Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Thursday, July 7
7:30 PM
ANNA NORTH
AMERICA PACIFICA
A startling debut novel about a teenage girl’s search for her missing mother on an island paradise turned dystopian nightmare. In the not too distant future, 18-year-old Darcy lives on the island of America Pacifica—one of the last places on earth that is still habitable after the second ice age.Education, food, and basic means of survival are the province of a chosen few, while most struggle under the thumb of a mysterious, corrupt dictator.
To Darcy, America Pacifica is simply home—the only one she’s ever known, made bearable by her loving though enigmatic mother. But when her mother doesn’t come home one night, Darcy is forced on a quest through the dark underbelly of the island, a journey that will take her through Pacifica’s corrupt history and make her an indispensible part of its future. In the spirit of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, America Pacifica imagines a world drastically different from the one we know today, and how we might continue to live in it.
Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, having received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and she is a staff writer for Jezebel.com. North grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in Brooklyn.
Friday, July 8
8:00 PM
LITERARY CLOWN FOOLERY
An Evening of Satire, Cabaret, and Amazing Feats of ComedyGet ready to rock your world: July’s Literary Clown Foolery is dedicated to the work of the amazing Neil Strauss! San Francisco’s clowns will bring new perspectives to Strauss’s books, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists,Emergency, and Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead. The evening will include clowns trying out the Game, live adaptations of Straus’s interviews with rock stars, as well as accordions, juggling, and just plain, old hilarity! Join us for the evening, it’s sure not to disappoint!
Admission $10; advance tickets at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006
Wines and mineral waters.
Monday, July 11
7:30 PM
AMY SNYDER
HELL ON TWO WHEELS:
An Astonishing Story of Suffering, Triumph, and the Most Extreme Endurance Race in the World
The Race Across America (RAAM) is a bicycle race like no other. Unlike its famous cousin the Tour de France, RAAM is much crazier, more gothic, and even savage. Once the gun goes off on the Pacific Coast, the clock doesn’t stop, forcing participants to forego sleep, or else lose. The first rider to complete the prescribed 3,000-mile route – nine days later at the Atlantic – is the victor. In this race, contestants have died, been maimed, and spiraled into the nightmarish realm of the mad. Most racers manage a few hours of sleep each day, while the leaders get by on an hour or so. Many hallucinate, often for hours on end, and every contestant suffers ghastly maladies including muscle, joint, and nerve failure; broken bones; and even life-threatening pulmonary infections.
In Hell on Two Wheels, Snyder follows a group of athletes before, during, and after the 2009 RAAM, the closest and most controversial race in the event’s 30-year history, .offering a thrilling and remarkably detailed account of the competitors’ triumphs and tragedies as they test themselves, each other, and the limits of human endurance. As RAAM exacts its vicious toll, Snyder shows how the 2009 racers discover their essential humanity and experience profound joy and completeness, demonstrating how such a grueling effort can also be cleansing and self-revelatory.
“As an Ironman finisher and avid cyclist, I was able to embed myself in the obscure world of ultra-distance cycling,” Snyder said. “Getting to know these athletes before, during, and after the 2009 race helped me see that RAAM is more than a race – it’s a monster and a crucible. As a result, Hell on Two Wheels became more than a story about a bike race. It’s an allegory about overcoming personal limitations and self-discovery that offers lessons for all of us, cyclists and non-cyclists alike.”
Amy Snyder grew up in New York City and attended Princeton University and Stanford Business School. After a career in management consulting she retired and settled in La Jolla, and began competing in Ironman triathlons and eventually discovered events even longer than the Ironman. Knowing she didn’t have it in her to conquer these ultra-distance races, she decided to find out why and how others can by following the RAAM,
Tuesday, July 12
7:30 PM
LOIS GOODWILL
ENTANGLED:
A Chronicle of Late Love
Age doesn’t matter when it comes to love.
Don, an eighty-year-old jazz pianist, and Sarah, a sixty-nine-year old clinical psychologist, spent twenty-two relatively content years together as monogamous lovers, despite their wildly different interests and personalities. One summer at her youngest son's wedding, a handsome, seventy-year-old former Jesuit priest asked Sarah to dance. She soon fell head over heels into an intoxicating, passionate relationship with him that belied their years. After a beguiling and giddy courtship, that romance abruptly blew up in her face.
Told from the alternating points of view of Don and Sarah, Entangled is an honest and moving memoir in two voices about the devastating consequences of a love affair gone wrong. When Sarah returned to Don, he discovered that she had kept a journal of her affair, and he agreed to join her in reconstructing, through writing, what had happened to them. Lois (Sarah) Goodwill’s story is the culmination of this courageous undertaking in the face of pain and betrayal. Their willingness to confront difficult truths led to a relationship that, while changed and injured by circumstance, was still a rich and vibrant source of friendship and acceptance.
Don Asher was a jazz pianist and author of nine books, including Notes from a Battered Grand and a biography of Hampton Hawes. His books have been reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An avid tennis player, he was a longtime resident of San Francisco.
Dr. Lois Goodwill is a retired clinical psychologist. Born in Montreal, Canada, she holds degrees from McGill University in Montreal and the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She enjoys attending theater and symphony performances and volunteer work, and is an enthusiastic hiker and walker. She is the mother of four children and grandmother of eleven. She lives in San Francisco.
Wednesday, July 13
7:30 PM
ELLEN SUSSMAN
FRENCH LESSONS
A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love, and loss as their lives intersect in surprising ways.Josie, Riley, and Jeremy have come to the City of Light for different reasons: Josie, a young high school teacher, arrives in hopes of healing a broken heart. Riley, a spirited but lonely expat housewife, struggles to feel connected to her husband and her new country. And Jeremy, the reserved husband of a renowned actress, is accompanying his wife on a film shoot, yet he feels distant from her world.
As they meet with their tutors—Josie with Nico, a sensitive poet; Riley with Phillippe, a shameless flirt; and Jeremy with the consummately beautiful Chantal—each succumbs to unexpected passion and unpredictable adventures. Yet as they traverse Paris’s grand boulevards and intimate, winding streets, they uncover surprising secrets about one another—and come to understand long-buried truths about themselves.
“As inviting as the smell of freshly baked croissants wafting from a Parisian café, this is a novel to savor.” -- Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier“Touching, thoughtful, hilarious, and exquisite in its observations, French Lessons—Ellen Sussman’s day in Paris with a wonderful collection of characters—is a treat. . . . Très charmant!” -- Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Four Ms. Bradwells
Ellen Sussman is the author of the novel On a Night Like This, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and was translated into six languages. She is the editor of two anthologies, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, a New York TimesEditors' Choice and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex. She has published numerous essays and short stories. Ellen teaches creative writing in both private classes and through Stanford Continuing Studies.
Thursday, July 14
7:30 PM
ANDREW LAM, ANGIE CHAU, and ISABELLE PELAUD
on Vietnamese American Identity, Literature and California
The San Francisco Chronicle described ANGIE CHAU's Quiet As They Come as "a powerful mix of tragedy and kindness, of miscommunications and all-too-painful empathy, which bound together are a resonating homage to many an immigrant." She was born in Vietnam and now lives in Eddie Money's former studio in Oakland.
ANDREW LAM is a writer and a co-founder of New America Media. Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora has won the Pen American "Beyond the Margins" Award in 2006, and was short-listed for "Asian American Literature Award”.East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres was published in October 2010 and listed as top ten indie books by Shelf Unbound magazine.
ISABELLE PELAUD is associate professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN).
These three local authors will read from their work and talk about Vietnamese American identity and literature and California. Bring your questions, observations, and join the discussion!
Wednesday, July 20
7:30 PM
SCOTT MARTELLE
THE FEAR WITHIN:
Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial
Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today's name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person's career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the "red menace" mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation's midst, just as they do today with the "War on Terror."
In his new book, The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation--the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve "top Reds" went on trial in Manhattan's Foley Square in January 1949.
The proceedings captivated the nation, but the trial quickly dissolved into farce. The eleven defendants were charged under the 1940 Smith Act with conspiring to teach the necessity of overthrowing the U.S. government based on their roles as party leaders and their distribution of books and pamphlets. In essence, they were on trial for their libraries and political beliefs, not for overt acts threatening national security. Despite the clear conflict with the First Amendment, the men were convicted and their appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that gave the green light to federal persecution of Communist Party leaders--a decision the court effectively reversed six years later. But by then, the damage was done. So rancorous was the trial the presiding judge sentenced the defense attorneys to prison terms, too, chilling future defendants' access to qualified counsel.
Martelle's story is a compelling look at how American society, both general and political, reacts to stress and, incongruously, clamps down in times of crisis on the very beliefs it holds dear: the freedoms of speech and political belief. At different points in our history, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have subtly or more drastically eroded a pillar of American society for the politics of the moment. It is not surprising, then, that The Fear Within takes on added resonance in today's environment of suspicion and the decline of civil rights under the U.S. Patriot Act.Watch the trailer.
“Martelle's scrupulous, lucid history resonates with contemporary relevance because it reminds us that freedom of speech and thought are most essential, not when we are feeling most confident, but when we are most afraid.” – from a review in The Los Angeles Times
Scott Martelle, former Los Angeles Times staff writer, is a veteran journalist, and the author of the critically acclaimed Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.