eagle River, Alaska, where he works as an independent researcher and on Arctic Ocean conservation for Ocean Conservancy. Huntington’s research activities include reviewing the regulation of subsistence hunting in northern Alaska, documenting traditional ecological knowledge of marine mammals, examining Iñupiat Eskimo and Inuit knowledge and use of sea ice, and assessing the impacts of climate change on Arctic communities and Arctic marine mammals.
Tuesday, July 27
THE FROZEN NORTH: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCTIC WITH DR. HENRY HUNTINGTON
Online, via Zoom
This is part one of our four part collaboration with Context Travel, as a special Members & Fellows series. These private events are included for free for all current Odd Salon Members, Fellows. To join us: New members may join by purchasing either the four part series pass for $125, or purchase tickets here to join the membership and reserve a spot for this seminar only for our standard annual membership cost of $100.

ABOUT CONTEXT TRAVEL: Context Learning is a cultural education provider, connecting global scholars with lifelong learners. Founded in Rome in 2003, Context started as a tour operator for travelers seeking off-the-beaten-path experiences in the world’s cultural capitals, growing quickly to 20,000 tours a year across 70+ destinations. After COVID-19 halted travel operations, Context continued to expand, launching live, scholar-led seminars and courses presented online. What emerged was a thriving community of experts and learners keen to continue exploring, growing, and philosophizing, regardless of their location. To date we’ve covered thousands of topics ranging from Tuscany to Timbuktu, Caravaggio to Frida Kahlo, Ancient Rome to Brexit. Context strives to be the cultural center for lifelong learning, at-home, on the ground, and everywhere in between.
If you are not already familiar with the many wonders of Context Travel, we’d heartily encourage you to go forth and explore their virtual and real-world exploration offerings

+ GOOGLE CALENDAR+ ICAL EXPORT

Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros
2021-07-23 12:00 - 14:00
The Mesa Refuge and Point Reyes Books present Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros, who will discuss their new book, The Atlas of Disappearing Places (New Press).
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About The Atlas of Disappearing Places
Our planet is in peril. Seas are rising, oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, coasts are flooding, species are dying, and communities are faltering. Despite these dire circumstances, most of us don’t have a clear sense of how the interconnected crises in our ocean are affecting the climate system, food webs, coastal cities, and biodiversity, and which solutions can help us co-create a better future.
Through a rich combination of place-based storytelling, clear explanations of climate science and policy, and beautifully rendered maps that use a unique ink-on-dried-seaweed technique, The Atlas of Disappearing Places depicts twenty locations across the globe, from Shanghai and Antarctica to Houston and the Cook Islands. The authors describe four climate change impacts–changing chemistry, warming waters, strengthening storms, and rising seas–using the metaphor of the ocean as a body to draw parallels between natural systems and human systems.
Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now. Weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” for each place, this work considers both the serious consequences if we continue to pursue business as usual, and what we can do–from government policies to grassroots activism–to write a different, more hopeful story.
A beautiful work of art and an indispensable resource to learn more about the devastating consequences of the climate crisis–as well as possibilities for individual and collective action–The Atlas of Disappearing Places will engage and inspire readers on the most pressing issue of our time.
About the authors
Christina Conklin is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work investigates the intersection of natural systems and belief systems, often using the ocean as both site and metaphor. Her essays, exhibitions, and installations consider our cultural responses to the intersecting ecological and social crises of our time. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and has exhibited internationally. She is currently working with thought leaders and activists around the world to help communities create regenerative cultural systems. She lives with her husband and two children in Half Moon Bay, California.
Marina Psaros is a sustainability expert and has led climate action programs across public, private, and nonprofit organizations for over a decade. She is a co-author (with Christina Conklin) of The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis (The New Press) and one of the creators of The King Tides Project, an international community science and education initiative. An amateur cartographer and ocean advocate, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lisa Wells
2021-07-22 19:00 - 21:00
Poet and nonfiction writer Lisa Wells joins us to discuss her new book, Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World (FSG).
“We are living in an extreme moment, and one where it’s very hard to know what effective action looks like against crises of a scale we’ve not before encountered. These accounts of people trying to grapple with that reality are sometimes inspiring and often cautionary, and always a spur to thinking about how the rest of us might accomplish the most we can.”—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World

We find ourselves at the end of the world; how then shall we live?
Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities—outcasts and visionaries—on the margins of society.
Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in new ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.
Blending reportage, memoir, history, and philosophy, Wells opens up seemingly intractable questions about the damage we have done and how we might reckon with our inheritance. “Brilliant in its quest . . . [and] an essential document of our time” (Charles D’Ambrosio), Believers demands transformation: If the Earth is our home, if our home is being destroyed—how then shall we live?
About Lisa Wells
Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer from Portland, Oregon. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix (2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have been published by The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Believer, n+1, The Iowa Review, The Poetry Foundation, and others. She lives in Seattle and is an editor for The Volta and Letter Machine Editions.

Alka Joshi with Angie Coiro
2021-07-21 18:00 - 20:00
THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT.
Fans of The Henna Artist, rejoice! Kepler’s favorite and bestselling author Alka Joshi returns this summer with the exciting second installment of the Jaipur trilogy, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur.
Once more we return to the dazzling Pink City, where a now twenty-year-old Malik enters a Palace internship at Lakshmi’s arrangement. In the lush halls of the upper-class, Malik retains all his skill for subterfuge and careful observation… and the wealthy of Jaipur have plenty of secrets. When a cinema-building project at the palace goes horribly awry, Malik has the sense that something more than architecture is at play. Can he carefully untangle the intrigue behind the cinema’s failed opening night? With a rich tapestry of characters, including the charming new Nimmi, Alka Joshi has created another spellbinding novel.
The Secret Keeper of Jaipur offers the perfect, absorbing summer read, replete with politics, romance, and an exquisite sense of the vivid Pink City. And for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Joshi’s work, now is also the ideal time to start. A talented local literary favorite, Joshi’s star is on a meteoric rise— with her 2020 bestselling debut, The Henna Artist, already in development for a television series.

Don’t miss this unique chance to ask Joshi your questions about the series, Jaipur, and her journey as an author. Joshi joins Kepler’s for a live webinar on July 21, in conversation with journalist-in-residence Angie Coiro.
Webinar space is limited, so register early! Please consider joining with a book to support programs like this one.

LOGIC MAGAZINE: FREER FUTURES
2021-07-17 13:00 - 15:00
Freer Futures
How do we democratize technology? How can we develop better models for developing, owning, and organizing the infrastructures of our lives?
Please join Logic Magazine for an online panel devoted to exploring these questions. We’ll be joined by the following Logic contributors:
+ Sarah T. Hamid is the policing tech campaign lead at the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, co-founder of the Prison Tech Research Group, and sits on the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Oregon.
+ Rodrigo Ochigame is a PhD candidate at MIT and an incoming assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
+ RK Upadhya is an engineer in the energy and resources sector, currently working at an electric utility in Texas.
+ Aaron Benanav is a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and the author of Automation and the Future of Work.

Moderated by Logic co-founder Ben Tarnoff.

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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.

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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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LOGIC celebrates Issue 13

“Distribution”

The internet was invented for the purpose of redistribution: to move computing power from one place to another. Today, the cloud both has and has not fulfilled this dream. On the one hand, users anywhere can borrow cycles from servers deep in the forests of Oregon or high on the mountains of Guizhou. On the other, those servers belong to just a handful of companies. Data analytics and machine learning have made it possible to optimize supply chains linking every part of the world. But they have not spread production or profits evenly. As blockchain evangelists aim to distribute trust, and distributed-cognition theorists describe a world of matter vibrating with consciousness, this issue will explore the distributive aspects of digital technologies. New futures are always arriving; they are never evenly distributed.

LOGIC is a critical journal devoted to technology and society. Past issues have explored the effects of technology on culture. Each issues focusses on a specific theme. Past themes have included: civic life in relation to technology, explorations of the problems and possibilities big tech and big data create, democracy in the face of ever accelerating technological advances, gender and equality, sex in relation to technology, how bodies and technologies cross one another, and much more. visit: https://logicmag.io

Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #37
2021-07-15 20:00 - 22:00 | online, CA, United States
A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic entering into our 3rd consecutive year that happens every third Thursday of the month en el Zoom mundo. Curated y hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.
Sign up for the 10-slot virtual open mic by filling out this form:
https://forms.gle/aHgoJxdUFXZXHjgQA
This month’s features: TBA
If you enjoy spaces like these, please support Nomadic Press by donating via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
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3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We will be posting the features’ Venmo handles during the event.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Speaking Axolotl
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VIRTUAL EVENT: Alka Joshi, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur
2021-07-15 19:00 - 21:00
New York Times bestselling author Alka Joshi will join us for a virtual event to celebrate The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, her sequel to The Henna Artist. Joshi’s new novel once again showcases her rich storytelling and talent for transporting readers to a different cultural place and time with themes that are universal. Here the year is 1969 and Malik, Lakshmi’s young helper from the first novel, is now an educated young man apprenticed at the Jaipur Palace and working on building the state-of-the-art public movie house when he becomes ensnared in a smuggling scheme that threatens all he aspires to, including the woman he loves.
Registration for this free Crowdcast event will begin soon.
This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
“The Henna Artist saga continues with Lakshmi’s new life in the Himalyan mountains with Dr. Kumar and the Shimla community clinic. With new characters to know and love, dilemmas to consider, adventures to be had, readers will embrace Lakshmi’s wisdom, courage, and love as she navigates the role of mature Aunty to now grown Malik. The scents, flavors, and richness of India’s 1969 post colonial culture permeate every page and I loved it all.” —Jenny, Bookshop staff
Alka Joshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist, is a graduate of Stanford University and received her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. She has worked as an advertising copywriter, a marketing consultant, and an illustrator. Alka was born in India, in the state of Rajasthan. Her family came to the United States when she was nine, and she now lives on California’s Monterey Peninsula with her husband and two misbehaving pups. The Secret Keeper of Jaipur is her second novel. Visit her website and blog at thehennaartist.com

Author Emma Brodie Discussing SONGS IN URSA MAJOR in a GGP Online Author Chat
2021-07-15 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Thursday, July 15, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of SONGS IN URSA MAJOR with author Emma Brodie.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81858196968 and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
Order your copy of SONGS IN URSA MAJOR, at http://bit.ly/ggpSongsUrsa, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at http://bit.ly/UrsaMajorAB.
Description

The year is 1969, and the Bayleen Island Folk Fest is abuzz with one name: Jesse Reid. Tall and soft-spoken, with eyes blue as stone-washed denim, Jesse Reid’s intricate guitar riffs and supple baritone are poised to tip from fame to legend with this one headlining performance. That is, until his motorcycle crashes on the way to the show.
Jane Quinn is a Bayleen Island local whose music flows as naturally as her long blond hair. When she and her bandmates are asked to play in Jesse Reid’s place at the festival, it almost doesn’t seem real. But Jane plants her bare feet on the Main Stage and delivers the performance of a lifetime, stopping Jesse’s disappointed fans in their tracks: A star is born.
Jesse stays on the island to recover from his near-fatal accident and he strikes up a friendship with Jane, coaching her through the production of her first record. As Jane contends with the music industry’s sexism, Jesse becomes her advocate, and what starts as a shared calling soon becomes a passionate love affair. On tour with Jesse, Jane is so captivated by the giant stadiums, the late nights, the wild parties, and the media attention, that she is blind-sided when she stumbles on the dark secret beneath Jesse’s music. With nowhere to turn, Jane must reckon with the shadows of her own past; what follows is the birth of one of most iconic albums of all time.
Shot through with the lyrics, the icons, the lore, the adrenaline of the early 70s music scene, Songs in Ursa Major pulses with romantic longing and asks the question so many female artists must face: What are we willing to sacrifice for our dreams?
About the Author

EMMA BRODIE has worked in book publishing for a decade, most recently as an executive editor at Little, Brown’s Voracious imprint. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program, and is a longtime contributor to HuffPost and a faculty member at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog, Freddie Mercury.
emmabrodie.com
Praise For…

“Emma Brodie’s debut lilts easily between the power chords of a rock anthem and the soulful nostalgia of a blues ballad, evoking the seventies rock scene through two compelling protagonists: Jesse Reid, charismatic rock star on the rise, and Jane Quinn, electrically gifted songstress struggling to get her foot on the ladder of the music world. Their passion for each other, for performing, and above all for their music makes for splashy, engrossing reading. Songs in Ursa Major is pure sun-soaked summer fun.”
—Kate Quinn, bestselling author of The Alice Network

This Is Now: Facebook Under Fire
2021-07-15 18:00 - 19:00
THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT.
Facebook is daily fare for two and a half billion users worldwide— and is also the red-hot target of worldwide criticism. From exploiting user data and profiting from fake news to amplifying and widening political divides— Facebook stands accused widespread political and social damage. If the charges hold water, how culpable is the leadership of the company? Could the problems beleaguering the platform have been foreseen or prevented?
Investigative journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang probe the many controversies surrounding Facebook’s data mining, internal politics, security breaches, lobbying, international content manipulation, and relentless drive for profits, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the platform got to its current position. Their explosive, exclusive reporting yields a shocking conclusion— that the company’s missteps have not been an anomaly, but an inevitability. The platform’s civic failures were baked into how Facebook was built to perform.
So what now?
With a Pulitzer nomination and multiple awards to their names, New York Times journalists Frenkel and Kang illuminate the inner workings of one of the world’s most powerful entities with An Ugly Truth. This hotly anticipated book untangles the insider politics and corporate indifference that every Facebook user and global citizen needs to understand.
Join us for an essential This Is Now interview on Thursday, July 15 at 6pm. Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang, and Kepler’s journalist-in-residence Angie Coiro will guide you through an eye-opening tour the media giant’s position today.
Webinar space is limited, so register early! Please consider joining with a book to support programs like this one.

VIRTUAL: Burning the Books: a conversation with Richard Ovenden and Abby Rumsey
2021-07-14 11:00 - 13:00
The Booksmith and Internet Archive present a discussion between Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, which has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, and writer and historian Abby Smith Rumsey. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A.
Buy your copy of Burning the Books from us! Order here.
This event is free and open to all ages, but RSVP is required.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, the senior executive officer of the Bodleian Libraries, a position he has held since 2014. His previous positions include Deputy Head of Rare Books at the National Library of Scotland, the Head of Special Collections and Director of Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and he held the Keepership of Special Collections at the Bodleian from 2003 to 2011, when he was made Deputy Librarian. He has been active in both the worlds of rare books and the history of photography, serving as Chairman of the Rare Books and Special Collections Group of CILIP, and Secretary of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. He is currently a Trustee of the Kraszna Kraus Foundation, and of Chawton House Library. He is the author of John Thomson (1837–1921): Photographer (1997) and co-editor of A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye (1999) and has contributed essays to the Cambridge History of Libraries, The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, and the History of Oxford University Press.
Abby Smith Rumsey is a writer and historian focusing on the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in all media. She has written and lectured widely on digital preservation, online scholarship, the nature of evidence, the changing roles of libraries and archives, intellectual property policies in the digital age, and the impact of new information technologies on perceptions of history and time. Rumsey served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia and has advised universities and their research libraries on strategies to integrate digital information resources into existing collections and services. For over a decade, Rumsey worked with the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the development of a national strategy to identify, collect, and preserve digital content of long-term value.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam | GGP Online Book Club
2021-07-13 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, July 13, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88516206714, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpLeaveTheWorldBehind, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/LeaveTheWorldAB.
Description

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction)
A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher’s Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis.
Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.
Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?

VIRTUAL EVENT: Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life
2021-07-13 18:00 - 20:00
Editor Steve Kettmann and contributors Sarina Morales and Mark Kreidler will discuss their new book Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life. This event is cosponsored by the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods.
Registration for this free virtual event will begin soon.
This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Pedro Gomez of ESPN was a beloved figure in the world of baseball and his death from sudden cardiac arrest on Feb. 7, 2021—Super Bowl Sunday—unleashed an outpouring of heartfelt tributes. He was 58, a hard-nosed reporter when he had to be but mostly a smiling ambassador of the sport with a knack for bringing alive the human stories that give people an emotional connection to a big-money sport. Pedro, a proud Cuban American, was known for his dramatic reporting from Havana. Fully and fluidly bilingual, he did as much as anyone to bridge the wide gap that had existed between U.S.-born players and the Latin Americans now so important to the game’s vitality and future growth. He was also a family man who loved to talk about his three children, Sierra, Dante and Rio, a Boston Red Sox prospect.
Pedro’s humanity and generosity of spirit shaped countless lives, including one of his ESPN bosses, Rob King, who was so moved by Pedro’s advice to him—“Remember who you are”—that he printed up the words and posted them on the wall of his office in Bristol. King is one of 62 contributors to Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life, who turn Pedro’s shocking death into an occasion to reflect on the deeper truths of life we too often overlook. Part The Pride of Havanaand part Ball Four,part The Tender Barand part Tuesdays With Morrie, this is the rare essay collection that reads like a novel, full of achingly honest emotion and painful insights, a book about friendship, a book about standing for something, a book about joy and love.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point
2021-07-12 18:00 - 20:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: Adam Serwer, award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, will discuss The Cruelty Is the Point—his searing collection of essays which make a damning case that cruelty is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of the Trump administration but its main objective and the central theme of the American project. This event is cosponsored by Marcus Books.
“No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates
Registration for this free Crowdcast event will begin soon.
Trump summoned the most treacherous forces in American history and conducted them with the ease of a grand maestro.
Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn’t know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.
In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump’s rise—including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.
While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer’s writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn’t happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible. Without acknowledging and confronting these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to another ambitious demagogue.
“Serwer’s powerful truth-telling grabs us, shakes us, and warns us that as long as we wishfully forget the history of American cruelty, we will fail to see it coming for all that we hold dear.” —Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us
Adam Serwer has written for The Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics while often viewing it through the lens of history. Serwer was a Spring Fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as well as the Ira Lipman Fellow at the Columbia University School of Journalism. He is the recipient of the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family.

Virtual Event: Violet Kupersmith and Rachel Khong
2021-07-12 18:00 - 20:00
JOIN US ON MONDAY, JULY 12 AT 6PM PT WHEN VIOLET KUPERSMITH JOINS US TO DISCUSS HER LATEST NOVEL, BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY, WITH RACHEL KHONG ON ZOOM!
PRESENTED IN PROUD PARTNERSHIP WITH THE RUBY
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88071786486
Or One tap mobile :
US: +16699009128,,88071786486# or +12532158782,,88071786486#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kelCQTV21m
Praise for Build Your House Around My Body
“A heady, gothic, spellbinder of a book.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
“This impressively constructed weave of stories, haunted by the ghosts of history and family, is gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing—usually all at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“A rich and dazzling spectacle…that peels back the layers of a haunted Vietnam.”—Kirkus Reviews
About Build Your House Around My Body
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this kaleidoscopic novel set in Vietnam spins half a century of history and folklore into the story of a missing woman.
In 1986, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience.
In 2009, pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra.
And in 2011, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend disappears without a trace.
Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives. Along the way, we meet a young boy sent to a boarding school in the mountains for the métis children of French expatriates just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule in 1945; two Frenchmen trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., called to investigate strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds the three women together.
Written with wit, ambition, and playfulness, this book takes us from sweaty nightclubs to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions to ex-pat flats, sizzling back-alley street carts to the noisy seats of motorbikes. Spanning over fifty years and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a fever dream about possessed bodies and possessed lands, a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing marvel of a novel.
About Violet Kupersmith
Violet Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel. She previously taught English with the Fulbright Program in the Mekong Delta and was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in the U.S.

Online Intensive Literary Seminar Series - Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
2021-07-12 17:00 - 18:30
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Sure, you maybe read Jane Eyre in college but you won’t believe the ways this thoroughly adult novel will wow you. Published in 1847, Jane was one of the first novels told from the first person. The book revolutionized prose by revealing so much of the speaker’s interiority and is often considered a precursor to Proust and Faulkner. It has spawned reams of scholarship on class, sexuality and feminism. Most importantly, though, Jane Eyre is just such an absorbing, suspenseful, sensual and meaningful book.
As if the Brontë masterpiece weren’t enough, we will read Jane alongside the insanely great modern prequel (1966) by Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea takes us to Rhys’s Caribbean to explore the background of the “madwoman in the attic,” the shocking character who is both invisible and at the heart of Jane. This slim novel is an important post-colonial response that will enrich your appreciation of Brontë. Either of these novels would make for a rich seminar; together, they’ll allow for excellent literary insights. Join us!
Join Kimberly Ford, for this two-part seminar series on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. We will be hosting this series on the following dates:
Monday, July 12 – 5:00-6:30 pm
Monday, July 19 – 5:00-6:30 pm
There are several ticket options that include books with purchase, books shipped to home, books picked up at Kepler’s Books or seminar only. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor all shipping costs will be waived for the literary seminars. The books should be read prior to the meeting date.

Wales to Bay VII
2021-07-11 12:00 - 14:00 | CA, United States
Sarah Kobrinsky and Caroline Goodwin host a virtual reading with two Bay Area poets and two poets based in Wales, UK.
Susan Cohen returned to poetry, her first love, after a long career as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and professor of journalism in the Bay Area. She earned an MFA from Pacific University in 2013, and is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections. Her second collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize. Her recent poems won the Terrain.org Annual Poetry Award and second place in Cutthroat Journal’s Joy Harjo Prize competition, and also have appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, Los Angeles Review, PANK, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, and 32 Poems, along with several anthologies, including: Why To These Rocks, Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers. She lives in Berkeley and has been to Wales once—too many years ago to count.
Peter Hughes lives on the northern margins of Snowdonia where he runs Oystercatcher Press. He also teaches, and has been Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Shearsman published Peter’s Selected Poems alongside a volume entitled ‘An intuition of the particular’: some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes. His other poetry publications include distinctive versions of Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. His most recent book is A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman).
Donna de la Perrière is the author of five collections of poetry: three books — Works of Love & Terror (2019), Saint Erasure (2010), and True Crime (2009), all from Talisman House — as well as two chapbooks, Night Calendar (Omerta, 2018) and First Love (The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange Collection, 2013).
Her work has appeared in journals such as American Letters and Commentary, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, Interim, Mantis, New American Writing, and Volt, as well as anthologies such as Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children (2013), No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (2009), and Bay Poetics (2006).
The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry Award and a 2016 Creative Work Grant from Intersection for the Arts, she founded and curated the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series (2004 – 2019) in San Francisco. She teaches in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at San Francisco State University and lives in Oakland, CA with the poet Joseph Lease and cats Whitman and Dickinson.
David Annwn’s most recent book of poetry is Resonance Field (2021) and his work features in The Edge of Necessary, Welsh Innovative Poetry and Blackbox Manifold 25 (2021). His poetry collaborations with master-calligrapher, Thomas Ingmire were the subject of an exhibition at California Book Club, San Francisco in 2016.
He has read at Caffe Trieste with Jack Hirschman and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and has delivered filmed readings at the Hepworth Gallery, Yorkshire UK and in settings throughout Europe. His poetry is featured in eight films by San Francisco film-maker, Howard Munson, including ‘Jeu de Marseilles’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Oj565sBH4 ). He is a recipient of a Cardiff International Poetry Award.
John Goodby writes: ‘Annwn has a mastery of different genres and modes (concrete / typographical, discursive, lyrical, neomodernist paratactic) and the ability to switch between them in the course of a single poem.’
Billy Mills has written of Resonance Field: The whole book is alive with this sense of interlocking collaboration, with Annwn creating a resonance field in which multiple voices interweave to create a work of singular interest in which, as the final line says, ‘it is time to recover’. To recover ourselves and our shared heritage.’
