Litseen

Ashley Nelson Levy Celebrates her debut novel, Immediate Family
2021-08-04 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Ashley Nelson Levy joins us to celebrate the publication of her stunning debut novel, Immediate Family (FSG).
“Composed with emotional candor and intellectual clarity, Immediate Family is about the improbable relentlessness of love. It’s a testament to the reality that no family, regardless of origin or composition, is ever fully formed: most days the best we can do is keep each other from coming undone. It’s a book that refuses tidy conclusions, and yet by the time I turned the last page, this book that had undone me had also left me magnificently whole.” —Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Immediate Family
It is the day of her brother’s wedding and our narrator is still struggling with her toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech and she doesn’t know where to begin, how to put words to their kind of love. She was nine years old when she traveled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, and shared bucolic childhood in Northern California. Yet when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn’t expect.
What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny’s case file. It’s also a confession of sorts to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding wane, she uncovers the words that can’t and won’t be said aloud.
In Immediate Family, a tender and fierce debut novel, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the enduring bond between two siblings and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
About Ashley Nelson Levy
Ashley Nelson Levy received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Clein-Lemann Esperanza Fellowship. Her work has been a notable mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she’s the recipient of the Bambi Holmes Award for Emerging Writers. In 2015, she cofounded Transit Books, an independent publishing house with a focus on international literature. Immediate Family is her first book.

Ashley Nelson Levy and Ismail Muhammad
2021-08-04 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Celebrates her debut novel, Immediate Family

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Wednesday, August 4, 2021 – 7:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Ashley Nelson Levy joins us to celebrate the publication of her stunning debut novel, Immediate Family (FSG). Ashley will be joined in conversation by writer and critic Ismail Muhammad.
“Composed with emotional candor and intellectual clarity, Immediate Family is about the improbable relentlessness of love. It’s a testament to the reality that no family, regardless of origin or composition, is ever fully formed: most days the best we can do is keep each other from coming undone. It’s a book that refuses tidy conclusions, and yet by the time I turned the last page, this book that had undone me had also left me magnificently whole.” —Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Immediate Family
It is the day of her brother’s wedding and our narrator is still struggling with her toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother, Danny, has asked her to give a speech and she doesn’t know where to begin, how to put words to their kind of love. She was nine years old when she traveled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, and shared bucolic childhood in Northern California. Yet when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn’t expect.
What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an attempt at a full accounting of their years growing up, invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny’s case file. It’s also a confession of sorts to the parts of her life that she has kept from him, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding wane, she uncovers the words that can’t and won’t be said aloud.
In Immediate Family, a tender and fierce debut novel, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the enduring bond between two siblings and the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
About Ashley Nelson Levy
Ashley Nelson Levy received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Clein-Lemann Esperanza Fellowship. Her work has been a notable mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she’s the recipient of the Bambi Holmes Award for Emerging Writers. In 2015, she cofounded Transit Books, an independent publishing house with a focus on international literature. Immediate Family is her first book.

Brian Evenson in conversation with Sarah Rose Etter
2021-08-04 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
eading from
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
published by Coffee House Press
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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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A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men—of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.
Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction. He has received three O. Henry Prizes for his fiction. His most recent book, Song for the Unraveling of the World, won a Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction and the Balcones Fiction Prize. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, and The Book of X, her first novel, which is the winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for novel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Cut, VICE, and more. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland.
Praise for The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
“Masterful and foreboding, each story in The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a tightly wound mystery which unravels just enough to show us the dark depths of the human condition. From a curator intent on destroying all evidence of human life to a house intent on consuming its inhabitants, don’t be surprised if you catch yourself holding your breath as you enter these fantastic worlds. Brian Evenson is one of our most brilliant minds, and he has outdone himself again.” —Sarah Rose Etter
“Literary horror at its most existential, visceral, and wonderful. These strange stories build upon each other to create an uncanny shadow universe rich, vivid and shimmering with every kind of terror. Another brilliant collection.” —Mona Awad
“In this rich offering, a true collection of worlds, Evenson gives us visions of the future that are avenues to the past; glimpses of the strange where we find what’s deeply familiar; in the living, the dead; and in these fantastic stories, the clearest, starkest portrait of our depraved reality. Evenson at his greatest—visceral, relentless, alive.” —Samantha Hunt
“Like with Borges or Kafka, every one of Brian Evenson’s stories are a whole world distilled down to a few pages, and rendered in a pointillism that feels not just abstract, but cosmic, yet is gritty all the same, and leaves a distinct, bloody residue in your mind, in your heart. And then you can no longer look at the world the way you used to.” —Stephen Graham Jones

On the Practice of Presence for Healing Personal and Collective Grief
2021-08-04 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual
In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in both our bodies and our communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties in our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief, prioritizing our wholeness, humanity, and inherent divinity.
Social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers to those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present and openhearted with their grief. In her latest book, Finding Refuge, Michelle uses personal narrative, meditation, and journaling practices to explore being present with our hearts, empowering us to see that we each have a role to play in taking intentional action to build momentum toward a shifting what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Through her work and writing, Michelle invites us to pick up the shattered parts of ourselves and remember our strength, wholeness, and sacredness through the practice of presence and attending to our grief.
Join program innovation leader in mindfulness, trauma, and racial healing Jenee Johnson in a conversation with Michelle about her latest book, her life and her work, and learn how to process your own grief, as well as family, community, and global grief.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/johnson-cassandra-michelle-august-4-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

James Rebanks and Nick Offerman
2021-08-04 08:00 - 17:00 | online, CA, United States
On his acclaimed new book, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

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Friday, August 6, 2021 – 12:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Acclaimed author James Rebanks joins us from the UK to discuss his new book, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey (Custom House). James will be joined in conversation by actor and author Nick Offerman.
“James Rebanks’s story of his family’s farm is just about perfect. It belongs with the finest writing of its kind.” — Wendell Berry
“One of the most important books of our time. Anyone who cares about our land – indeed, anyone who buys food – should read this book. Told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations – where we went wrong and how we can change our ways – is at the forefront of a revolution. It will be our land’s salvation.” — Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Pastoral Song
The Acclaimed International Bestseller * Named “Nature Book of the Year” by the Sunday Times (London) * Shortlisted for the the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize
As a boy, James Rebanks’s grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.
Hailed as “a brilliant, beautiful book” by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.
About James Rebanks
James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism. He uses his popular Twitter feed – @herdyshepherd1 – to share updates on the shepherding year. He is the author of The Shepherd’s Life.

Marc Anthony Richardson and Carolina de Robertis
2021-08-04 08:00 - 17:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25 AT 6PM PT WHEN MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON JOINS US TO DISCUSS HIS NOVEL, MESSIAHS, WITH CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS AT 9TH AVE!
Masks Required While In-Store
You can join this event virtually by registering at the link below.
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cqwbFFuBQIS0qvGhukkbow
Praise for Messiahs
“Messiahs is a fever dream of storytelling. It explores racism and interracial conflict, the deadly prison industrial complex, climate emergency, social death, and more in prose that unfurls like waves of sound. Bleak, though not without hope, challenging, though with numerous rewards along the way, innovative from start to finish, Messiahs is a marvel.”
—John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and author of Annotations and Counternarratives
“In Messiahs, Marc Anthony Richardson gives us an innovative, intelligent, and insightful take on several American obsessions, including punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty. As much as this layered narrative presents a warning about things to come, it also offers a profound examination of rebirth, redemption, second-acts. All in all an unnerving, uncanny, and challenging read on many levels, but well worth the effort.”
—Jeffery Renard Allen, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank
About Messiahs
A fiercely ecstatic tale of betrayal and self-sacrifice.
Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform-“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion. The lovers begin their affair by exchanging letters, and after his release, they withdraw to a remote cabin during a torrential winter, haunted by their respective past tragedies. Savagely ostracized by her family for years, the woman is asked by her mother to take the proxy initiative for her brother-creating a conflict she cannot bear to share with her lover. Comprised of ten poetic paragraphs, Messiahs‘ rigorous style and sustained intensity equals agony and ecstasy.
About Marc Anthony Richardson
Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, and a Hurston/Wright fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Keith Boykin
2021-08-04 08:00 - 17:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 AT 6PM PT WHEN KEITH BOYKIN DISCUSSES HIS BOOK, RACE AGAINST TIME: THE POLITICS OF A DARKENING AMERICA, AT 9TH AVE!
Masks Required for In-Person Event
Join us online by registering at the link below
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_i2ifIaLzTJS28dSVTok04Q
Praise for Race Against Time
“With clear insights and provocative analysis, Keith Boykin showcases why he is one of the country’s foremost experts on race and politics in America. This book is timely, relevant, and important.”—Leah Wright Rigueur, associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University
“Race Against Time is Keith Boykin’s best book yet in a long list of books and anthologies that have helped define what cultural criticism is. This book is also an account of what it means to be overlooked in a capitalist landscape that denies the existence and contribution of black queer citizens. What floors me is that Boykin’s genius—from all the political and racial history from Reconstruction onward, to his well-wrought recounting of the antics of US presidents from Reagan to Trump—still allows him to remain a man of hope and a writer that affirms the spirit in essays that speak to us as a comforting brother would.”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tadition
“In evocative fashion, and through the depth of his personal experiences at the highest levels of American politics, Keith Boykin traces the parameters of America’s ‘never-ending civil war,’ from the shock of Clinton’s Black-voter-driven presidency though Bush and Obama and the white nationalist nightmare of Donald Trump. Race Against Time is essential reading at a calamitous time.”—Joy Reid, host of MSNBC’s The ReidOut
About Race Against Time
A Cold Civil War has engulfed the nation.
After a deadly pandemic, shocking incidents of police brutality, a racial justice crisis, and the fall of a dangerous demagogue, America remains more divided than at any time in decades. At the heart of this national crisis is the fear of a darkening America—a country in which there is no longer a predominant white majority.
As the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, its leaders have incited white Americans in a last-ditch race against time to stop the advance of a new, multiracial emerging majority. Keith Boykin, long time political commentator, has watched this white resentment consume the GOP over the course of a life in politics, activism, and journalism. He has also observed the divisions among Democrats, as white progressives have postponed demands for full racial equity, while Black voters have often been too forgiving of party leaders who have failed to deliver. America can no longer avoid its long overdue reckoning with the past, Boykin argues. With the familiarity of personal experience and the acuity of historical insight, Boykin urges us to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and save the union, not just by making Black lives matter, but by making Black lives equal.
About Keith Boykin
Keith Boykin is a CNN political commentator, New York Times best-selling author, and a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton. Boykin teaches at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York and previously taught at American University in Washington, D.C. He is a co-founder and first board president of the National Black Justice Coalition. He was a co-host of the BET Networks talk show “My Two Cents,” starred on the Showtime reality television series “American Candidate,” was an associate producer of the film “Dirty Laundry,” and he has appeared on many other TV shows, including BET’s “Being Mary Jane.” A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Boykin is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of four books. He lives in New York City.​​​​​​​

Did I Say You Could Go: Melanie Gideon in conversation with Natalie Baszile
2021-08-04 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of DID I SAY YOU COULD GO with author Melanie Gideon in conversation with Natalie Baszile (author of WE ARE EACH OTHER’S HARVEST: CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN FARMERS, LAND, AND LEGACY).
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84357144645 and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
Order your copy of DID I SAY YOU COULD GO at http://bit.ly/ggpDidISay, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/DidISayAB. Order your copy of WE ARE EACH OTHER’S HARVEST in print from GGP at http://bit.ly/ggpHarvest or in #audiobook from Libro.fm at http://bit.ly/HarvestAB.
Description

A suspenseful, gripping novel about families and friendships torn apart at the seams by obsession, secrets, and betrayal with relentless twists and turns that hurtle forward to a shocking confrontation.
When Ruth, a wealthy divorcé​e, offers to host the Hillside Academy kindergarten meet-and-greet, she hopes this will be a fresh start for her and her introverted daughter, Marley. Finally, they’ll be accepted into a tribe. Marley will make friends and Ruth will be welcomed by the mothers. Instead, the parents are turned off by Ruth’s ostentatious wealth and before kindergarten even begins, Ruth and Marley are outcasts.
The last guest to arrive at the meet-and-greet is Gemma, a widow and a single mother to her daughter, Bee. Ruth sets her sights on the mother-daughter duo, and soon the two families are inseparable. Ruth takes Gemma and Bee on Aspen vacations, offers VIP passes to Cirque du Soleil, and pays for dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants. For Gemma, who lives paycheck to paycheck, Ruth’s largesse is seductive, but as the years go by, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s accruing an increasingly unpayable debt. When Ruth’s affair with a married Hillside dad is exposed, and she’s publicly shunned, Gemma uses it to sever ties with Ruth.
Six years later, when Gemma finds herself embroiled in a scandal of her own—Ruth comes to her defense. Their renewed friendship rehabilitates their reputations, but once again, Gemma starts to feel trapped as Ruth grows more and more obsessed with their relationship.
A relentless page-turner, Did I Say You Could Go is the story of friendships steeped in lies and duplicity. It’s about two families who, when pushed to extremes, cross the line with devastating results.
About Melanie Gideon

Melanie Gideon is the bestselling author of the novels, Valley of the Moon and Wife 22, as well as the memoir The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After. Her books have been translated into thirty-one languages. Wife 22 is currently in development. She has written for The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Times (London), the Daily Mail (London), and other publications. She was born and raised in Rhode Island and now lives in the Bay Area.
About Natalie Baszile

Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel Queen Sugar, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, longlisted for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and adapted for television by writer/director Ava DuVernay and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN. Baszile holds a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. She lives in San Francisco.

Annie Zaleski with Kevin Smokler / Duran Duran's Rio
2021-08-04 08:00 - 17:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host Annie Zaleski for her new book, Duran Duran’s Rio, part of the acclaimed 331/3 book series. She’ll be in conversation with Booksmith BFF and author of Brat Pack America and Practical Classics, Kevin Smokler. Join us!
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Duran Duran’s Rio here and we’ll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).
We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
About the book
In the ’80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade’s music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act’s breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music’s art-rock-the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as “Hungry Like the Wolf” and the title track.
However, Rio wasn’t a success everywhere at first; in fact, the LP had to be buffed-up with remixes and reissued before it found an audience in America. The album was further buoyed by colorful music videos, which established Duran Duran as leaders of an MTV-driven second British Invasion, and the group’s cutting-edge visual aesthetic. Via extensive new interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration-and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist.
About the authors
Cleveland, Ohio-based author, journalist and editor Annie Zaleski is an award-winning writer with profiles, interviews, and criticism in a variety of publications. Bylines include Rolling Stone, NPR Music, The Guardian, Salon, Time, Billboard, The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, Cleveland Plain Dealer, andLas Vegas Weekly. She also contributed liner notes to the 2016 reissue of R.E.M.’s Out of Time and Game Theory’s 2020 collection Across The Barrier Of Sound: PostScript.
Kevin Smokler (@weegee) is a writer, documentary filmmaker and event host with a focus on pop culture. He’s the author of the book Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies (2016) and the essay collection Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven’t Touched Since High School (2013). In 2020, he co-directed the documentary film Vinyl Nation on the contemporary renaissance of vinyl records in America, which has screened at 27 film festivals in the US, Europe and Australia. He’s appeared in conversation onstage with comedians, playwrights, authors, magazine publishers, architects, musicians and filmmakers for the last 2 decades and lives in San Francisco.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
2021-08-03 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh join us to discuss their startlingly relevant new book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine (MCD).
“Until Proven Safe combines history, geography, epidemiology, and the ethics of space exploration—how can this be? Because, as the authors explain in a very entertaining and wide-ranging way, quarantine, ironically enough, crosses borders of space and time to make a complex knot of stories. Timely, eye-opening, provocative—you will see the world differently after reading it.” —Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning novelist, and author of Ministry for the Future
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast page.
REGISTER HERE
About Until Proven Safe
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have been researching quarantine since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Until Proven Safe, they bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent reading for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces–––biological, political, technological––that shape our modern world.
Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe.
Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus.
But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction.
We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Until Proven Safe helps us make sense of our new reality through a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.
About the authors
NICOLA TWILLEY is co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and an award-winning contributor to The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles.
GEOFF MANAUGH is the author of the New York Times-bestseller A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Chaney Kwak in conversation with Oscar Villalon
2021-08-03 19:00 - 20:00 | 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 | CA
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
———-
(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 | CA
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.
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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 | CA
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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
____________________
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 | CA
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 | CA
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.
———-
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 | CA
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 | CA
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.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required
———-
(CLICK HERE) to register.
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book.
———–
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 | CA
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 | CA
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 | CA
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 | CA
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
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