Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Thursday, September 30, 7:30 PM
FERYAL ALI GAUHAR
No Space for Further Burials
Set in Afghanistan in late 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence.
The novel’s narrator, a U.S. army medical technician in Afghanistan helping “liberate” the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society’s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. Their collective tale becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed.
Feryal Ali Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University, Montreal, and has worked as a filmmaker and broadcaster in Europe and the U.S. She has been imprisoned by two military regimes in Pakistan for her prodemocracy activism. In 1999 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund. She lives in Lahore, Pakistan, with fourteen cats, three dogs, a turtle, and four donkeys.
“In No Space for Further Burials, Feryal Ali Gauhar has crafted a novel of unrelenting truth, held in transcendent prose and an exquisite grace. There is no easy redemption here, but there is light and more light.” – Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Song for Night
“Profoundly touching…Feryal Ali Gauhar questions us and forces us to face our responsibilities as universal citizens. In a mirror effect, she makes us see the image of a world that has become its own tormentor.” – Yasmina Khadra, author of The Swallows of KabulMonday, October 4, 7:30 PM
TAO LIN Richard Yates
“[A] deadpan literary trickster.” – The New York Times
Tao Lin’s trademark minimalism takes on a much darker edge as he narrates the story of a young man dealing with the consequences of an affair with an underage girl, in a startling change of direction for this cult writer. Buried within Lin’s work is a troubling question – what exactly constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?
Richard Yates is named after real-life writer Richard Yates, but it has little to do with him. Instead, it racks the relationship between writer Haley Joel Osment, a New Yorker in his early twenties, and Dakota Fanning, his 16-year-old lover. Moving between Fanning’s suburban New Jersey home and Osment’s Wall Street apartment, the couple increasingly shuns the outside world as they work to navigate the moral ambiguity of their relationship. But as that relationship grows more obsessive and Osment becomes more intimately involved with Fanning, she reveals her increasingly disturbing and self-destructive personality. Osment’s own guilt and anger entrap him as they find the relationship – and their lives – hurtling out of control.
"Richard Yates is hilarious, menacing, and hugely intelligent. Tao Lin is a Kafka for the iPhone generation. He has that most important gift: it’s impossible to imagine anyone else writing like he does and sounding authentic. Yet he has already spawned a huge school of Lin imitators. As precocious and prolific as he is, every book surpasses the last. Tao Lin may well be the most important writer under thirty working today." -- Clancy Martin
Tao Lin is the author of numerous other books, including Shoplifting from American Apparel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.Tuesday, October 5, 7:30 PM
NICK BILTON
I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for The New York Times’ Bits blog and a reporter for the paper. At the Times, he has also worked in research and development labs, helping chart the path for the future of news; he is also an adjunct professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunication program. Bilton delivers a new and often counterintuitive understanding ho how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior in his new I Live in the Future.
Bilton explains why social networks, the openness of the Internet, and handy new gadgets are not just vehicles for telling the world what you had for breakfast but are becoming the foundation for “anchoring communities” that tame information overload and help determine what news and information to trust and consumer – and what to ignore.
Exploring the way our brains are adapting and the positive effect of new media narratives on thinking and action, Bilton finds evidence in a study that shows that surgeons who play video games are more skillful than their nonplaying counterparts. He examines how the Internet is creating a new type of consumer, the “consumnivore”, living in a world where immediacy trumps quality and quantity, and discovers who is dictating the type of content being created. Bilton describes why the map of tomorrow is centered on “Me”, and why that simple fact means a totally new approach to the way media companies shape content -- and why people pay for experiences, not content…and why great storytelling and extended relationships will prevail and enable businesses to engage with customers in ways that go beyond merely selling information…and so much more.
Our intent is to welcome you to an energetic, engaging in-person discussion with the very savvy Nick; his further intent is to continue the discussion with readers online . (Bonus for book buyers: the I Live in the Future reading experience also includes access to additional original content – using your smart phone and one of many free applications available for download online, snap an image of the QR Code at the beginning of each chapter to see videos of Nick expanding on key ideas and controversies plus links to related articles, research, and interactive experiences.)
Thursday, October 7, 6:30 – 9:30 PM
THE BOOKSMITH BOOKSWAP, LITQUAKE EDITION EAT, DRINK, TALK, (SWAP) BOOKS!Presented in collaboration Litquake and with fabulous wordsmith guests including Oscar Villalon, Holly Payne, and K.M. Soehnlein.
What:
Join The Booksmith for the only Litquake event that celebrates YOU, the Reader. The Bookswap is a truly unique event: participants have the chance to reflect on their most treasured reads and learn about dozens of new, fantastic books; the evening culminates in a rowdy (and always entertaining) swap – think cocktail party, with a bookish twist.
Since its inception last year, The Booksmith Bookswap has SOLD OUT every time and has received rave (“the most unique book event…ever!”; “a great place to meet smart, creative, like-minded people”) reviews from all who participate.
For the Litquake edition, bibliovores from across the city will convene at Martin Macks, a very fun Irish pub in the Haight Ashbury. We’ll have hilarious and interesting book-y conversation starters, amazing writers, wine and beer, and the best pub fare in all of San Francisco. Bring a book – one you passionately love but can part with – and we’ll provide the rest.
Who:
You! This event is for anyone who has ever loved a book and craved the chance to convince more folks to read it. You’ll also meet amazing writers and a big group of passionate readers like you.
Where:
Martin Macks (1569 Haight Street, between Clayton and Ashbury, San Francisco)Sunday, October 10, 4:00 PM
DEAN RADER
Works & Days
Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader’s debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways. In a style that is at once both traditional and experimental, these poems map the terrains of high and popular culture with serious meditation and wry humor. Characters in Rader’s interactive landscape include Wallace Stevens, Michael Jackson, Dorothea Lange, Arvo Part, and even Frog and Toad. Like its namesake, Works and Days by the Greek poet Hesiod, Rader’s work takes on the great issues of any era -- our attempts to make sense of dreams, duty, and the divine.
Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He has received the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize (2007) and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize (2009). He regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle and blogs at The Weekly Rader,SemiObama and 52 Gavins. A native of Weatherford, Oklahoma, he now lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. Check out Dean's website at http://deanrader.com/
“There is no anticipation like waiting for the poem you ordered to arrive,” Dean Rader writes. Well, the poems we ordered have arrived. Works & Days is a shipment of poetic pleasure, a care package to get readers through a dark, unpoetical time. Playful, probing, frequently philosophical (and sometimes mock-philosophical, and sometimes both), these entertaining and liberating poems know their tradition and engage with it without being confined by it.” -- Troy Jollimore
“Dean Rader reads his past, reads the landscape of his native land, especially Oklahoma, through the lens of previous poets, such as Hesiod, his first tutelary guide, who lead him to a vibrant, innovative, and fresh new poetry, who point the way to his own formal making, his poignant American version of life and labor, Works & Days.” – Edward Hirsch
Monday, October 11, 7:30 PM
STEVEN JOHNSON
Where Good Ideas Come From
How and why do world-changing ideas surface? Johnson writes, “The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. I have distilled them down into seven patterns: the adjacent possible; liquid networks; the slow hunch; serendipity; error; exaptation; and emergent platforms. The more we embrace these patterns – in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools – the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.”
Johnson traces these patterns across centuries and disciplines, from the FBI’s tragic failure to grasp the importance of information that might have prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Gutenberg’s use of wine-press technology to build the world’s first printing press with moveable type to the founding of Google on a Net-transforming hunch. But the relevant question, Johnson insists, is not how these guys got to be so clever (or not). Rather, what we need to ask is: What kind of environment fosters remarkable innovation?
With four critically acclaimed books, the two most recent being New York Times Notable Books, Steven Johnson has demonstrated that he can pinpoint an urgent cultural issue and illuminate it with dazzling cross-disciplinary insights. Whether tweaking conventional wisdom in Everything Bad is Good for You, offering captivating new perspectives on the conflict between science and religion in The Invention of Air, or debunking skepticism about the significance of Twitter in a cover story for Time magazine, Johnson has commanded a prominent perch in the public discourse. Now Johnson bridges natural science, intellectual history, urban sociology, and cutting-edge technology to explore one of our most pressing cultural questions, and to offer persuasive, inspiring, and practical answers that readers can use to propel their lives and careers forward.
“An infectiously exciting writer…Steven Johnson is that rarest of commodities among twenty-first century public intellectuals…His is a questing, limber intelligence, eager to consider opposing arguments, explore new terrain, and notice underlying patterns he hasn’t seen before.” –Salon.com, reviewing The Invention of Air
Steven Johnson is the founder of a variety of influential websites – most recently, outside.in – and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. With 1.5 millionTwitter followers, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s most perceptive and thought-provoking thinkers on new media and the evolution of information technology. His previous books are The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open, Emergence, and Interface Culture.
Wednesday, October 13, 7:30 PM
BILL BARICH
Long Way Home - On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America
“We do not take a trip; a trip takes us,” John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley. In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled upon a used copy of Travels in Ireland, where he has lived for the past eight years, and it inspired him to explore the mood of the United States as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. With a hotly contested election looming, and in the shadow of an economic meltdown, Barich set off on a 5,943-mile cross-country drive from New York to his old hometown in San Francisco via Route 50, a road twisting through the American heartland.
Long Way Home is the stunning result of his pilgrimage, an illuminating and perceptive portrait of America at a dramatic point in its history. Where Steinbeck returned from the road depressed about the country’s soul, Barich – while not uncritical of the narrow-mindedness and incivility of our present culture – finds brightness among the dark and rekindles his belief in the long view, as exemplified by the unbridled optimism of some high school kids in Hutchinson, Kansas, and by the undaunted spirit of an eighty-year-old barber he chanced upon in Jefferson City, Missouri. “The world truly does renew itself while we’re looking the other way,” he observes.
From the Easter Shore of Maryland to the spectacular landscape of Moab, Utah, to Steinbeck’s own Salinas Valley, filled with memorable encounters and redolent with history and local color,Long Way Home is a truthful, inspiring account of the country at a social and political crossroad. “The highway nakes into a tunnel,” Barich writes about a stretch of Route 50 in West Virginia, “the erupts into the light with the force of revelation.”
Bill Barich is the author of eight books, among them A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub and the racetrack classic Laughing in the Hills. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Literary Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library, and has written for The New Yorker for many years. He currently lives in Dublin – and California.