Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
PAUL MADONNA
Exhibit and book signing for Haight Street Art Walk
Friday, April 24 from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m.Over twenty businesses in Haight-Ashbury are joining forces to organize a monthly Art Walk on the last Friday of every month. The entire neighborhood will be celebrating local artists, and The Booksmith is excited to have Paul Madonna hang out with us for the evening surrounded by his art and books.
Paul Madonna's strip, All Over Coffee, appears every Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle and on SFGate.com. Paul's drawings and prints are shown in museums, galleries, restaurants and cafes, and in 2007 a collection of All Over Coffee was published by City Lights Books. Other work can be found in various publications including the Believer Magazine, A Writer's San Francisco, and the new collection Artists Sketchbooks. In 1994 Paul received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and that same year he was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD Magazine, for which he proudly received no money. Paul currently lives with his wife in San Francisco.
GABRIELLE BELL AND ARIEL SCHRAG
Reading, slideshows, and book signing for Cecil and Jordan in New York and Likewise
Tuesday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m.Cecil and Jordan in New York, the new collection from Gabrielle Bell, represents her short comics work that has been published in various anthologies over the past five years. The surrealist title story, in which a young woman turns herself into a chair so as not to be too much of a bother to those around her, is being adapted into a short film, Interior Design, by director Michel Gondry as part of the Tokyo! trilogy released this spring.
Set in Berkeley, Ariel Schrag's Likewise takes us into the holy grail of teenagers, every bit as terrifying as it is liberating: senior year. Struggling with a major longing for her ex-girlfriend who has gone away to college, her parents' post-divorce relationship, anxiety over the future, and all the graphic details of her complicated life, Ariel sets out to document everything and everyone.
Gabrielle Bell was born in England and raised in California. In 1998, she began to collect her "Book of" miniseries (Book of Sleep, Book of Insomnia, Book of Black, etc), which resulted in When I'm Old and Other Stories. In 2001 she moved to New York and released her autobiographical series Lucky. Her work has been selected for the 2007 and 2009 Best American Comics and the Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is working on a second volume of Lucky.
Ariel Schrag was born in Berkeley, CA. She is the author of the autobiographical graphic novels Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise, which chronicle her four years at Berkeley High School. She was a writer for seasons three and four of the hit Showtime series, The L Word. Ariel's illustrations and comics have appeared in publications such as The San Francisco Chronicle, Jane, Paper, and The Village Voice. She divides her time between Los Angeles and New York.
BEN GREENMAN
Reading & book signing for Please Step Back
Thursday, April 30 at 7:30 p.m.Please Step Back is a swirling Sixties saga of the rise and fall of Rock Foxx, whose unprecedented mixed-race/mixed gender band makes socially conscious music that takes him to the height of worldwide rock stardom. But then his music begins to darken and disappear amidst rumors of sexual debauchery and drugs and violence, even as the culture itself explodes into assassinations and riots until people ask themselves: Whatever happened to Rock Foxx?
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the books Superbad, Superworse, A Circle is A Balloon and Compass Both, and Correspondences. His short fiction, journalism, and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney's and the Paris Review. He lives in Brooklyn.
JOHN WRAY
Reading & book signing for Lowboy
Friday, May 1 at 7:30 p.m.Lowboy is about a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who is on a mission to stop the planet’s destruction by radical climate change. He has six hours, and the only way to do it is by losing his virginity. The Daily Beast called it the underground novel of the year. Publisher's Weekly said "Wray deploys brilliant hallucinatory visuals, including chilling descriptions of the subway system and an imaginary river flowing beneath Manhattan. In his previous works, Wray has shown that he’s not a stranger to dark themes, and with this tightly wound novel, he reaches new heights."
John Wray was born in Washington, D.C., where his parents, both scientists, were employed by the National Institute of Health. Wray majored in biology at Oberlin College, intending to become an ornithologist; in the end, he had to content himself with becoming a birdwatcher. Wray’s first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and won a Whiting Award in Fiction. This past year, Granta magazine selected him as one of the best American novelists under the age of thirty-five. For the last seven years, Wray has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, across the street from the Prospect Park Bandshell. He has no intention of moving.
TAMIM ANSARY
Reading & book signing for Destiny Disrupted
Monday, May 4 at 7:30 p.m.In the days after 9/11, Tamim Ansary became a regular on the airwaves in the United States, asked day after day to explain what had just happened to audiences across the country. Raised in Muslim Afghanistan (he is now based in Northern California), having contributed to and edited secondary school textbooks about world history, and possessing a warm and engaging manner and an ease with the role of “cultural interpreter,” Ansary had a unique perspective on and way of explaining U.S and Middle East relations to the masses. In his new book, Destiny Disrupted, Ansary again acts as cultural interpreter, this time covering much more than the significance and consequences of a single day: here, Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world sees it, from the time of Mohammed to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, and what the Islamic world makes of the Western version of those same events.
Tamim Ansary is the author of the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, and has been a major contributing writer to several secondary school history textbooks. Born in Afghanistan, he now lives in San Francisco, where he is director of the San Francisco Writers Workshop and writes a column for Encarta.com.
TIBET: 50 YEARS OF RESISTANCE AND EXILE
Panel discussion & screening for the 50th Anniversary of Tibet's Peaceful Resistance
Wednesday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m.The Booksmith is pleased to host a panel of four leading thinkers from the world of Tibetan arts and culture in discussion about Tibet's 50 years of peaceful resistance to the occupation by Chinese government. This event is presented under the aegis of Booksmith's social justice platform in collaboration with the Tibetan Association of Northern California.
Guests will include Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan woman poet to be published in the U.S. (Rules of the House, 2003); Topden Tsering, Berkeley-based writer, graphic artist, activist, and former Editor of The Tibetan Bulletin, the official journal of the Tibetan exile community; and Rosemary Rawcliffe, producer and director of international programs in television, film, video, and theater, including the The Women of Tibet film trilogy.
LOGAN AND NOAH MILLER
Reading, screening & book signing for Either You're In or You're In the Way
Thursday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m.When identical twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller’s homeless father died alone in a jail cell, they vowed come hell or high water that their feature film, Touching Home, would be made as a dedication to their love for him. Either You're In or You're in the Way is the amazing story of how—without a dime to their names nor a single meaningful contact in Hollywood—they managed to write, produce, act, and direct a feature film in under a year starring actor Ed Harris. Touching Home premiered at the coveted San Francisco International Film Festival last April and has won numerous audience awards.
With an alcoholic father who lived most of the time in his truck and a single mother trying to eke out a living to raise them, the Miller twins had a tough childhood. Their talent and athletic ability helped fuel their dream of becoming professional baseball players. When that dream failed, they scraped out an existence as bingo callers, ditch diggers, and house painters, and were eventually plucked out of obscurity by a high fashion modeling scout. In a particularly hilarious episode, the ultra famous fashion photographer David LaChapelle declares his intentions to put Noah in a g-string and paint his body gold. The twins escaped from the shoot, pocketing a large portion of the food from the catering table, and never looked back. Broke but not broken, they set their sights on making the film they had always talked about with their dad.
ANDY RASKIN
Launch party, reading and book signing for The Ramen King and I With sake tastings by True Sake
Tuesday, May 12 at 7:30 p.m.In The Ramen King and I, a "painfully humane, hilariously candid" (Publishers Weekly) memoir, Andy Raskin confronts a longtime pattern of romantic infidelity. Despair— and a bizarre series of adventures involving Japanese food—lead him to adopt Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, as an unlikely spiritual guide. Devouring Ando's books and essays (such as "Mankind is Noodlekind"), Raskin set out to meet the food pioneer—and to find the secret to a committed relationship.
Raskin's stories have been broadcast on public radio's All Things Considered and This American Life, and published in The New York Times, Gourmet, Wired, Women's Health, CNN/Money and Playboy (the Japanese edition). A judge for the 2009 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, Andy resides in San Francisco, where he's a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Sake tastings will poured by True Sake, the sake boutique in Hayes Valley.
ALEX HATCH
Discussion, slideshow, and book signing for Cracks in the Asphalt With community gardeners and beekeepers
Thursday, May 14 at 7:30 p.m.Cracks in the Asphalt is a one-of-a-kind guide book to 30 of San Francisco's Community Gardens. One important aspect of the book is to let readers know that these gardens were born out of the hard work of each group of neighborhood activists whose role was to not only create a garden where there was a dumping ground, but to create a sense of community as well. Because of this the gardens are situated over looking freeways, in downtown areas, in out of the way corners and busy neighborhoods.
Alex Hatch is a native San Franciscan who believes in the preservation of open space through the development of community gardens by and for the benefit of city residents.She has been a teacher, gardener and pruner in the Bay Area for 15 years, and between occupations has traveled throughout the world as well as living in Europe and Japan. Over time Alex has observed San Francisco becoming overdeveloped where much of its green spaces are threatened. This book is an attempt to introduce the readers to the necessity as well as the charms of green and open community spaces. Alex lives in San Francisco with her life partner Emily (who wouldn't put her hands in dirt but who loves these gardens) and their two cats Pasha and Nemo.
And just in case all those goodies aren't enough, a parting gift for you. Here's the latest comic offering from our very own Sean Chiki: "I Remember Lemuria", a take on the Shaver mystery.
JOSHUA MOHR
Launch party, reading, and book signing for Some Things That Meant the World to Me
Monday, June 1 at 7:30 p.m.Enter Damascus, the womb-like bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, and you’ll find Rhonda, a thirty-year-old man suffering from depersonalization—a disorder allowing him to reconfigure his reality to tolerate trauma. Some Things That Meant the World to Me is the gritty tale of a band of outcasts struggling to make sense of their broken pasts in this subtly affecting, achingly poignant, and mature debut novel.
Joshua Mohr has been published in Other Voices, The Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast, among others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at a halfway house. His second novel, From a Fragile Galaxy, is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in June 2010.