Archive
Friends, below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
ERIKA MAILMAN
reading & book signing for The Witch’s Trinity
Tuesday, January 27 at 7:30 pm
Set in 1507, The Witch’s Trinity tells the disturbing story of small town in Germany whose residents turn on themselves after a famine strikes and a friar arrives from a large city, claiming the town is under the spell of witches in league with the devil. Erika Mailman’s debut novel is both a historical work and, in the words of Khaled Hosseini, a “gripping, well-told story of faith and truth.”
Erika Mailman can trace her own roots to a Massachusetts relative who twice stood trial for witchcraft. A member of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, Mailman is a columnist and the author of earlier books on local history.
RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
Reading & book signing for Best Sex Writing 2009
Monday, February 2 at 7:30 pm
Intelligent, upbeat, and sex-positive, the pieces in Best Sex Writing 2009 offer an in-depth look at sex the way it actually happens in America today. This anthology includes gubernatorial sex scandals, rape fantasies, "Dear John" letters, teen sexuality, purity balls, the science of screwing, bathroom sex, and other topics scrutinized by noted columnists, bloggers, and authors in pieces that are funny, informative, challenging, sexy, and serious.
Contributors and local writers Tracy Clark-Flory and Violet Blue will be among those joining Bussel for this Booksmith event.
Rachel Kramer Bussel is a columnist for the Village Voice and is senior editor at Penthouse Variations. She has written for a long list of publications including Bust, Cosmopolitan, Penthouse, Radar, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York. She has been quoted in the New York Times, USA Today, Maxim UK, and other publications, and has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show, The Berman and Berman Show, NY1, and Showtime's Family Business. She has hosted In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series since October 2005, about which the New York Times' UrbanEye newsletter said she "welcomes eroticism of all stripes, spots and textures." She blogs at lustylady.blogspot.com and cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com.
SHARON DOUBIAGO
Reading & book signing for Love on the Streets
Tuesday, February 10 at 7:30 pm
Sharon Doubiago is a prolific poet who knows herself intimately and is deeply committed to her craft. On her latest collection, Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems, she confidently states "the new poems just keep coming." Love on the Streets features selections from four of Doubiago's books of poetry, two of which are book length poems (a style for which she is noted), Hard Country and South America Mi Hija. It also includes poems from the collections Psyche Drives the Coast and Body and Soul. Among Doubiago's other work is a third book length poem, The Husband Arcane: The Arcane of O, and two short fiction collections: The Book of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, and El Nino.
Doubiago holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and the Oregon Book Award for Psyche Drives the Coast. She has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. Doubiago is an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota and a board member of PEN Oakland, a chapter of PEN Center USA, which supports the literary arts within the multicultural community.
PETER FOGTDAL
Reading & book signing for The Tsar's Dwarf
Tuesday, February 17 at 7:30 pm
Having written 12 novels in Danish, The Tsar's Dwarf is Peter Fogtdal's first book to be translated in English. In the novel, Soerine, a deformed female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great, who is smitten by her freakishness and intellect. Against her will, the Tsar takes Soerine to St. Petersburg, where she becomes a jester in his court. There, she lives a life that both compels and repels her. The Tsar's Dwarf is a masterfully told and brilliantly translated novel about aberration, endurance, and the human condition.
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark May 22, 1956, Peter Fogtdal had an obscene amount of pimples as a teenager. He studied in the US from 1977-82 at University of Florida and Cal State Fullerton, and decided that he wanted to be a writer and get laid. He succeeded on the first account. Returning to Denmark in 1982, Fogtdal worked as a freelancer for Denmark's national radio as a DJ and a satirical writer. He has written twelve novels in Danish, and in 2005, won the Francophone Literature Prize for Le Front Chantilly (Flodeskumsfronten). Fogtdal shares his time between Copenhagen, Denmark and teaching literature and writing at Portland State University in Oregon.
EUGENE MIRMAN
Reading & book signing for The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life
Friday, February 20 at 7:30 pm
No one understands the complexities of modern life better than Eugene Mirman, claims Eugene Mirman, and anyone seeking guidance from a man who has lived through everything (except the Great Depression, the Spanish-American War, and Jerry Lee Lewis's sex scandal) won't resist this charmingly hysterical guidebook. In The Will to Whatevs, Mirman advises on many of life's difficult challenges, such as: how to become ultra-popular in high school (without "putting out" -- whatever that is); discover somewhere between four and two thousand ways to overcome social anxiety (sadly, closer to four); and how to start a band, become an artist, or disappoint your parents by getting cast on a reality TV show!
Eugene Mirman is a New York City based comedian, writer and actor. He has appeared in his own half-hour special on Comedy Central, in a recurring role on HBO's Flight of the Conchords, on Conan O'Brien and Carson Daly, MTV, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Home Movies, Lucy, Daughter of the Devil and in the new Adult Swim live action series Delocated. He's released two comedy albums: The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman (voted Best of 2004 by Time Out and The Onion) and En Garde, Society! Mirman tours the US regularly with countless comedians and has also appeared with bands such as Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse, The Shins, Cake, and Tegan and Sara.
KIM ADDONIZIO
Reading & book signing for Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
Tuesday, February 24 at 7:30 pm
In Ordinary Genius, Kim Addonizio presents exciting new insights into the creative process, craft, and the lessons of her own creative subjects--love, loss, identity, community, along with a heady variety of writing exercises (and innovative ways to use the Internet). Chapters on gender, race, and class challenge readers to explore their creative vision more deeply. Addonizio, hailed for her passionate, award-winning poetry, shares her breakthroughs and frustrations frankly, including samples of rejection slips. She offers not only encouragement but also a wealth of knowledge about form and structure, metaphor and rhythm, revision, and that elusive goal: publishing.
Kim Addonizio is the author of four poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, will be published in October 2009. Her first novel, Little Beauties was chosen as "Best Book of the Month" by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released in 2007. She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing,"; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure; and the anthology Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil. Addonizio's awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.
VERONICA CHATER
Reading & book signing for Waiting for the Apocalypse
Friday, February 27 at 7:30 pm
Chater brings an ear for dialogue and an eye for the absurd to Waiting for the Apocalypse, a tragicomic debut memoir about coming of age in the 1970s in an ultraconservative Catholic family.
It is 1972, in San Jose, California, and 10-year-old Veronica's parents believe that Vatican II has corrupted the Catholic Church. Pitting himself against the Church and modern America, her father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima. But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and Veronica and her siblings run feral on the streets as their parents pray for a miracle and the family falls into poverty. Forced to return to the Bay Area broke and disappointed, they attend the Latin Mass in truck garages, backyards, and abandoned buildings, and join the Catholic counter-revolution--an underground network of warrior monks trained to think and fight like the Christian crusaders of the twelfth century. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she is forbidden to enjoy anything modern--clothes, movies, and music--but learns to think for herself through journal-writing and poetry, and ultimately rebels against a fanaticism that has long since stopped making sense.
Veronica began her writing career at the age of seven on her father's Underwood typewriter in her family's backyard. When it became clear that she would have to finance her career by working, she sought out jobs that promised to supply creative material, among them food waitress, limousine driver, airplane re-fueler, costume seamstress, convenience store cashier (graveyard shift), restaurant prep-cook, door-to-door toothbrush salesperson, criminal background check person, cocktail waitress, lost-luggage handler, housemaid, bartender, size 6 clothes model, carpenter's assistant, African hyena research assistant, theater stagehand, mail delivery person, English language tutor, wedding reception caterer, car mechanic (60's VW's only), landscape gardener, movie extra, clean-room technician, hybrid-artificial pancreas designer (California patent # 2134088), speed typist, editor's assistant, and titillating story-writer for various women's magazines, including a popular national weekly.
CARA BLACK
Reading and book signing for Murder in the Latin Quarter
Thursday, March 5 at 7:30 p.m.
Murder in the Latin Quarter is the 9th book in the best-selling and award-nominated Aimée Leduc Investigation series. In it, a Haitian woman arrives at the office of Leduc Detective and announces that she is Aimée’s sister. A virtual orphan since her mother’s disappearance and her father’s death, Aimée is thrilled. Her partner, René, is wary of this stranger, but Aimée embraces her and soon finds herself involved in murky Haitian politics leading to murder.
Cara Black frequents a Paris little known outside the beaten tourist track, a Paris she discovers on research trips and interviews with French police and private detectives. She is a San Francisco Library Laureate and a member of the Paris Sociéte Historique in the Marais. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and their teenage son.