Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Reading group for The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada, translated from Japanese by Susan Bernofsky
Thursday, June 25 at 6:30 p.m.Found in Translation, the Booksmith’s reading group, continues with a roster of exciting award-winning titles. Each one a contemporary work of translated fiction, the books discussed by the group will be available at a 15% discount.
In The Naked Eye, a precocious Vietnamese high school student is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. As she is preparing to present her paper, she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. She escapes on a train to Moscow...but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh loses herself in the films of Cathrine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.
SHILPA AGARWAL
Reading and book signing for Haunting Bombay
Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m.Haunting Bombay is a literary ghost story set in 1960's India that tells the tale of three generations of the wealthy Mittal family who have buried a tragic history and the ghosts of the past who rise up to haunt them. In her award-winning novel Agarwal weaves together mysticism, mystery, and haunting supernatural spirits in a luminous story of power and powerlessness, voice and silence in post-colonial India. Agarwal's "stunning debut" has been reviewed as a compelling snapshot of 1960's Bombay and a ghost story that evokes both the hauntings of Poe and the hot pulse of today's vampire narratives."
Shilpa Agarwal is a Los Angeles-based writer and academic. Born in Mumbai to a family uprooted by India's Independence movement and subsequent Partition in 1947, Shilpa's early writings explored how colonialism and the chaos of dislocation shaped human interaction. As an undergraduate at Duke University, Shilpa specialized in Asian and African literatures and Women's Studies. She pursued her interest in post-colonial literatures as a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She taught at both UCLA and UCSB, including a course on South Asian diaspora, and spoke regularly on the politics and poetics of community.
PAUL KRASSNER
Reading and book signing for In Praise of Indecency
Tuesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m.Paul Krassner's style of personal journalism constantly blurs the line between observer and participant. Nowhere is this more apparent than in In Praise of Indecency, a collection of essays and interviews culled from his columns at AVN Online. Whether being interviewed by Susie Bright, or imagining a conversation between Pee-Wee Herman and Pete Townshend about their busts by overzealous cops, or reminiscing about his friend Lenny Bruce, Krassner shines his keen satirical mind on the so-called taboos of todays society and breaks them down to show the hypocrisy of the worlds "culture warriors." With a biting wit and tongue firmly planted in cheek, Mr. Krassner reveals the absurdity of our oppressive social mores in this stark, funny, and ultimately thought-provoking collection.
Paul Krassner is the founder, editor and frequent contributor to the free-thought magazine The Realist. A key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s, he edited Lenny Bruce's autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People. He currently writes columns for AVN Online and High Times Magazine and publishes the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster at paulkrassner.com. In 2004 he received an ACLU Upton Sinclair Award for dedication to freedom of expression. His books include Pot Stories for the Soul, Tales of Tongue Fu, One Hand Jerking, and Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut. He continues to perform and lecture at college campuses, theaters and art galleries across the country.
SQUAW VALLEY WRITERS POETRY BENEFIT READING
with Cornelius Eady, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Evie Shockley
Grace Cathedral, 1100 California Street
Friday, July 17 at 7:30 p.m.
PURCHASE TICKETS -- General Admission: $20/Students: $15Cornelius Eady, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Evie Shockley will read their poetry in The Nave at Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street). This benefit reading will raise money for the Poetry Scholarship Fund at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Books donated by the poets and their publishers will be available for purchase before and after the reading, and the poets will be available to sign books after the reading.
This will mark the 18th year for this annual benefit event, and every year it is a standing room-only success. All proceeds will benefit the Poetry Workshop Scholarship Fund, enabling talented writers to attend the week-long poetry writing workshop held each year in Squaw Valley, California. It is the goal of this program to support both established and emerging writers of talent who would benefit from working with their peers at the Poetry Week at Squaw Valley. - Tickets are available from Brown Paper Tickets.
JOANNA G. HARRIS
Reading and book signing for Beyond Isadora
Monday, July 20 at 7:30 p.m.Beyond Isadora: Bay Area Dancing The Early Years, 1915-1965 documents the fascinating and little-known history of early 20th century dance in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a history of performers, choreographers and teachers, pioneers of today's dance community. It is also women's history, since the prime movers were almost all women. This history, offered here as short biographical and chronological sketches, seeks to detail the regional development of ballet and of modern, ethnic and folk dance, from the era of Isadora Duncan, San Francisco's dance legend, who is regarded as the pioneer revolutionary and the mother of modern dance, to the mid 1960s. After Isadora, decades of dancers, dance groups and organizations carried on and refined a new American dance.
After many years of dance training in NY with the Duncan Dance Guild, the New Dance Group, Graham, Limón and Cunningham, Joanna G. Harris came to the Bay Area to study at Mills College with Marian Van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer. As a graduate student she worked on IMPULSE, the annual magazine of dance, and upon graduation taught at UC Berkeley where she choreographed and performed for the Department of Drama and Music, 1959-69. Joanna formed her own company, the Monday Night Group, toured California, and founded the Dance/Drama Department at UC Santa Cruz and the Creative Arts Therapy program at Lone Mountain College. She is on the faculty of OLLI Institute, Berkeley and an instructor at the Modern Dance Center, Berkeley. She also writes reviews and essays about dance for websites and print publications.
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Reading group for Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator at the Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, translated from the Italian by Ana Goldstein
Thursday, July 23 at 6:30 p.m.Found in Translation, the Booksmith’s reading group, continues with a roster of exciting award-winning titles. Each one a contemporary work of translated fiction, the books discussed by the group will be available at a 15% discount. The group is led by The Booksmith's own Julie Boyer.
Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator at the Piazza Vittorio, Amara Lakhous's prize-winning novel, is a social satire and murder mystery. A small culturally-mixed community living an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned and the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome.
SKIP HORACK
Reading and book signing for The Southern Cross
Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m.The Southern Cross features a teenager who makes a grisly discovery while woodcock hunting; an exonerated ex-con who may not be entirely innocent; a rabbit farmer in mourning; and an earnest young mariner trying to start a new life with his wife. It features proudly Southern characters not often seen in fiction – birdwatchers, recreational hunters, beekeepers, and even marine biologists. “A knockout winner” according to author Antonya Nelson, The Southern Cross marks the arrival of a standout new voice in fiction.
Skip Horack was born and raised in Louisiana, attended Florida State University, and practiced law for five years in Baton Rouge. His work has appeared in Epoch, the Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and other journals. Horack currently teaches at Stanford University, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in San Francisco.
MARC LESSER
Reading and book signing for LESS: Accomplishing More by Doing Less
Wednesday, July 29 at 7:30 p.m.A certain kind of busyness is crucial to life, allowing us to earn a living, create art, and achieve success. But too often it consumes us and we become crazy busy, nonstop busy, and we expend extraneous effort that gets us nowhere. Marc Lesser's new book LESS shows us the benefits of doing less in a world that has increasingly embraced more - more desire, more activity, more things, more exhaustion. Less is about stopping, about the possibility of finding composure in the midst of activity. The ideas and practices that Lesser outlines offer a radical yet simple approach to transforming a lifestyle based on endless to-do lists into a more meaningful approach that is truly more productive in every sense.
Marc Lesser has been practicing and studying Zen for thirty years and is a Zen priest in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Marc was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for ten years and in 1983 served as director of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the West. He was founder and CEO of Brush Dance, a publishing company that creates greeting cards, journals, and calendars, for fifteen years and currently teaches and lectures in both the Zen and business environments. He holds an MBA from New York University’s Graduate School of Business and is the president of ZBA Associates, a company offering coaching and consulting services in the business and not-for-profit communities. He lives in northern California with his wife and two children.
The Cresting Wave: San Francisco Underground Comix Experience
July 10 — August 22, 2009
Electric Works
130 8th Street
San Francisco, CA
www.sfelectricworks.com
415 626 5496Electric Works is pleased to present "The Cresting Wave: The San Francisco Underground Comix Experience," a group exhibition featuring underground comix artists from San Francisco, from the mid-'60's to the late '80's. Artists included are Mark Bode, Vaughn Bode, Guy Colwell, R. Crumb, Jay Kinney, Paul Mavrides, Dan O'Neill, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Larry Todd, Randy Vogel, and S. Clay Wilson. Culling work from private collectors and the artists themselves, guest curator, Underground Comix writer, publisher and historian, Dan Fogel, has amassed important work from each artist that spans personal drawings, well-known comix pieces, including covers and original comps, as well as other rare ephemera from the heyday of the San Francisco scene.
JIMMY CHEN, ANNE GERMANACOS, JENNY PRITCHETT AND HELEN WICKES
Reading and book signing for Best of the Web 2009
Tuesday, August 4 at 7:30 p.m.Best of the Web 2009 is an eclectic collection of the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction pieces from online literary journals. In the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as Pushcart and Best American Non-Required Reading, this is the first substantial attempt at an annual print compilation of the best of material published online.
Contributors Jimmy Chen, Anne Germanacos, Jenny Pritchett and Helen Wickes will read their work. Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation and the blog Conversational Reading, will host.