Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Wednesday, September 21
7:30 PM
AN EVENING WITH NEAL STEPHENSON
AT THE SWEDISH AMERICAN HALL
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Neal Stephenson is continually rocking the literary world with his brazen and brilliant fictional creations—whether he’s reimagining the past (The Baroque Cycle), inventing the future (Snow Crash), or both (Cryptonomicon). With the gargantuan REAMDE, this visionary author whose mind-stretching fiction has been enthusiastically compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace—not to mention William Gibson and Michael Crichton—once again blazes new ground with a high-stakes thriller that will enthrall his loyal audience, science and science fiction, and espionage fiction fans equally. The breathtaking tale of a wealthy tech entrepreneur caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game,REAMDE is a new high—and a new world—for the remarkable Neal Stephenson.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novelsCryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and Anathem. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Tickets: seat + book $47, at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-383-3006 or in the store.
The Booksmith at the Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street, San Francisco
Doors will open for seating at 6:30; a downstairs bar will be open. Space is limited, so we suggest purchasing your tickets early.
Thursday, September 22
7:30 PM
REVEREND BILLY and SAVITRI D
THE REVEREND BILLY PROJECT: FROM REHEARSAL HALL TO SUPER MALL WITH THE CHURCH OF LIFE AFTER SHOPPING
Reverend Billy, the revivalist preacher created by performance artist Bill Talen, has attracted an international following as he has railed in white suit and clerical collar against the evils of excessive consumerism and corporate irresponsibility. In his early solo performances in Times Square he delivered sermons by megaphone against Starbucks and the Disney Store; as his message and popularity spread, he’s been joined by a 35-member choir (The Life After Shopping Gospel Choir) and a 7-piece band. The group’s acclaimed stage show and media appearances (including the film What Would Jesus Buy?) have reached millions.
The Reverend Billy Project presents texts and backstage accounts of recent performance-actions by Reverend Billy and the troupe’s director, Savitri D, recounting their exploits on three continents in vivid narratives that are engaging, shrewdly analytical, and often side-splittingly funny. Also included are an introduction by journalist Alisa Solomon and her engaging interview with Bill and Savitri about their work. As thoughtful as they are funny and inventive, Reverend Billy and Savitri D’s story-essays bring to life a playful yet sincere new form of political theater. We’re thrilled they will both be with us this evening.
Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping have been featured in a wide range of contemporary media, including some unlikely places: the Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, Fox News, and even Glenn Beck. More than a thousand homemade movies of Reverend Billy have been posted on YouTube by the old-time faithful, and the project maintains a website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and a regular email bulletin that goes out to tens of thousands subscribers.
Monday, September 26
7:30 PM
HELEN BENEDICT
SAND QUEEN
Culled from real life stories of female soldiers and Iraqis, SAND QUEEN offers a story of love, courage and struggle from the rare perspective of two young women on opposite sides of a war.
Nineteen-year-old Kate Brady joined the army to bring honor to her family and democracy to the Middle East. Instead, she finds herself in a forgotten corner of the Iraq desert, guarding a makeshift American prison. There, Kate meets Naema Jassim, an Iraqi medical student whose father and little brother have been arrested and detained. Kate and Naema promise to help each other, but the stresses of war soon strain their intentions. Like any soldier at war, Kate must face the daily threats of bombs and attacks, but as a woman, she is in equal danger from the predatory men in her unit. Naema suffers bombs, starvation, and the loss of her home and family. As the two women struggle to survive and hold on to the people they love, each comes to have a drastic and unforeseeable effect on the other’s life.
“Every war eventually yields works of art which transcend politics and history and illuminate our shared humanity. Helen Benedict’s brilliant new novel has done just that with this century’s American war in Iraq. Sand Queen is an important book by one our finest literary artists.” – Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Helen Benedict is the author of five novels and five books of nonfiction. This, her sixth novel, is based on her research for her most recent nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Benedict has won three major awards for her work on soldiers: The 2010 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus, The Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness for 2010, and the 2008 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. She has testified twice to Congress on behalf of women in the military. She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.
Wednesday, September 28
7:30 PM
BANNED BY THE BAY PRESENTS
“LET’S TALK FREADOM WITH KIRK BOYD”
Banned by the Bay, San Francisco’s celebration of Banned Books Week, invites you to The Booksmith for an insider’s look into battles over censorship and free speech and the state of the First Amendment in our libraries and schools.Kirk Boyd graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1985 and then later returned to receive an LL.M, writing about the enforcement of economic and social rights in courts of law. He then went on to his doctorate, receiving his J.S.D. in 2001, for drafting an International Bill of Rights that can be enforceable in the courts of all countries. This work went on to become the best-selling book 2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together, which tells about the evolution of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into an enforceable International Bill of Rights.
This event is made possible by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Media Law Resource Center Institute, The Booksmith and is part ofBanned by the Bay, a celebration of Banned Books Week taking place from September 24 - October 1.
Thursday, September 29
7:30 PM
SIMON REYNOLDS
RETROMANIA:
POP CULTURE’S ADDICTION TO ITS OWN PAST
In conversation with SCOTT HEWICKER
“Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading towards a sort of cultural–ecological catastrophe, when the seam of pop history is exhausted? And out of all the things that happened this past decade, what could possibly fuel tomorrow’s nostalgia crazes and retro fads?”
What will popular culture and music from the first decade of the twenty-first century be remembered for? In RETROMANIA, a brilliant consideration of this question, one of today’s best music writers, Simon Reynolds argues that the 2000s were the ‘Re’ Decade. The ‘Noughties’ saw countless genre revivals, classic album reissues, film and television remakes, lucrative reunion tours, event reenactments, and music that recycled, repurposed, and renovated existing culture with samples and mash-ups. As Reynolds writes, “there has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.” But what does this mean for the present and future of music? Are we in the midst of the gradual wind-down of pop? Is this how it ends? “Not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university”?
In addition to music, Reynolds considers everything from fashion to film, and shows how technologies that burgeoned in the 2000s—from internet archives, to YouTube, to the iPod—have made access to the past ridiculously easy. If we live in a world where we can hop on the computer (or iPhone) and watch a video of a blues singer like Son House, followed by a late seventies performance by Talking Heads, and then the newest Lady Gaga video within the span of ten minutes—and use them all to build our own identity—then who are we? If we document everything that we do right as we do it, aren’t we always in a state of looking backwards? There are some aspects of ‘retromania’ that Reynolds has less disdain for than others, but overall this book is an unsparing critique, itself nostalgic for the days when pop music seemed to hurtle into the future, and genres and artists had the ability to define eras.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most respected music journalists working today, and his writing is both influential and polarizing. He draws on an impressive range of knowledge, and writes with a fluid, engaging style. His books Rip it Up and Start Again and Generation Ecstasy are well-regarded works about their respective genres, and RETROMANIA may be his most broadly appealing book yet. It makes an argument about art, nostalgia, and technology that has implications for all readers—whether diehard music fans or not. It’s an important and provocative look at the present and future of culture and innovation.
Scott Hewicker is an artist, writer and musician based in San Francisco. He has an MFA from Stanford University and has exhibited his work at Gallery 16, Jack Hanley Gallery, Deitch Projects NY, Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen, ICA Philadelphia and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He recently co-curated the exhibit Hauntology at the Berkeley Art Museum with Larry Rinder, and plays in the bands The Alps and Aero-Mic’d. With Cliff Hengst, Hewicker co-edited and illustrated the book, Good Times, Bad Trips published by Gallery 16
“If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music, it would have to be—on the basis of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style—Simon Reynolds.” -- Geoff DyerWednesday, November 2
7:30 PM
ALAN KAUFMAN
DRUNKEN ANGEL
“With an outsized heart to go with its outsized thirst, Drunken Angel tells
the sort of truths that feel like myths and the sort of myths that feel like truth.”
—Daniel Handler
Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Alan Kaufman was an alcoholic so mauled by his indulgences it’s a marvel he was alive enough to get into recovery. DRUNKEN ANGEL is the story of how he climbed up from the abyss of a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing and guilt to become a celebrated writer, editor, organizer and father to the daughter he’d abandoned for 20 years.
Kaufman’s descent takes us from the street gangs of the Bronx to the intellectual centers of Manhattan; from the battlefields of Gaza and the West Bank, where he served in the Israeli army, to the punk rock nights of the East Village, the poetry stages of Europe and San Francisco, as he was a force in the nascent spoken word poetry movement.The brutal account of his ceaseless, losing battle against his addiction and the glimpses of beauty that emerge as he begins to find his way is mesmerizing. For the frontispiece Kaufman chose the Diane Arbus quote, “It’s very thrilling to see darkness again.” Reading this book is like watching an accident to see if any of the victims crawl away barely alive. Kaufman did, and here delivers a lacerating cautionary tale.
With his estranged daughter as inspiration, Kaufman cleaned himself up at age 40, taking full responsibility for nearly destroying himself, his work and so many loved ones along the way.
Alan Kaufman is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Jew Boy, the novel Matches, called "an extraordinary war novel," by David Mamet, and a book of poetry, Who Are We?. He is the award-winning editor of several anthologies, the most recent of which, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. His work has appeared in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, Partisan Review, Tikkun and Tel Aviv Review, among other publications. A former editor of Jewish Frontier, he is the founder and editor of the controversial magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution and has performed extensively as a spoken-word poet in the United States and internationally. A lay ordained Zen practitioner, he is also one of the founders and Dean of the Free University of San Francisco, which The New York Times recently compared to the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.