Litseen

Zach Norris, We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities
2020-10-09 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online
Zach Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, author of We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities, and co-founder of Restore Oakland, a community advocacy and training center that will empower Bay Area community members to transform local economic and justice systems and make a safe and secure future possible for themselves and for their families. Zach is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation’s youth incarceration epidemic.
Zach helped build California’s first statewide network for families of incarcerated youth which led the effort to close five youth prisons in the state, passed legislation to enable families to stay in contact with their loved ones and defeated Prop 6—a destructive and ineffective criminal justice ballot measure.
We Keep Us Safe, released in 2020, has been praised by Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Kirkus Reviews. To purchase Zach’s book we recommend Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore Literary & Garden Arts. #WeLoveBookstores
In addition to being a Harvard graduate and NYU-educated attorney, Zach is also a graduate of the Labor Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing in Los Angeles, California and was a 2011 Soros Justice Fellow. He is a former board member at Witness for Peace, Just Cause Oakland and Justice for Families. Zach was a recipient of the American Constitution Society’s David Carliner Public Interest Award in 2015, and is a member of the 2016 class of the Levi Strauss Foundation’s Pioneers of Justice.
Zach is a loving husband and dedicated father of two bright daughters, whom he is raising in his hometown of Oakland, California.
The Ella Baker Center works locally, statewide and nationally to shift resources away from prisons and punishment and towards opportunities that make our communities safe, healthy and strong. We believe that what you water grows. That’s why we mobilize everyday people to build power and prosperity in our communities. Our work includes the Decarcerate Alameda County campaign, policy work abolishing abusive practices in prisons, Night Out for Safety and Liberation and more.
Connect with Zach Norris – Website | Twitter | Facebook
Connect with The Ella Baker Center – Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Registration: https://bit.ly/ZachNorris10-9-20
SFPL YouTube Live: https://youtu.be/DI–fPefE04
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Ticketed Virtual Event: Erin Brockovich, Superman's Not Coming
2020-10-08 19:00 - 21:00
Join us for a ticketed online event with environmental activist, crusader, fighter, and maverick Erin Brockovich, who will discuss her new book, Superman’s Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis and What We the People Can Do About It—a book that looks at our present situation with water and shows us how we can take action to make changes in our cities, towns, and villages, before it’s too late.
Tickets for this special event will go on sale soon.
Brockovich shows us what’s at stake, and writes of the fraudulent science that disguises these issues, along with cancer clusters not being reported. She writes of the saga of PG&E that continues to this day, and of the communities and people she has worked with who have helped to make an impact. She writes of the water operator in Poughkeepsie, New York, who responded to his customers’ concerns and changed his system to create some of the safest water in the country; of the moms in Hannibal, Missouri, who became the first citizens in the nation to file an ordinance prohibiting the use of ammonia in their public drinking water; and about how we can protect our right to clean water by fighting for better enforcement of the laws, new legislation, and better regulations. She cannot fight all battles for all people and gives us the tools to take actions ourselves, have our voices heard, and know that steps are being taken to make sure our water is safe to drink and use.
“Brockovich urges people to continue to fight for what they believe in…[Her] belief in individual activism—rather than relying on leaders, corporations, or the government to handle the water crisis—is the guiding theme in her new book…inspirational.”—Sam Gillette, People
ERIN BROCKOVICH is the president of Brockovich Research & Consulting and the founder of the Erin Brockovich Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to educate and empower communities in their fight for clean water. She is the coauthor of Take It from Me: Life’s a Struggle but You Can Win and has her own show on PodcastOne. She lives in Southern California.

Virtual Event: Neal Karlen on Prince
2020-10-08 18:00 - 20:00
Join us on Thursday, October 8 at 6pm PDT when Neal Karlen joins us to discuss his book, This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Odyssey On+Off the Record
on Zoom!
Signed bookplates available while supplies last! Preorder now!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83006881839
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,83006881839# or +13462487799,,83006881839#
Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
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About This Thing Called Life
An unusual, remarkably detailed biography of one of the most iconic musicians of our times, by a reporter who did the only two long authorized interviews with Prince and became a lifelong friend.
This Thing Called Life subtly changes what we know about a massive star, one who relentlessly controlled his own image and career, and who everyone wanted to know.
Neal Karlen interviewed Prince for the artist’s two Rolling Stone covers and, according to Prince’s former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Indeed, Prince and Karlen had known each other years before, as two of the gang of Minneapolis boys who biked around the neighborhood and played basketball. Karlen says that not only can fans not understand Prince without understanding Minneapolis in the 70s, but that anyone who knew Prince only knew 15% of him: that was all he was willing to give, no matter how much he cared for them.
Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson’s roots, including his contradictory and often tortured relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life explains the star as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, frequented libraries, jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse (instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas”).
About Neal Karlen
Neal Karlen writes regularly for The New York Times and is a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Minnesota journalism school. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Elle, The Forward, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Olam, among other publications. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

VIRTUAL: Launch for Paul Madonna / Come to Light
2020-10-08 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith and The Bindery host a virtual event with Paul Madonna to launch his new illustrated novel Come to Light.
** Please note **
> This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
> If you’d like a copy of Come to Light, you can purchase one here, below, or when completing your registration. We are currently offering free shipping throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Come to Light is a fresh and original mystery with an unusual detective: Emit Hopper, a former rock star turned author and artist. Six years ago, Emit’s wife, Julia, went missing. Now the remains of her two hiking companions have been found buried in the California wilderness. But the discovery raises more questions than answers, so with his love for classic detective books and rye whiskey, Emit sets out across Europe chasing down clues, sketchbook in hand.
Quickly, Emit finds himself embroiled in a plot far larger than he could have imagined: he becomes a target of a State Department investigation, gets entangled in an international ring of art thefts, and discovers his own artwork stolen. He meets an exuberant French nobleman, a murderous five-year-old, and a bohemian Roman heiress. From the Venice Biennale to the flooding of Piazza Navona, you’ll find yourself laughing, gasping, and drawing right alongside Emit as he travels through some of the most beautiful regions of Europe, unraveling a suspense-filled and surprisingly tangled mystery.
Replete with strikingly rendered drawings that bring this exquisite and intriguing novel to life, Come to Light is the thrilling follow-up to the adventures of Emit Hopper, which debuted in Close Enough for the Angels.

Paul Madonna is an award-winning artist and writer whose unique blend of drawing and storytelling has been heralded as an “all new art form.” He is the creator of the series All Over Coffee, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for twelve years, and the author of five books, including Everything is its own reward (winner of the 2011 NCBA for best book) and the Emit Hopper Mystery Series. Paul’s work ranges from novels to cartoons to large-scale public murals, and can be found internationally in print as well as in galleries and museums, including the Oakland Museum of California and the William Blake Association in France. Paul was a founding editor for therumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and was the first (ever!) art intern at MAD magazine.

** Please note **
> This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
> If you’d like a copy of Come to Light, you can purchase one here, below, or when completing your registration. We are currently offering free shipping throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck's Poem Jam
2020-10-08 18:00 - 19:00 | online
featuring special guests, themes and writing groups. In October we honor Latinx Heritage month with poets Josiah Luis Alderete, Lourdes Figuroa and more.
Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho spanglish speaking poet from La Area Bahia who learned to write poetry in the kitchen of his Mama’s Mexican restaurant. He was a founding member of San Francisco’s outspoken word troupe The Molotov Mouths and is also a radio insurgente whose stories have appeared on KALW’s “Crosscurrents” and whose show “The Spanglish Power Hour” aired on KPFA. He curates and hosts the Latinx reading series SPEAKING AXOLOTL in Oakland which happens every third Thursday of the month at Nomadic Press Studios. Josiah Luis Alderete’s book of poems is forthcoming from Black Freighter Press.
Lourdes Figuroa is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum. Her work has been published in the SF Poet’s 11 2008 & 2010, Generations Literary Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Something Worth Revisin. Spooky Actions Books published her first chapbook, yolotl, and Backwords Press recently published her poem, “War America War.” She received her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco. Lourdes is a native of limbo nation and believes in your lung, your throat.

Aarti Namdev Shahani - Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares (Virtual Event)
2020-10-08 16:00 - 18:00
Come join us! Sign up to participate in the next event in Macmillan’s Book + Author series: a virtual book club event with journalist and activist Aarti Namdev Shahani for the paperback release of her heart-wrenching debut memoir, Here We Are. We’ve partnered with Macmillan to bring this opportunity to book club members across the country, who can tune in to hear a discussion and participate in the live Q&A. Register through the link above.
The Shahanis came to Queens—from India, by way of Casablanca—in the 1980s. They were undocumented for a few unsteady years and then, with the arrival of their green cards, they thought they’d made it. This is the story of how they did, and didn’t; the unforeseen obstacles that propelled them into years of disillusionment and heartbreak; and the strength of a family determined to stay together.
Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares follows the lives of Aarti, the precocious scholarship kid at one of Manhattan’s most elite prep schools, and her dad, the shopkeeper who mistakenly sells watches and calculators to the notorious Cali drug cartel. Together, the two represent the extremes that coexist in our country, even within a single family, and a truth about immigrants that gets lost in the headlines. It isn’t a matter of good or evil; it’s complicated.
Ultimately, Here We Are is a coming-of-age story, a love letter from an outspoken modern daughter to her soft-spoken Old World father. She never expected they’d become best friends.
Aarti Namdev Shahani is the author of memoir Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares. She is a correspondent for NPR based in Silicon Valley, covering the largest companies on earth. Her reporting has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. Before journalism, Shahani was a community organizer in New York City, helping prisoners and families facing deportation. Her activism was honored by the Union Square Awards and Legal Aid Society. She received a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, with generous support from the university and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She completed her bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She was among the youngest recipients of the Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University and is an alumna of A Better Chance, Inc. Shahani grew up in Flushing, Queens—in one of the most diverse zip codes in the country—and believes every American should visit her hometown to understand what makes America great.

Patti Smith
2020-10-08 14:00 - 16:00
Bay Area Book Festival in conjunction with City Lights Booksellers present
Extraordinary Dreamer: Patti Smith on “Year of the Monkey”
Patti Smith in an intimate evening of reading and music
celebrating the paperback release of
YEAR OF THE MONKEY
published by Vintage Books
Tickets: $35.00
(Purchase Tickets Here)
This is a virtual event.
Each ticket purchase includes a paperback copy of Year of the Monkey (note: we can only ship within the United States), event admission for the live event, and a link to the recorded conversation for viewing after October 8th. Book orders will begin shipping after September 1st.
We regret we cannot accept international orders for this event.
She redefined rock and roll for a generation, defied conventional expectations at every turn, and created enough zeitgeist-shaping art for more than one lifetime. Now Patti Smith has something new and beautiful to share: a “beautiful, elegant, and poetic” (NPR) memoir chronicling a transformational year of personal loss, cross-country travel, and political upheaval. Year of the Monkey reprises the spellbinding storytelling we all fell in love with in her National Book Award-winning Just Kids and bestselling M Train, conjuring the complexity and magic of an extraordinary dreamer’s inner life. In this unique live experience, Patti will play a few songs with longtime band mate Tony Shanahan and share passages from Year of the Monkey.
Critical Praise for YEAR OF THE MONKEY
“Poignant, gorgeous—a picaresque voyage through Patti Smith’s dreams and life, blending fiction and reality, conjured characters and actual ones. She writes of seeing her image reflected on the surface of the toaster: ‘I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.’ That describes her spirit perfectly.” —Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

“Elegant, poetic, wildly entertaining, touching—a beautifully realized and unique memoir that chronicles a transformative year in the life of one of our most multi-talented creative voices. Part travel journal, part reflexive essay on our times, and part meditation on existence at the edge of a new decade of life . . . Effortlessly weaving together fiction and nonfiction, Smith takes readers on two unique journeys: one that can be traced on a map and one, infinitely richer and more complex, that takes place inside her head and heart. Smith’s musical career sometimes threatens to overshadow her accomplishments in other creative fields—but every page in this book is packed with enough outstanding prose to constantly remind readers that Smith is an accomplished novelist, essayist, and poet who won the National Book Award in 2010. In her capable hands, a simple look at New York City in winter becomes a flash of beautiful poetry. Smith’s approach to nonfiction is unique and brave: It counts as true if it happened, if she imagined it, and if she felt it. This is a book about Smith and the world all around. And that is just one more reason why everyone should read it.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“Moving—an account of physical and intellectual wanderings . . . Smith does not rage against her approaching 70th birthday, nor does she turn away from it. She finds art everywhere, and remains a pioneer, the same rules-shattering poet and National Book Award-winning writer . . . She is, as she writes in Year of the Monkey, ‘still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I can.’” —Jack Cline, The Washington Post
“Miraculous . . . A dream-driven, reality-reclaiming masterpiece laced with poetry and philosophy and surrealism and the hardest realism there is: that of hope . . . Smith is aglow; she moves through this world as a time-traveler, an eavesdropper, a vagrant, a vagabond in the land of literature and life; she is a human mirror. She. invites us to relinquish the different names we give to the living of life and just live it, with all its disorienting uncertainty. Reflecting on clarifying dreams, worrying for our shared future, Smith reminds us that the only remedy for a broken reality is more truth. She reaches, with a lucid and luminous hand, for the buoyancy that is our lifeline.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“A lucid dream of a memoir . . .Smith sees mystical connections everywhere—and, floating along on the drifts of her words, the reader does, too.” —The New Yorker

“Deft and enigmatic. . . Life can’t help but confound us; love is enough to sustain us, and loss, if not revocable, can, for the moment, be redeemed. [But] Smith is too smart for easy consolations; she has been through too much . . . She summons this scene, this moment, giving it the weight of a reckoning. Year of the Monkey reminds us that despair and possibility often spring from the same source.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Smith began writing Year of the Monkey on New Year’s Day 2016, a transformative year for the artist that brought aging, the loss of friends, and overall disillusionment. Juxtaposed with this personal narrative are Smith’s descriptions of western landscapes she visited . . . Fact and fiction increasingly blur, a combination made surreal by Smith’s obsession with details that keep popping up in various locations . . . A gripping tale of the search for meaning in times of turbulence—expressed with Smith’s signature poetic flair.” —Christian Allaire, Vogue
“Since 1975, Patti Smith has been blurring the lines between music, poetry, and prose, howling with grief and roaring with delight, whether onstage or via the written word. Year of the Monkey [is] her preternatural latest memoir . . . In this slim, hallucinatory volume, Smith roves the country in real time, visiting favorite haunts, hitching rides with strangers, contemplating the fuzzy border between waking and dreaming, and mourning the results of the 2016 presidential election. But just as a sense of gloom begins to settle, the sun peeks through the clouds. For while ‘there is nothing in heaven like the suffering of real life…,’ she writes, ‘I still keep thinking something wonderful is about to happen.’” —Leigh Haber, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Lyrical, poignant . . . [the book] chronicles Smith’s travels and beautifully veers between dreamlike solitary reveries. Smith gives voice in the book to a national feeling of grief framed by her own personal losses; she sums up the nexus of aging, steeped in reflection and loss. She notices every detail like a photographer, with her words exquisitely framed by nuance.” —Solvej Schou, Associated Press
“Reading about [Smith’s life] makes the world shimmer with possibility. We follow her as she hitchhikes through the desert and gets left for dead, meets weirdos and mystics in diners up and down the coast, then takes off for Kentucky to help the playwright Sam Shepard finish his final project. A book full of riddles and fantasies [and] about one woman’s 2016. Grief on a colossal, national scale has a way of making the most personal, quotidian sufferings feel small and unimportant. At the same time, it makes those typical human tragedies appear suddenly of a piece with the world around them. Patti Smith writes beautifully.” —Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox

“A fascinating journey . . . powerful stuff. Smith [has a] peculiar brand of wandering—dead phone, no car, scant provisions, vague itinerary . . . The book has little about music, [but] what’s there is priceless. Year of the Monkey [also] includes charming, quirky photos by the author, and achingly sweet recollections.” —Claude Peck, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In her third memoir, Smith is both haunted and joyed by the passage of time. Losses surround her [in] the year she turns 70—a year of devastation, with catastrophes both unique to her life and ones shared across America. As she crosses the country in a series of solitary adventures infused with the memories of her life on the road, she meets the world with curiosity and openness. The many [who] revere Smith will take a thrill in her vivid recollections of long ago days on the stage and the streets of Greenwich Village, while anyone consumed by the fears of today will find them expressed vividly by a beautiful voice.” —Adrienne Gaffney, San Francisco Chronicle

“Smith’s grace and erudite philosophy is a welcome balm in these times . . . Her latest memoir is an introspective look at her year of solo wandering—she documents that year’s massive political and social change her own lyrical way. The American canon is littered with ‘road trip memoirs,’ but if there’s a voice we’d want to add to that genre, it would be Smith.” —Town & Country

“Lovely, dreamlike . . . a slim volume [with a] minor-key melancholy. The punk poet’s latest memoir unfold like the stack of old Polaroids in her New York apartment: ‘One after another, each a talisman on a necklace of continuous travels.’” —Entertainment Weekly
“Compelling—ruminations, adventures, unexpected connections: [this] personal, cross-country odyssey captured by her prose and Polaroid portraits finds Smith mining magical moments within even the most seemingly mundane of circumstances. She weaves threads of everyday experiences and warm recollections together in the manner of a waking dream. Funny moments make Smith relatable. The narrative thread is transformation. She is equally a participant and observer of life; as much as art provides sustenance and solace for her in troubled times, by the end she is invoking a greater call to action. If there is anyone capable of living in the past, present and future simultaneously, and occupying space between reality and dreams, it is Smith. It may not be easy to conveniently explain Smith’s style or approach, but that is not the point. You simply need to surrender to it to be inspired.” —Bryan Reesman, Newsday
“One of America’s finest memoirists. Funny and weird, sober and sad, Year of the Monkey is simultaneously a travelogue of Smith’s journeys through California, Arizona, Portugal and Kentucky; a fantastical dream-journal full of imagined conversations; and a clear-eyed meditation on Smith’s relationships with two of her oldest, dearest friends—playwright Sam Shepard and music producer Sandy Pearlman—who passed away as she was writing it. It’s perhaps the closest she’s come to synthesizing the penetrating maturity of her latter-day writings with the improvisational wildness of her early free-form poems and songs.” —Andrew Barker, Variety

“In her poetic prose and [with] snaps of her trusty Polaroid camera, Smith captures truth and beauty, challenges and victories. Year of the Monkey traces her year of wandering across California’s Santa Cruz coast and the West, searching for answers for questions she never knew she had . . . Smith’s writing is impressionistic; fact and fiction intermix and she captures authentic moments that never fade away.” —Drew Tewksbury, Los Angeles Times
“Whether it’s guttural, poetic lyricism or compassionate nonfiction, Patti Smith’s writing style and ability are truly unrivaled. In Year of the Monkey, her words are paired with Polaroids as she explores aging, grief and the dire global embrace of right-wing nationalism.” —Lizzie Manno, Paste
“In the time since her exquisite memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award in 2010, godmother of punk Patti Smith has been documenting her travels with her pen and trusty Polaroid. In Year of the Monkey, her wanderlust drives her from San Francisco to Santa Cruz to Arizona to Kentucky to New York . . . Along the way, she meets fellow nomads, mourns for loved ones both in the process of dying and those long gone, and she drinks a whole lot of coffee. A keen observer of the world around her, Smith is equally adept at documenting her inner terrain. Wherever she wanders, it’s always worth the trip.” —Emily Rems, Bust
“This is the modern-day Patti Smith: older, wiser, seeing the world, and reporting it all back to us in only the way she can. You can’t read this and not feel inspired after you put it down.” —Inside Hook
“From meditations on poetry, politics, art, and dreams, to her own lyrical way of interacting with the world, Year of the Monkey confirms Patti Smith cannot be boxed in by either genre or medium. The book also includes Smith’s Polaroids from her travels—yes, she is somehow a talented photographer on top of everything else.”
—Jeva Lange, The Week

“Lyrical: a book [that] defies all familiar categories, playfully exploring the seam between reality and fantasy. It’s full of mysterious characters who emerge from somewhere out of the American landscape. [After] a New Year’s Day opening—Smith lost and alone in a part of Santa Cruz usually clogged with tourists–we follow her to Venice Beach, Arizona, Kentucky, Seattle, and New York. The beating heart of the book comes with Smith’s visits to Sam Shepard at his Kentucky horse ranch….A rich, kaleidoscopic narrative of surprises and insights.” —Wallace Baine, Good Times

“Smith is always willing to see where a new road might lead. Her career has been a study of language, with interest in melodic refrains, surreal images, and reverent tones. Year of the Monkey is absolutely true in eternal truths, ornamented by a sense of poetry . . . A stunning, soothing work.” —Megan Volpert, PopMatters
“Over the course of a year leading up to her 70th birthday, rock legend Patti Smith stood witness to the fragility of life. There’s an explicit dreamlike quality and focus to The Year of the Monkey, which offers a very specific glimpse into the life of an artist facing her mortality without coasting. Through her trips, cups of coffee, and dreams, Smith radiates compassionate and concern as she meditates upon the practice of sitting with loss and change during ever-turbulent times.” —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer
“A melancholy mood and poetic language distinguish Smith’s third memoir, set during the Chinese year of the monkey, the year when she moves from age 69 to 70. She begins on New Year’s Day, 2016, the morning after finishing a three-night run at the Fillmore in San Francisco and sitting at the deathbed of a long-time friendwho introduced her to City Lights, Caffe Trieste and the Grateful Dead. She chronicles cafés, hitchhiking trips, strange motels in Santa Cruz and vivid dreams. With great tenderness, she describes visiting Sam Shepard in the final months of his life and helping him get his last book completed.”
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC
“Magical, rich—the unique artistry of Smith’s prose remains.” —Fiona Sturges, The Guardian (UK)

“Extraordinary.” —Bryan Appleyard, The Times (UK)
“It was a year of disruption, wandering, dreams and surreal visions: this year of the monkey on the Chinese zodiac was also the year Smith turned 70, and a trickster election hurled the country into a dark looking-glass realm. Smith writes with fresh lucidity, wit, bittersweet wonder, and stoic sorrow, shifting in tone from lyrical to hallucinatory to hard-boiled as she describes her meditative and investigative meanderings along the Pacific coast and in the desert. Keenly sensitive to atmosphere, she finds herself ‘in the middle of the unexplained’ as she travels with cosmic spontaneity and ‘an almost religious simplicity’ . . . She remembers her life-saving childhood library and a cherished, then dying friend. Smith also chronicles with exquisite poignancy her last visits with her soul mate Sam Shepherd . . . Elegiac, vital, and magical.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist [starred review]
“Luminous . . . Smith wanders between waking and dreaming in a year filled with the death of a close friend and the political turmoil of the 2016 election . . . In light of her 70th birthday, she writes lyrically on various subjects: she describes Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, which she carries along her travels, as an ‘expansive hydrogen bomb;’ caught up in Belinda Carlisle’s infectious beat, she imagines a ‘nonviolent hubris spreading across the land.’ She discovers that her most meaningful insights come from her vivid dreams, and she feels a palpable melancholia over having to wake up from them. Smith casts a mesmerizing spell with exquisite prose.”
—Publishers Weekly [starred review]

“Intriguing—a memoir that evolves around the transformations both in Smith’s life and the American political landscape. Disturbing yet humorous, with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction blurred, Smith’s work is unlikely to disappoint.”
—Jianan Qian, The Millions
“Captivating . . . a chronicle of a year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies. The titular year, 2016, set Smith, [who] refers to herself as the ‘poet detective,’ on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. Throughout, Smith ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday, and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory, and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit . . . Redemptive.”
—Kirkus [starred review]

Bathsheba Demuth and Elizabeth Rush Discuss the award-winning environmental history, Floating Coast
2020-10-08 12:00 - 14:00
Bathsheba Demuth and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Elizabeth Rush join us for a conversation about Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton).
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel. REGISTER HERE.
“A brilliant hybrid.… Often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision.” — Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
About Floating Coast
A Nature Top-Ten Book of 2019
An NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019
“A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created.” —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.
About the participants
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the United States and Russia, and in the history of energy and past climates. She has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America.
Elizabeth Rush‘s journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper’s, Pacific Standard, and the New Republic, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants including the Howard Foundation Fellowship, awarded by Brown University; the Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Pedagogical Innovation in the Humanities; the Metcalf Institute Fellowship; and the Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University and her BA from Reed College. She lives in Rhode Island, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Fowzia Karimi
2020-10-08 12:00
Fowzia Karimi is a writer, illustrator, and alumni of the Mills MFA in Creative Writing Program. As Publishers Weeklydescribes, her illuminated debut novel Above Us the Milky Way “renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs.” Karimi also illustratedThe Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene. She is the recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and lives in Texas.

Virtual Event: Kazim Ali, Gillian Conoley, and Brian Teare
2020-10-07 19:00 - 20:00 | virtual
Join us on Wednesday, October 7th at 7pm PST when Kazim Ali is joined by poets Gillian Conoley and Brian Teare to celebrate his new collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84685235176Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,84685235176# or +12532158782,,84685235176#
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About The Voice of Sheila Chandra
Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There’s an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.

About the Author
Kazim Aliwas born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, includingthe volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary’s College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

Contemporary Classics - Call Me Zebra
2020-10-07 18:30 - 20:30
Patricia Holt, former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, continues her popular book group, “Contemporary Classics.”
A book should stand the test of time before becoming a classic, but very often, critics and literary judges leap to praise books as “instant classics” soon after publication. These are the titles Pat’s group will hold up to scrutiny—in fact, the chewier, more literary, more dense, and “hard to read” the better. One needn’t have read widely, studied literature, or learned about literary criticism to join. Just drop in or join us for the whole series, and let the developing wisdom of the group be your only guide.
Email Pat to register and to receive a Zoom link for the meeting. You can write to her at p.holt12@comcast.net.
Fall dates:
October 7: Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
November 4: Weather, Jenny Offill
December 2: Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
January 6: Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
February 3: The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai

About Patricia Holt
Pat was book editor and critic at The San Francisco Chronicle for 17 years and has been writing reviews and book industry commentary at Holt Uncensored since 1998. She has facilitated book groups for the past 15 years and also joins the Marin West Review’s editors, Myn Adess and Doris Ober, on Radio Bookmobile, a lively discussion on West Marin Community Radio KWMR, usually the first Thursday of every month at 10-11 a.m., about the most beautiful passages and stirring controversies they can find on the current book scene.

Katherine May On Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
2020-10-07 12:00 - 14:00
Katherine May joins us from the UK to discuss her new book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (Riverhead Books).
“Every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself. . . . This is truly a beautiful book.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Wintering
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
About Katherine May
Katherine May is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The Times (London), Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan. She lives by the sea in Whitstable, England and is an avid lover of the outdoors.

Colossus:Home Reading
2020-10-06 21:30 - 22:30
Paul Corman Roberts
CV
Devorah major- special guest
Deborah Fruchey
Hannah Ingebretsen
Halim Madi
Peggy Morrison
Abe Becker
Sheryl Bize-Boute
Lisa Lim

Alex Ross and John Adams in Conversation
2020-10-06 19:00 - 21:00
Alex Ross and John Adams in Conversation
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
One of today’s most influential and well-respected writers on classical and contemporary music, Alex Ross shares insights from his new book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, exploring the controversial composer’s influence on the artistic, intellectual, and political life of both his time and ours. Ross’ first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Critics Circle Award; and his second book, the collection Listen to This, received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.
In this live-streamed talk, Ross is joined (virtually) by eminent composer, author, and longtime Cal Performances partner and friend John Adams, who—with operas including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic to his credit—is no stranger to musical drama and its intersection with politics and history. Ross’ new book is the product of more than 10 years of research and reflection, and examines the resonance of Wagner’s mythic storytelling on, among many other things, fantasy fiction by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and films and television shows such as Star Wars, The Matrix, and Game of Thrones. He has been the music critic at the New Yorker for nearly 25 years and has received both MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships.
Read more and purchase tickets

Event date:

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 – 7:00pm

Event address:

Live-streaming online

Virtual Event: Robert Duncan and Gary Wilson
2020-10-06 19:00 - 21:00
Three Rooms Press and Green Apple Books
present the Official West Coast Launch for LOUDMOUTH, a novel, featuring reading, discussion, and music by author Robert Duncan, former editor of Creem magazine, plus special guest Gary Wilson, experimental musician and performance artist.
The event will be held via livestream to YouTube and Facebook on Tuesday, October 6, 7 pm Pacific.
The event will be hosted by Three Rooms Press co-director Peter Carlaftes.
Tune in at the link below
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H3XQ-hOXqR8
About Loudmouth
In 1970s New York City, Thomas Ransom dreams that rock ’n’ roll will be his ticket out of the life his conservative family planned for him, and he takes it to the extreme: burning bridges and houses on the way to discovering his true destiny.
Thomas Ransom, born to a severely dysfunctional southern family transplanted to New York City, is left to his own devices by neglectful parents, and spends his childhood shadowing his criminally-inclined half-brother and roaming the city with hard-drinking teenage pals. He eventually finds an outlet as the flamboyant singer of a downtown rock band, and later as the young editor of the Detroit-based magazine that invented punk, only to return to New York, at the height of the 1970s bacchanal, and crash. But it isn’t music that saves him. It’s a soft-spoken painter, who turns out to be the most outrageous character of all. With echoes of Almost Famous and Just Kids, LOUDMOUTH tracks an impassioned musician and writer out among the punks, hippies, and wild geniuses of rock when music was the center of the world.
About Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan is author of The Noise: Notes from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, an exploration of pop and society in the Seventies, Kiss, a satirical biography of the band, and Only the Good Die Young, profiles of dead rock stars. He was a writer for Creem, before becoming, at 22, managing editor of the magazine, working alongside his friend Lester Bangs, and he has contributed to Rolling Stone, Circus, Life, and dozens of other publications. He is anthologized in the book Springsteen on Springsteen and archived in rocksbackpages.com. He was story consultant, as well as interview subject and voiceover, for the 2019 documentary, Boy Howdy: The Creem Magazine Story and appears in public TV’s Ticket to Write, a documentary about the “Golden Age of Rock Music Journalism.” He has worked as a singer, songwriter and producer, and is founder of the 29-year-old ad agency Duncan Channon, with offices in San Francisco, LA and Brooklyn. He was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but comes from a Southern family, and grew up mostly in New York. His great-grandfather, as editor of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials against the Klan. He currently lives with his wife, the artist and rock photographer Roni Hoffman, in Fairfax, California. Loudmouth is Duncan’s first novel.
About Gary Wilson
Gary Wilson emerged from New York’s DIY movement with 1977’s proto-New Wave masterpiece You Think You Really Know Me, an extraordinary record which has been known to suck unprepared new listeners in like a drug and never let go. Shortly after its limited release its creator simply vanished. In the 25-year wake before he was found again, Gary’s small-town opus had spread by word-of-mouth and indie radio to inspire a whole new generation of musicians and producers with his bizarre songs and personal musical vision. His cult following includes Beck, who shouts him out in “Where It’s At (Two Turntables And A Microphone)”, The Roots’ ?uestlove, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and of course, Stones Throw’s Peanut Butter Wolf. The re-release You Think You Really Know Me in 2002 won him accolades in The New York Times and culminated in sold-out shows in New York and Los Angeles. Gary Wilson has continued making music in the years following his “disappearance.” His re-emergence in the world coincided with his 2004 release on Stones Throw titled Mary Had Brown Hair.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell | GGP Online Book Club
2020-10-06 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, HAMNET.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85002634130.
You can order a copy in hardcover at https://bit.ly/GGPHamnet, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/HamnetAB.
August 2020 Indie Next List

“I loved Hamnet in very much the same way I loved Lincoln in the Bardo. This novel explores the way the dead haunt the living—especially how the death of a child haunts their parents—and does it in the context of a fascinating historical figure and time. But we know so much about the Lincolns, and so little about the Shakespeares. Maggie O’Farrell’s ability to construct a palpably real emotional life for all the members of the Shakespeare family—but especially for Shakespeare’s wife—is just magical. This is a powerful and haunting novel.”— Nina Barrett, Bookends & Beginnings, Evanston, IL
Description

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young, alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.
A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
About the Author

Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O’Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh. She is the author of The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award); Instructions for a Heatwave; This Must Be the Place; and most recently, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.
Praise For…

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Hamnet is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure… In Hamnet, Shakespeare’s marriage is complicated and troubled, yet brimming with love and passion… This novel is at once about the transfiguration of life into art– it is O’Farrell’s extended speculation on how Hamnet’s death might have fueled the creation of one of his father’s greatest plays– and at the same time, it is a master class in how she, herself does it… O’Farrell has a melodic relationship to language. There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world… We can smell the tang of the various new leathers in the glover’s workshop, the fragrance of the apples racked a finger-width apart in the winter storage shed, and we can see how the pale London sun “reaches down, like ladders, through the narrow gaps in buildings to illuminate the rain glazed street.”… As the book unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage, and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing.”
–Geraldine Brooks, the New York Times Book Review [COVER]
“All too timely…inspired…[An] exceptional historical novel ”
—The New Yorker

VIRTUAL: Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr / A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area
2020-10-06 19:00 - 21:00
Booksmith and The Bindery host a virtual event with the authors of A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr.
** Please note **
> This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
> If you’d like a copy of A People’s Guide to San Francisco, you can purchase one here, below, or when completing your registration. We are currently offering free shipping throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area looks beyond the mythologized image of San Francisco to the places where collective struggle has built the region. Countering romanticized commercial narratives about the Bay Area, geographers Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr highlight the cultural and economic landscape of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, radical interracial and cross-class organizing against housing discrimination and police violence, young people demanding economically and ecologically sustainable futures, and the often-unrecognized labor of farmworkers and everyday people.
The book asks who had—and who has—the power to shape the geography of one of the most watched regions in the world. As Silicon Valley’s wealth dramatically transforms the look and feel of every corner of the region, like bankers’ wealth did in the past, what do we need to remember about the people and places that have made the Bay Area, with its rich political legacies?
With over 100 sites that you can visit and learn from, this book demonstrates critical ways of reading the landscape itself for clues to these histories. A useful companion for travelers, educators, or longtime residents, this guide links multicultural streets and lush hills to suburban cul-de-sacs and wetlands, stretching from the North Bay to the South Bay, from the East Bay to San Francisco. Original maps help guide readers, and thematic tours offer starting points for creating your own routes through the region.

Rachel Brahinsky is Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco, affiliated with Urban and Public Affairs, Politics, and Urban Studies. Her research is focused on race, property, and urban change.

Alexander Tarr is Assistant Professor of Geography at Worcester State University. His research, writing, and cartography examine the development of cities, food politics, and digital culture.

** Please note **
> This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
> If you’d like a copy of A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, you can purchase one here, below, or when completing your registration. We are currently offering free shipping throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Virtual Event: Robert Duncan and Gary Wilson
2020-10-06 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Three Rooms Press and Green Apple Books present…
The Official West Coast Launch for LOUDMOUTH, a novel, featuring reading, discussion, and music by author Robert Duncan, former editor of Creem magazine, plus special guest Gary Wilson, experimental musician and performance artist.
The event will be held via livestream to YouTube and Facebook on Tuesday, October 6, 7 pm Pacific.
The event will be hosted by Three Rooms Press co-director Peter Carlaftes.
Tune in at the link below
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H3XQ-hOXqR8
About Loudmouth
In 1970s New York City, Thomas Ransom dreams that rock ’n’ roll will be his ticket out of the life his conservative family planned for him, and he takes it to the extreme: burning bridges and houses on the way to discovering his true destiny.
Thomas Ransom, born to a severely dysfunctional southern family transplanted to New York City, is left to his own devices by neglectful parents, and spends his childhood shadowing his criminally-inclined half-brother and roaming the city with hard-drinking teenage pals. He eventually finds an outlet as the flamboyant singer of a downtown rock band, and later as the young editor of the Detroit-based magazine that invented punk, only to return to New York, at the height of the 1970s bacchanal, and crash. But it isn’t music that saves him. It’s a soft-spoken painter, who turns out to be the most outrageous character of all. With echoes of Almost Famous and Just Kids, LOUDMOUTH tracks an impassioned musician and writer out among the punks, hippies, and wild geniuses of rock when music was the center of the world.
About Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan is author of The Noise: Notes from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, an exploration of pop and society in the Seventies, Kiss, a satirical biography of the band, and Only the Good Die Young, profiles of dead rock stars. He was a writer for Creem, before becoming, at 22, managing editor of the magazine, working alongside his friend Lester Bangs, and he has contributed to Rolling Stone, Circus, Life, and dozens of other publications. He is anthologized in the book Springsteen on Springsteen and archived in rocksbackpages.com. He was story consultant, as well as interview subject and voiceover, for the 2019 documentary, Boy Howdy: The Creem Magazine Story and appears in public TV’s Ticket to Write, a documentary about the “Golden Age of Rock Music Journalism.” He has worked as a singer, songwriter and producer, and is founder of the 29-year-old ad agency Duncan Channon, with offices in San Francisco, LA and Brooklyn. He was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but comes from a Southern family, and grew up mostly in New York. His great-grandfather, as editor of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials against the Klan. He currently lives with his wife, the artist and rock photographer Roni Hoffman, in Fairfax, California. Loudmouth is Duncan’s first novel.
About Gary Wilson
Gary Wilson emerged from New York’s DIY movement with 1977’s proto-New Wave masterpiece You Think You Really Know Me, an extraordinary record which has been known to suck unprepared new listeners in like a drug and never let go. Shortly after its limited release its creator simply vanished. In the 25-year wake before he was found again, Gary’s small-town opus had spread by word-of-mouth and indie radio to inspire a whole new generation of musicians and producers with his bizarre songs and personal musical vision. His cult following includes Beck, who shouts him out in “Where It’s At (Two Turntables And A Microphone)”, The Roots’ ?uestlove, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and of course, Stones Throw’s Peanut Butter Wolf. The re-release You Think You Really Know Me in 2002 won him accolades in The New York Times and culminated in sold-out shows in New York and Los Angeles. Gary Wilson has continued making music in the years following his “disappearance.” His re-emergence in the world coincided with his 2004 release on Stones Throw titled Mary Had Brown Hair.

[Virtual Ruby] Book Launch: A Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning
2020-10-06 17:30
Join us for a reading and Q&A to celebrate the release of Ruby member Sunisa Manning’s debut novel, A Good True Thai (Epigram Books, September 2020), hailed by Kirstin Chen, author of Bury What We Cannot Take, as “an astounding debut from a talented new voice,” and a finalist for the 2020 Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Sunisa will be in conversation with Ruby member Meng Jin, author of Little Gods. The poet Monica Sok, author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On, will read an invocation to open the event.
Books are available for purchase here through East Bay Booksellers.
About the book:
Set in the 1970s, A Good True Thai is a historical epic that captures one of the most famous periods of political unrest and artistic openness in Thailand’s history. It follows the story of three young people –Det, Lek and Chang – whose paths converge at a local university. Det is the descendant of royalty through his mother, the granddaughter of a king. Influenced by Lek and Chang’s political fervour, Det radicalises, and the three of them venture into the Thai jungle to fight alongside the communists. As they are embroiled in the perils of political revolution, they must learn to tame and reconcile their love for one another. A Good True Thai was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
About Sunisa:
Sunisa Manning was born and raised in Bangkok by Thai and American parents. She went to Brown University and now lives in California. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus and other places. She’s been honoured with residencies at Hedgebrook and Hambidge, and awarded fellowships at San Jose State and the SF Writers Grotto. A Good True Thai is her first novel.

Source:: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-ruby-book-launch-a-good-true-thai-tickets-119361010997

Mike Jung In Conversation with Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich --VIRTUALLY!
2020-10-06 16:00 - 18:00
Join us for a virtual conversation between Mike Jung and Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich as they discuss Jung’s new novel,The Boys in the Back Row.
Jung will debut his forthcoming music video opus of absurdity, “Kitten Time,” announce the winners of his pre-order giveaway, and possibly even perform a live song.

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 – 4:00pm

This event will take place live on Crowdcast. Pre-registration required. Click here to save your spot!
This is a free event, though we encourage you to purchase a signed copy of the book through our website and / or to make a contribution to support Mrs. Dalloway’s virtual events. Be sure to add your contribution before you “Save your Spot”. Thank you!
Best friends Matt and Eric are hatching a plan for one big final adventure together before Eric moves away: during the marching band competition at a Giant Amusement Park, they will sneak away to a nearby comics convention and meet their idol–a famous comic creator. Without cell phones. Or transportation. Or permission. Of course, their final adventure together is more than just that–really, it’s a way for the boys to celebrate their friendship, and their honest love and support for one another. That’s exactly what we love so much about The Boys in the Back Row it’s an unabashed ode to male friendship, because love between boys, platonic or otherwise, is something to celebrate. And of course, because this is Mike Jung, we’ll be celebrating it with hilariously flawed hijinks and geekiness galore!
Mike Jung is the author of Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities, Unidentified Suburban Object, and The Boys in the Back Row, and contributed to the anthologies Dear Teen Me, Break These Rules, 59 Reasons to Write, (Don’t) Call Me Crazy, and The Hero Next Door. His books have been honored by the Bank Street College of Education, Children’s Book Council Reading Beyond List, Cooperative Children’s Book Center, Georgia State Book Awards, Iowa Children’s Choice Awards, Kansas State Reading Circle, National Parenting Publications Awards, Parents Choice Foundation, and Texas Bluebonnet Awards. He’s proud to be a founding member of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks team, and lives in Oakland, California, with his family. Find Mike on Facebook, Twitter, or at www.mikejung.com.
Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich is the author of many books including The Two Naomis and the forthcoming It Doesn’t Take a Genius. Her nonfiction includes Someday is Now: Clara Luper and the 1958 Oklahoma City Sit-Ins, and Saving Earth: The Climate Crisis and the Fight for Our Future. She has contributed to a number of anthologies, including We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, and was the editor of We Need Diverse Books’ The Hero Next Door. She lives with her family in NYC. Find her on Instagram @olugbemisolarhudayperkovich.

Poised to Soar Helen Macdonald and Camille Dungy discuss Vesper Flights
2020-10-06 14:00 - 16:00
Bestselling author Helen Macdonald is joined in conversation by Camille T. Dungy to celebrate the publication of Vesper Flights (Grove).
This event is presented in partnership with the Bay Area Book Festival.
All ticket sales are being handled by the Book Festival. Please visit their eventbrite page to register.

About Vesper Flights
Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.
In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep.
Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing the massive migration of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.
By one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
About the authors
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist who lives in Cambridge, England. She is also the author of the poetry collection Shaler’s Fish, and the bestselling memoir, H is for Hawk.
Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. She lives with her husband and child in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Virtual Event: Aarti Namdev Shahani
2020-10-05 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Join us on Monday, October 5th at 7pm PST when Aarti Namdev Shahani discusses her memoir, Here We Are, on Zoom!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81346922046
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,81346922046# or +12532158782,,81346922046#
Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
US: +1 669 900 9128 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 301 715 8592 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 646 558 8656
Webinar ID: 813 4692 2046
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/ktyp7X41Q
Praise for Here We Are
“Aarti Shahani’s book is destined to take its place among the finest memoirs written in recent decades—a heartbreaking, hilarious and tender love letter to the millions of people who have made their way across lands and oceans to try and find a new life in America. This book will take you on a vivid, almost cinematic journey that is both beautiful and unforgettable.”
—Guy Raz, co-creator of How I Built This, Wow in the World and TED Radio Hour
Included in Library Journal‘s list of Best Books 2019.
“This timely, bittersweet immigration story will resonate powerfully with readers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“As it chronicles immigrant tragedy and triumph, this provocative book also reveals the dark underside of the American judicial system and the many pitfalls for people of color within a landscape of white privilege. A candid and moving memoir.”
—Kirkus
“A worthy addition to immigration discourse, this book is a raw and engaging glimpse into the challenges immigrant families face that are either too traumatic or mundane to land on the news.”
—BookPage
About Here We Are
Here We Are is a heart-wrenching memoir about an immigrant family’s American Dream, the justice system that took it away, and the daughter who fought to get it back, from NPR correspondent Aarti Namdev Shahani.
The Shahanis came to Queens—from India, by way of Casablanca—in the 1980s. They were undocumented for a few unsteady years and then, with the arrival of their green cards, they thought they’d made it. This is the story of how they did, and didn’t; the unforeseen obstacles that propelled them into years of disillusionment and heartbreak; and the strength of a family determined to stay together.
Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares follows the lives of Aarti, the precocious scholarship kid at one of Manhattan’s most elite prep schools, and her dad, the shopkeeper who mistakenly sells watches and calculators to the notorious Cali drug cartel. Together, the two represent the extremes that coexist in our country, even within a single family, and a truth about immigrants that gets lost in the headlines. It isn’t a matter of good or evil; it’s complicated.
Ultimately, Here We Are is a coming-of-age story, a love letter from an outspoken modern daughter to her soft-spoken Old World father. She never expected they’d become best friends.

Barbara Kingsolver - How to Fly (Virtual Event)
2020-10-04 16:00 - 18:00
In this intimate collection, the beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and more than a dozen other New York Times bestsellers, winner or finalist for the Pulitzer and countless other prizes, now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are smartly crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous.
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.
Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.
Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling works of fiction, including the novels, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her body of work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Conversations with Authors - Bobbie Ann Mason (Virtual Event)
2020-10-04 16:00 - 18:00
Bobbie Ann Mason‘s new release, Dear Ann, is a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love.
Her first short stories were published in The New Yorker, during the 1980s renaissance of the short story, when writers such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff came to prominence. Her first book of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The title story, “Shiloh,” about a disabled trucker whose wife is not used to having him at home, has been widely anthologized in college textbooks. The couple’s trip to the Civil War battleground of Shiloh began for Mason a recurring preoccupation with the theme of war.
Her first novel, In Country, is taught widely in classes and was made into a Norman Jewison film starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. It is about a teenager whose father died in Vietnam before she was born, and who is now coming of age, desperate to know more about him. The Girl in the Blue Beret ventures into World War II and the ways it is remembered. Her memoir, Clear Springs, about an American farm family throughout the twentieth century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her book of linked stories, Nancy Culpepper, is inspired by this family, and she says that while the circumstances are different, this is the work of fiction most closely identified with her own life and sensibility.

Conversations with Authors - P. J. O'Rourke (Virtual Event)
2020-10-03 16:00 - 18:00
P. J. O’Rourke‘s latest work, A Cry from the Far Middle, asks his fellow Americans to take it down a notch, offering a new collection of essays about our nation’s propensity for anger and perplexity.
P. J. has written twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He is also an H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. He lives in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.
Michael Krasny has been in broadcast journalism since 1983. He was with ABC in both radio and television and migrated to public broadcasting in 1993. He has been Professor of English at San Francisco State University and also taught at Stanford, the University of San Francisco and the University of California, as well as in the Fulbright International Institutes. A veteran interviewer for the nationally broadcast City Arts and Lectures, he is the author of a number of books, including Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, Spiritual Envy, and Let There Be Laughter, as well as the twenty-four lecture series Short Story Masterpieces.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #29
2020-10-02 18:00 - 19:00
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
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If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
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We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Nomadic Press is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #28
Time: Oct 2, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 832 0891 3825
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Virtual Event: Yamile Saied Méndez
2020-10-02 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Join us on Friday, October 2nd at 6pm PDT, when Yamile Saied Méndez dicusses her YA debut novel, Furia, on Zoom!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82109506823
Webinar ID: 821 0950 6823
About Furia
A powerful, #ownvoices contemporary YA for fans of The Poet X and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter set in Argentina, about a rising soccer star who must put everything on the line—even her blooming love story—to follow her dreams.
In Rosario, Argentina, Camila Hassan lives a double life.
At home, she is a careful daughter, living within her mother’s narrow expectations, in her rising-soccer-star brother’s shadow, and under the abusive rule of her short-tempered father.
On the field, she is La Furia, a powerhouse of skill and talent. When her team qualifies for the South American tournament, Camila gets the chance to see just how far those talents can take her. In her wildest dreams, she’d get an athletic scholarship to a North American university.
But the path ahead isn’t easy. Her parents don’t know about her passion. They wouldn’t allow a girl to play fútbol—and she needs their permission to go any farther. And the boy she once loved is back in town. Since he left, Diego has become an international star, playing in Italy for the renowned team Juventus. Camila doesn’t have time to be distracted by her feelings for him. Things aren’t the same as when he left: she has her own passions and ambitions now, and La Furia cannot be denied. As her life becomes more complicated, Camila is forced to face her secrets and make her way in a world with no place for the dreams and ambition of a girl like her.
Filled with authentic details and the textures of day-to-day life in Argentina, heart-soaring romance, and breathless action on the pitch, Furia is the story of a girl’s journey to make her life her own.
About Yamile Saied Méndez
Yamile (sha-MEE-lay) Saied Méndez is a fútbol-obsessed Argentine American who loves meteor showers, summer, astrology, and pizza. She lives in Utah with her Puerto Rican husband and their five kids, two adorable dogs, and one majestic cat. An inaugural Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, she’s a graduate of Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Méndez is also part of Las Musas, the first collective of women and nonbinary Latinx middle grade and young adult authors. Furia is her first novel for young adult readers.

Daniel Mendelsohn Acclaimed writer discusses his new book, Three Rings, with local Chris Jennings
2020-10-01 18:00 - 20:00
Daniel Mendelsohn is joined in conversation by Chris Jennings to discuss his latest book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (University of Virginia Press).
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel. Register here.
About Three Rings
In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.
Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own–works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul… Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus–a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years–resulted in his banishment… and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books–a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father–that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
About the authors
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million as well as three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. He teaches literature at Bard College.
Chris Jennings is the author of Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. He graduated from Deep Springs College and Wesleyan University. He lives in Northern California with his family and dog.

Zoetrope Magazine Fall Issue Celebration
2020-10-01 18:00 - 20:00
City Lights celebrates the award winning literary periodical’s fall issue. Editor Michael Ray and Managing Editor Manjula Martin are joined by several contributors in an afternoon of readings and celebration.

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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 the journal (link to be posted soon)
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Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, Zoetrope: All-Story is a quarterly print magazine of short fiction, one-act plays, and essays on film. Among the most celebrated literary periodicals in the world, it has won every major story award, including four National Magazine Awards for Fiction, along with a number of design commendations. The magazine’s contributors comprise the most promising and significant writers of our era: Mary Gaitskill, Colum McCann, Rachel Cusk, Jim Shepard, Elena Ferrante, Daniel Alarcón, Karen Russell, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson, Elizabeth McCracken, David Mamet, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Pedro Almodóvar, Ethan Coen, Yoko Ogawa, Charles D’Ambrosio, Neil Jordan, Haruki Murakami, and many more.
Zoetrope: All-Story is also an art magazine—the editors invite a different artist to design each edition in its entirety. Past guest designers include David Lynch, Zaha Hadid, William Eggleston, Agnès Varda, Kara Walker, David Bowie, Ed Ruscha, Iggy Pop, Guillermo del Toro, Abbas Kiarostami, Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, PJ Harvey, Elizabeth Peyton, Gus Van Sant, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Julian Schnabel, Mary Ellen Mark, David Byrne, Helmut Newton, Lou Reed, and John Baldessari, among others.
The magazine is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December and printed in California by Community Printers, Inc.

Reverend Al Sharpton - Rise Up (Virtual Event)
2020-10-01 17:30 - 19:30
A rousing call to action for today’s turbulent political moment, drawing on lessons learned from Reverend Sharpton’s unique experience as a politician, television and radio host, and civil rights leader.
When the young Alfred Charles Sharpton told his mother he wanted to be a preacher, little did he know that his journey would also lead him to prominence as a politician, founder of the National Action Network, civil rights activist, and television and radio talk show host. His enduring ability and willingness to take on the political power structure makes him the preeminent voice for the modern era, a time unprecedented in its challenges.
In Rise Up, Reverend Sharpton revisits the highlights of the Obama administration, the 2016 election and Trump’s subsequent hold on the GOP, and draws on his decades-long experience with other key players in politics and activism, including Shirley Chisholm, Hillary Clinton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and more.
Beginning with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson and closing with Rev. Sharpton’s moving eulogy for George Floyd, Rise Up offers timeless lessons for anyone who’s stood at the crossroads of their personal or political life, weighing their choices of how to proceed.
