Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Thursday, August 11
7:30 PM
CARMELA CIURARU
in conversation with OSCAR VILLALON
NOM DE PLUME: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
Nom de Plume is a fascinating collection of stories – populated by individuals whose ‘doubleness’ is so distinct that they acquire secondary personalities, and, in some notable cases, multiple personalities. It’s a richly documented literary excursion into the inner, secret lives of some of our favorite writers.” -- Joyce Carol Oates
“This is a fascinating book on a fascinating subject. We all have other selves, but only some of us give them a name and let them loose in the world. Carmela Ciuraru steps behind a host of shadowy facades to interrogate the originals, and the result is both enlightening and wonderfully entertaining.” -- John Banville
In our “look at me” era of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the 24-hour news cycle, privacy now seems a quaint relic. Everyone’s a brand. Self-effacement is a thing of the past. Yet as Carmela Ciuraru’s book reminds us, it wasn’t always like this. NOM DE PLUME explores the fascinating stories of sixteen authorial impostors across centuries and cultures, plumbing the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of their fame.
Various biographies have chronicled the lives of individual pseudonymous authors such as Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, and George Eliot, but never before have the stories behind many noms de plume been collected into a single volume. Each chapter is a mini-biography, delving into the intrigue and turmoil behind the secret identities. These are narratives of secrecy, obsession, modesty, scandal, defiance, and shame. A few highlights: A shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford felt free to let his imagination run wild only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll; the aristocratic, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing Baroness who rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays as George Sand; the alcoholic, misanthropic, nattily dressed, snail collecting, bestselling novelist Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mister Ripley) concealed her identity -- and her sexuality -- to write a novel celebrating lesbian love. (Elsewhere, she used occasional pseudonyms for her anti-Semitic rants in newspapers and in letters to politicians.); the “three weird sisters” (as the poet Ted Hughes called them) from Yorkshire -- the Brontës -- produced instant bestsellers, transforming them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Emily and Anne were dead by the age of thirty, tragically never having achieved fame under their own names; a young Eton-educated man from a well-to-do family reinvented himself as the downtrodden writer George Orwell.
Grounded by research yet highly accessible and engaging, these provocative, astonishing stories reveal the complex motives of writers who hoarded secret identities -- sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. A wide-ranging exploration of pseudonyms both familiar and obscure, NOM DE PLUME is part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.
Carmela Ciuraru is not a pseudonym. Her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them and Solitude Poems. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN American Center, and has written for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Forward, Newsday, O, The Oprah Magazine, and ReadyMade.She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on Twitter @CarmelaTheTwit, or find her onFacebook and read her blog about the arts, culture and books
Oscar Villalon is the managing editor of Zyzzyva, and a former book critic for theSan Francisco Chronicle. He is also a dynamic interviewer, a part he’ll play splendidly this evening.
Friday, August 12
8:00 PM
LITERARY CLOWN FOOLERY
An Evening of Satire, Cabaret, and Amazing Feats of Comedy
August’s Foolery features Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm byNicole Daedone. Nicole is the founder of One Taste and has been making international waves redefining the female orgasm. (Check out her TED Talk.). This evening, Nicole joins us in person, talking with the clown Dr. Schmidt about her work! Come for an evening of hilarious clown acts and learn all about orgasms in the process!
Admission $10; advance tickets at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006. Wines and mineral waters.
Tuesday, August 16
7:30 PM
An Evening of Poetry and Music
YURI KAGEYAMA with ERIC KAMAU GRAVATT and ISAKU KAGEYAMA
Prize-winning American essayist, novelist and poet Ishmael Reed has compiled into a new book the works of a Japanese woman who has chosen English as her language of expression to explore the themes of racism, sexuality, identity and family. Yuri Kageyama’s poetry and fiction underline her bicultural Japanese and American sensibilities for a challenging view of the everyday that debunks cultural stereotypes and lambastes male domination.
“They’ve called Yuri ‘cute’ often during her life. She’s cute all right. Like a tornado is cute. Like a hurricane is cute. This Yuricane,” Reed writes in his introduction. “Her poems critique Japanese as well as American society. The Chikan. The arrogance of the Gaijin, who, even when guests in a country, insist that everybody be like them. Some are erotic. You might find allusions to Richard Wright, Michelangelo, John Coltrane. Music is not only entertainment but like something that one injects, something that invades the nervous system.”
Yuri Kageyama is a bilingual and bicultural poet and writer, born in Japan, raised in Maryland, Tokyo and Alabama. Her works have appeared in many literary publications, including Y’Bird, Greenfield Review, San Francisco Stories, On a Bed of Rice, Breaking Silence: an Anthology of Asian American Poets, POW WOW: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience _ Short Fiction from Then to Now, Other Side River, Beyond Rice, Yellow Silk, Stories We Hold Secret, KONCH, MultiAmerica and Obras. She has two books of poems, The New and Selected Yuri: Writing From Peeling Till Now and Peeling. Her film “Talking Taiko” (March 2010), directed by Yoshiaki Tago, documents her readings and thoughts on art and life. She has collaborated in readings with music, visual art and dance, including an Isamu Noguchi exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has translated the words of dancer Suzushi Hanayagi for Robert Wilson’s performance piece “KOOL _ Dancing in My Mind.” She also translated Hiromi Ito's poems. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University and holds an M.A. in Sociology from the UC Berkeley. She lives in Tokyo.
Eric Kamau Gravatt is a jazz drumming legend, having performed with many artists, including Stanley Clarke, Michael Brecker, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Wallace Roney, Gary Bartz, Ravi Coltrane, Weather Report, John Scofield, Albert Ayler, Don Ayler, Yuri Kageyama, Roberta Flack, Sonny Fortune, Bill Frisell, Woddy Shaw, Derrick Trucks, Roy Hargrove, Bobby Hutcherson, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Donald Byrd, Carlos 'Patato' Valdez, Ladjii Cammara, Booker Irvin, Pharoah Saunders, James Moody, Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Harold Wheeler, Tony Hymas, Donny Hathaway, Paquito D'Rivera, Hino Terumasa, Andrew N. White III, The Milwaukee Symphony, Jimmy Heath, Sam Rivers, Khalid Yasin, George Mraz, Savion Glover and Kikuchi Masabumi. He has taught at the Philadelphia All City Elementary School Student’s Symphony Orchestra, The New Thing Art & Architecture Center and the African Heritage Dancers & Drummers, both in Washington, D.C., as well as lectured at Howard University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Minnesota He lives in Minneapolis and leads Source Code.
Isaku Kageyama is the principal drummer for top taiko ensemble Amanojaku, in Tokyo, where he studied taiko under composer and Amanojaku founder Yoichi Watanabe from the age of six. He has also blended taiko with other genres to claim a place in the modern art scene for the traditional Japanese drum by leading his fusion trio Hybrid Soul, his extensive collaborations with Winchester Nii Tete, a percussionist from Ghana, and featuring taiko in creative club events for the young in Tokyo. He has played with Toshinori Kondo, Amelia Ali, Seijiro Sawada, Kazutoki Umezu, Kyosuke Suzuki, Chris Young, Pat Glynn, Craig Harris, NATA, Kansai Yamamoto, Yuu Ishizuka, Shintaro Sendo, Terumasa Hino and Takashi Yanase. He is a two-time National Odaiko (large drum) Champion. He was the youngest player to win the honors at the Mr. Fuji Odaiko Contest in 2000, at 18. He won the Hokkaido title in 2003. He has taught taiko in Brazil, where Amanojaku has repeatedly visited to instruct its taiko style. He lives in Boston and is studying at the Berklee College of Music.
Wednesday, August 17
7:30 PM
JULIAN GUTHRIE
THE GRACE OF EVERYDAY SAINTS:
How a Band of Believers Lost Their Church and Found Their Faith
“Must a religious community depend on a physical structure for its reality? Or do the people themselves make sacred ground wherever they gather? The exiled congregation of St. Brigid have not given up their church. Their story will reverberate long after this amazing book ends.”—Maxine Hong Kingston
St. Brigid Church was one of San Francisco’s great landmarks in the early 1990s. The church itself had weathered depressions and natural disasters, epic earthquakes and a massive fire. Its loyal congregation was active, vibrant, and growing. But in 1993, without warning, the Catholic archdiocese mysteriously ordered its doors to be closed.The Grace of Everyday Saints is the story of how a ragtag group of believers came together in a crusade to save their church. What they discovered would be devastating: that around the country, parishes like theirs were threatened by the higher echelons of the Church, all to hide a terrible secret. Soon there were near-daily headlines that shocked the world. But still this unlikely group of heroes—led by a renegade lawyer, a reformed Catholic, and an antiestablishment priest—continued to meet weekly, to fight, to prove that their beloved St. Brigid was worth saving.
A dramatic narrative that takes readers from the streets of San Francisco to the halls of the Vatican, Guthrie’s investigation is about injustice and betrayal, redemption and grace.
Julian Guthrie is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Best of the West Award and the Society of Professional Journalists' Public Service Award.
Wednesday, August 24
7:30 PM
CLARK BLAISE
THE MEAGRE TARMAC
BHARATI MUKHERJEE
THE NEW MISS INDIA
Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee are writers, with scores of books between them, who have been married to one another for over forty years. This evening they’ll talk about, and read a bit from, each of their new books, and will discuss intercultural marriage, its expectations and realities.
Of Clark Blaise’s newest collection of stories, Margaret Atwood writes “Top work by a master storyteller and border-crosser … a gem of a book.”
The Meagre Tarmac begins with Dr. Vivek Waldekar, who refused to attend his father’s funeral because he was “trying to please an American girl who thought starting a fire in his father’s body too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.” It ends with Pranab Dasgupta, the Rockefeller of India, who can only describe himself as “‘a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant.’” And in between is a cluster of remarkable characters, incensed by the conflict between personal desire and responsibility, who exhaust themselves in pursuit of the miraculous. Fearless and ferociously intelligent, these stories are vintage Blaise, whose outsider’s view of the changing heart of America has always been ruthless and moving and tender.
Of Bharati Mukherjee’s newest novel, Amy Tan writes, “Enchanting! Mukherjee's pitch-perfect ear for character and mood and her story-telling gifts capture the exhilarating restlessness of a young Indian woman's pursuit of happiness. Miss New India illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains.”
Meet Anjali Bose. Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali doesn’t like her prospects. Armed with ambition, moxie and a gift for language, Anjali sets off to Bangalore, India’s fastest-growing major metropolis, determined to change her destiny. .Miss New India perfectly captures a moment in a modernizing, sophisticated and evolving India in this vividly imagined story of a young woman’s quest to invent a new life for herself.
Mukherjee explores how young Indians are dismantling age-old social structures by creating new identities—both literally and figuratively—as call-center employees, where crossing cultural lines is only a phone call away.
Clark Blaise, Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University
Centre. In 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University; he after went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990-1998), and as President of the
Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy, and in
2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Bharati Mukherjee is the author of eight novels, two story collections, and the coauthor of two books of nonfiction. She has also written numerous essays on immigration and American culture and is the first naturalized U.S. citizen to have won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Best Fiction. She is a professor of English at the UC Berkeley.