Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Booksmith in Berkeley:
Tuesday, December 6
7:30 PM
LUIS ALBERTO URREA
QUEEN OF AMERICA
A Berkeley Arts & Letters ProgramThe remarkable heroine of the beloved bestseller The Hummingbird’s Daughter makes a welcome return in an epic novel of love, loss and miracles in America by the bestselling storyteller Luis Alberto Urrea. More than two decades in the making, QUEEN OF AMERICAis the much-anticipated sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and showcases one of our most talented writers at the top of his form.
Urrea’s tale is based on his real great-aunt Teresita, who had healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint. Urrea extensively researched historical accounts and family records for decades to get the true story. He recounts a spell-binding tale: After the bloody Tomochic rebellion, Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and “Saint of Cabora,” flees with her father to Arizona. But their plans are derailed when she once again is claimed as the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution. Besieged by pilgrims and pursued by assassins, Teresita embarks on a journey through turn-of-the-century industrial America-stopping in New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis.
Teresita meets immigrants and tycoons, European royalty and Cuban poets, all waking to the new American century. As she decides what her own role in this modern future will be, she must ask herself, can a saint fall in love? At turns heartbreaking, uplifting, and riotously funny, QUEEN OF AMERICA reconfirms Luis Urrea’s status as one of our literary gems.
Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of 14 books, including The Devil’s Highway and Into the Beautiful North. Winner of a Lannan Literary Award and Christopher Award (for Across the Wire), he is the recipient of an American Book Award (for Nobody’s Son), the Kiriyama Pize, an Edgar award (for Amapola in Phoenix Noir(), and a citation of excellence from the American Library Association. He is also a member of the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. Follow him on Twitter; catch him on Facebook.Celebrate author, book, and the holidays with us as we end our fall season!
Berkeley Arts & Letters and The Booksmith @ the Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
7:30 PM (doors open at 6:45)
Tickets $12 (seat), $36 (1 seat + 1 book), $48 (2 seats + 1 book) in advance at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006.Tickets at the door, based on space available, $15. A portion of the proceeds will be given to the Alameda County Food Bank for its Holiday Food & Fund Drive. (If you’d like to make a personal donation, contact ACFB here.)
Celebrating the Rebirth of Capra Press:
Wednesday, December 7
7:30 PM
JENNIFER FUTERNICK
I NEVER EXPECTED THIS GOOD LIFE: Poems and Stories
More moving and wonderfully strange than Jennifer Futernick’s certainty at seventeen that she would never be happy is her effortless joy in being proved wrong. Her response has been to teach herself thankfulness, and she has produced a memoir making it an art form.
Futernick has an intimacy with the biology of kinship. She establishes the metaphorical heart at the center of a complex ecosystem—in which love is water, light, and oxygen—by weaving together body and spirit so viscerally and so well that at times it will leave you wanting to forget where you end and someone else begins. She is most at home, and at her most eloquent, in noting the myriad ways that the heart extends its influence into every touch, look, thought, reply… every thing that matters.“In this brave and unusual memoir, the author's spirit vibrates through these refreshingly honest and open pages. She does not shy away from the joy and pain of ordinary life, but reveals in surprising, delicate detail the connections that make up ‘the good life’." -- Kate Abbe, author of Joy Riding; Nothing Curved
Jennifer Futernick holds a B.A. in Humanities from U.C. Berkeley and an MLS from San Jose State. She was a research librarian at McKinsey & Company for over twenty years. Currently a poet and freelance editor, she lives with her husband in San Francisco.
Capra Press, an important and independent publishing house established in Santa Barbara by Noel Young in 1969; it was sold to Robert Bason in 2001.Capra has returned to family ownership with its purchase by Noel’s eldest daughter, Hilary Young Brodey, her husband Philip and John and Diana Harrington, and is now based in San Francisco. Capra acquired and published over 300 titles by writers like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Raymond Carver, Ray Bradbury, Gretel Ehrlich, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The press will remain a small, independent press and continue the tradition of publishing artfully crafted, quality literary works. We’re delighted to honor its past, and to welcome its rebirth and its future. This evening celebrates the first publication by the “new” Capra Press.
Thursday, December 8
7:30 PM
ZYZZYVA Winter Issue Celebration and Reading
with KAREN JOY FOWLER, JOSEPH DI PRISCO, KATIE CHASE, and ADAM JOHNSON
hosted by editor Laura Cogan and managing editor Oscar VillalonCome celebrate the release of ZYZZYVA's Winter 11 issue (No. 93) with a reading by four of its contributors: The Jane Austen Book Clubauthor Karen Joy Fowler, rising talent Katie Chase, poet Joseph Di Prisco, and award-winning novelist Adam Johnson. Wine will flow, good cheer will abound.
Katie Chase’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthologies. Born and raised outside of Detroit, she now lives in Portland.
Joseph Di Prisco is the author of several books, including two novels and two books of poetry. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other places. His forthcoming novel is All For Now. He lives in Berkeley.
Karen Joy Fowler is the prize-winning author of many books, including the novels Sister Noon, Wit’s End, and The Jane Austen Book Club. Her most recent book is the story collection What I Didn’t See. She lives in Davis and Santa Cruz.
Adam Johnson is the author of the story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. His novel The Orphan-Master’s Son will be published in January.
Friday, December 9
5:30 – 7:00 PM
BEER TASTINGS
JEREMY COWAN
CRAFT BEER BAR MITZVAH:
How it Took 13 Years, Extreme Jewish Brewing, and Circus Sideshow Freaks to Make Shmaltz Brewing Company an International Success
Shmaltz proprietor Jeremy Cowan delivers a witty and compelling tale of how the nation's first and only kosher craft beer came to fruition, Cowan tells the story of Shmaltz Brewing's evolution from an inside joke into a thriving and award-winning craft brewing company. In the words of Pete Slosberg, founder of Pete's Wicked Ale, "This man knows how to build a brand from scratch, and reading his story is a fascinating, can't-put-the-book-down tale. Just don't read it from right to left." Cowan divulges the small business challenges and marketing strategies that helped him go from hand-squeezing pomegranates and delivering beer in his grandmother's Volvo, to producing two of the most respected and unique craft beer brands in America: HE'BREW the Chosen Beer and Coney Island Craft Lagers."Jeremy Cowan is the Philip Roth of Craft Beer, and 'Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah' is his "Portnoys Complaint", a hilariously mindblowing account of a young Gen J entrepreneur who, armed only with vision, love of things Jewish, and a few bucks, turns his "He-brew Beer" label into an American cultural institution. "Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah' will bootleg inspiration straight into your heart."
-- Alan Kaufman, author of Jew Boy and editor of
The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
Shmaltz Brewing Company was awarded the gold medal for “Best American Craft Beer” and the overall “Best in Show” by Beverage World Magazine, 2010. Established by Jeremy Cowan in San Francisco in 1996 with the first batch of 100 cases of HE’BREW Beer® bottled, labeled, and delivered by hand, Shmaltz has sold over eight million bottles of beer to date. Along with their acclaimed line of HE’BREW Beers®, Shmaltz introduced its sideshow-inspired Coney Island Craft Lagers® in 2007. Shmaltz Brewing beers have appeared in such distinguished media outlets as The New York Times, CNN, Beer Advocate Magazine, NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” and The Onion, and are now distributed in over 30 states.
* 21+. Samples will include HE'BREW and Coney Island Craft Lagers (with some vintage and limited releases thrown in), at the very least!
“Cowan transforms San Francisco into the land of Malt and Hops with humor, an edge and a deep sense of biblical intoxicity.” -David Katznelson, Co-Founder of The San Francisco Appreciation SocietyPUBLICATION DAY CELEBRATION!
Tuesday, January 10
7:30 PM
ADAM JOHNSON
THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON
“Adam Johnson has pulled off literary alchemy, first by setting his novel in North Korea, a country that few of us can imagine, then by producing such compelling characters whose lives unfold at breakneck speed. I was engrossed right to the amazing conclusion. The result is pure gold, a terrific novel.” – Abraham Verghese
“An addictive novel of daring ingenuity; a study of sacrifice and freedom in a citizen-eating dynasty; and a timely reminder that anonymous victims of oppression are also human beings who love. A brave and impressive book.” – David Mitchell
"I've never read anything like it. This is truly an amazing reading experience, a tremendous accomplishment. I could spend days talking about how much I love this book. It sounds like overstatement, but no. The Orphan Master's Son is a masterpiece." – Charles Bock
When Adam Johnson first started researching North Korea, he was writing an ironic story called “The Best North Korean Short Story of 2005,” a playful take on how Kim Jong Il dictates a single ridiculous narrative for a country of 23 million. But once Johnson read the heartbreaking firsthand stories of North Korean defectors, he abandoned his original idea and began instead a novel about an average citizen coming of age during the famine. He also felt he had no choice but to travel there himself, and experience life in one of the most isolated countries on earth. There, he discovered – despite the screening of his three government minders – a place where every woman wears the same color lipstick, starving families forage for chestnuts in trees, pedestrians are randomly scooped up for “volunteer” labor, and loudspeakers blast nonstop patriotic anthems.
From his rare observations, Adam Johnson – whose previous fiction has been hailed as “remarkable” by The New Yorker and as having “great ingenuity and bravado” by The New York Times – created THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON. In this big-hearted, haunting, and boldly imaginative novel, Johnson interweaves the story of a young man named Jun Do with the official North Korean narrative as dictated by Kim Jong Il. As readers follow Jun Do from his orphanage work camp to his job as kidnapper of unsuspecting Japanese, through his time monitoring radio waves on a fishing boat to his dangerous impersonation of a government minister, they are exposed to the weird and wild textures of a corrupt country where the slightest mistake is punishable by death.
THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON is a knuckle-biting literary thriller from a masterful storyteller, as well as a courageous meditation on what it means to be free
Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s and Tin House, as well as in Best New American Voices. His other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.
Watch the book trailer here! http://youtu.be/Vx0eAfegTjg