Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Friday, September 24, 7:30 PM
GARIN HOVANNISIAN
Family of Shadows: A Century of Murder, Memory, and the Armenian American Dream
In Family of Shadows Garin Hovannisian presents the history of Armenia, past, present, and future, through the story of three generations of the men in his family: his great-grandfather Kasper, his grandfather Richard, and his father Raffi.
A teenager in 1915 in the village of Kharpert, in what was then western Armenia, Kasper was caught in the chaos of the first genocide of the 20th century -- the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians and the displacement of a historic people from its homeland of three thousand years. He witnessed the murder of his kid brother, his father, and his family. He eventually escaped to the United States and built an agricultural and real estate empire.Growing up on Kasper’s twenty-acre farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s, Richard spoke no Armenian. In junior high school, he was horrified to learn that, according to the class atlas, Armenia did not exist. He resolved to learn Armenian and has spent his life chronicling the nation’s history and campaigning for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Today, Richard is a professor of Armenian history at UCLA and one of the world’s authorities on genocide.
A corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, Raffi had visited Soviet Armenia many times. In 1990, he and his immediate family returned for good. When Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Raffi was handed a fax machine and a building that would soon become the republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today, Raffi leads Heritage, a national liberal party, in Armenia’s parliament --and will run for president in the 2013 election
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A powerful story about the long shadows that history casts on one family, Family of Shadows also perfectly captures Armenia’s history in the last 100 years.
Garin Hovannisian is a graduate of UCLA (06) and of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (M.S., 08). The recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Armenia, he now lives between Los Angeles and Yerevan. His writing on Armenian issues, including the Genocide, has appeared in the Los AngelesTimes, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and many other publications, as well as in major periodicals of the Diaspora, such as The Armenian Observer and the literary journalArarat.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Art of TranslationSaturday, September 25, 7:30 PM
DANIEL KEHLMANN
Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes
Imagine being famous. Being recognized on the street, adored by people who have never even met you, known the world over. Wouldn’t that be great?
But what if, one day, you got stuck in a country where celebrity means nothing, where no one spoke your language and you didn’t speak theirs, where no one knew your face (no book jackets, no TV) and you had no way of calling home? How would your fame help you then?
What if someone got hold of your cell phone? What if they spoke to your girlfriends, your agent, your director, and started making decisions for you? And worse, what if no one believed you were you anymore? When you saw a look-alike acting your roles for you, what would you do?
And what if one day you realized your magnum opus, like everything else you’d ever written, was a total waste of time, empty nonsense? What would you do next? Would your audience of seven million people keep you going? Or would you lose the capacity to keep on doing it?
Fame and facelessness, truth and deception, spin their way through all nine episodes of this captivating, wickedly funny, and perpetually surprising novel as paths cross and plots thicken, as characters become real people and real people morph into characters. The result is a dazzling tour de force by one of Europe’s finest young writers.
“Who would have thought contemporary Central European literature could be so fun and so funny? Daniel Kehlmann is who. The young Austrian prodigy, famous everywhere but in the United States, has given us a real beauty of a book, farcical, satiric, melancholic, and humane. Modern fame may have been invented in America, but nobody has dramatized its paradoxes and heartbreaks more entertainingly than the European Kehlmann does here." -- Jonathan Franzen
Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages. Awards his work has received include the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin.
Monday, September 27, 7:00 PM
THE RUMPUS BOOK CLUB IN-PERSON DISCUSSION
Lan Samantha Chang’s All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost
First, The Rumpus announced its’ version of a book club – one whose members receive a hand-chosen book, for a thrilling insider’s early (before publication) look at what’s likely to be a very hot book. Club members are then invited to an online discussion with the author and with one another. (Read all about The Rumpus Book Club here.) What could be added to the mix? Why, a get-together to meet and talk with other club members in person!
We’re delighted to host these monthly gatherings this fall. Local book club members, come on in; if you’re a member from outside the Bay Area, but planning to be in our neighborhood, you come on in, too! Curious about The Rumpus and its book club? You, too!
Tonight: a discussion about Lan Samantha Chang’s new novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.BOOKSMITH PRESENTS AN EVENING WITH FILMMAKER & NOVELIST GUILLERMO DEL TORO
at the Sundance Kabuki Theater
Tuesday, September 28, 7:30 PM
GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guillermo del Toro made his feature directorial debut in 1993 with the film Cronos, and has since gone on to direct, among other films, Mimic, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II, Hellboy I, Hellboy II, and Pan's Labyrinth,which garnered enormous critical praise worldwide and won three Academy Awards. Del Toro has produced and written films numerous films. He is currently working on a remake of Frankenstein; it’s been announced that James Cameron will produce Del Toro’s 3-D At the Mountains of Madness, and that Del Toro will direct Disney’s The Haunted Mansion.
With Chuck Hogan, Del Toro has become a novelist as well. Their first novel was The Strain, about which all that must be said is this:
They have always been here. Vampires. In secret and in darkness. Waiting. Now their time has come.
In one week, Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country.
In two months -- the world.
“I cannot wait to see where Del Toro and Hogan take us next.” -- James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Doomsday Key
The wait is over! Guillermo Del Toro returns with The Fall -- the second blood-chilling volume in their critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling Strain Trilogy. The Fall picks up where The Strain left off -- with a vampiric infection spreading like wildfire across America as a small band of heroes struggles to save the dwindling human race from the vampire plague. Horror fiction and dark fantasy fans will be swept up in this epic story that bestselling author Nelson DeMille describes as “Bram Stoker meets Stephen King meets Michael Crichton.”
In addition to his multiple screen ventures, Del Toro is, with Chuck Hogan, writing the third volume in The Strain trilogy.
Film fans, young filmmakers and vampire and horror novel fans alike won’t want to miss this very special event!
Advance ticket purchase encouraged; general admission tickets at the door may or may not be available.
General admission $12.
VIP ticket for private pre-talk reception at 6:30 PM, also at the Kabuki, with Mr. Del Toro, including delicious food, a special bar drink, reserved seat, and a copy of The Fall $75.
Kabuki Sundance Theater, 1881 Post Street at Fillmore, San Francisco. Doors open for general admission seating at 6:45 PM; VIP ticket holders will be seated promptly at 7:15 PM.
Tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets online or by phone at 800-838-3006, and at The Booksmith.
Tuesday, September 28, 7:00 PM
FOUND IN TRANSLATION Book Group
The Golden Age by Michal AjvazAs we turn toward fall, we read a writer who hails from Kafka's city--Prague--and who is reminiscent of both that famous writer and Jorge Luis Borges. Michal Ajvaz, considered by many the greatest living Czech author, has written in The Golden Age a book that is once philosophical and riveting, a book about language and narratives that includes fake civilizations and dueling royal families. On an imaginary island in the Atlantic Ocean lives a nation of humans without cars, money, or even telephones. They're discovered by a modern-day Gulliver who wants to chronicle their strange society and its one piece of writing, a collective, Wikipedia-like effort known only as the Book (called by one critic a "pre-Gutenberg Internet"). We'll talk about what this odd fairy-tale like book has to say about our own connected culture, as well as satire, the importance of storytelling to a society, and the morality of betrayal.
Join us on the fourth Tuesday of every month for spirited conversation about some of the newest writing hitting the U.S. from all over the globe. No foreign language knowledge necessary and no continental savvy required (but will be appreciated!) -- just bring your desire to read some excellent new books, hand-selected for you by Scott Esposito, of the Center for the Art of Translation and The Quarterly Conversation, who also fearlessly leads the discussion, brilliantly.. You'll also meet some great new people and chat with them about the best new fiction from around the world.
Wednesday, September 29, 7:00 PM
MONA SIMPSON
My Hollywood
Mona Simpson, acclaimed author of Anywhere But Here and A Regular Guy, has written a wonderfully provocative and appealing new novel, her first in ten years. My Hollywood tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.
Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage, once a 50/50 arrangement, changes, with Claire left at home with a baby, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.
Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children’s higher education back in the Philippines, becomes their nanny. Lola stabilizes the rocky household and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and “Williamo” remains her own closely guarded secret.
In a novel at turns satirical and heartbreaking, we see two versions of events: the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it is possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs us all.
“This big gorgeous book is at once an entertaining, socially astute upstairs-downstairs drama and a profound meditation on the shifting and often competing demands of love and work in a woman’s life. One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. Lola, the Filipina nanny at the heart of this book, is surely one of the great literary creations of our time. My Hollywood is vast in scope, exquisite in detail, rife with pleasure.” – Michelle Huneven
“In her first novel since Off Keck Road, Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents… The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A darkly beautiful atlas of the American promised land, and a definitive novel of modern domesticity. Brilliant, in short.” -- Joseph O’Neill
“Simpson's massive gifts -- for unflinching precision, for artful indirection and for the deft unfurling of imagery -- are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them.” -- Michael Chabon
Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of theChicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica.