Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Wednesday, April 18
7:30 PM
MELANIE THORNE
HAND ME DOWN
talks with
PAM HOUSTON
CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED
A tough, tender, debut novel, in the tradition of Dorothy Allison and Janet Fitch, Hand Me Down is the unforgettable story of a girl who travels between California and Utah in search of her true family, having never been loved best of all.
Fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Reid has spent her life protecting her sister, Jaime, from their parents' cruel mistakes. Their father, who'd rather work the system than a job, pours every dollar into his many vices, denying his daughters the shoes and clothing they need. Their mother, once a loving parent, is going through a post-post-adolescent rebellious streak and finds love with a dangerous ex-con. When she chooses starting a new family over raising her first-born girls, Elizabeth and Jaime are separated and forced to rely on the begrudging kindness of increasingly distant relatives.
A string of broken promises that begins with Liz's mother swearing, "I would never hurt you, Liz. You're family," propels her between guest beds in two states searching for a safe home. All the while, Liz is burdened by her stake in a bleak pact with a deceitful adult: to tell the truth about the darkest of her circumstances will cost her the ability to shelter Jaime. As Liz spirals into the abyss of fear and shame that haunts her sleepless nights, can she break free from her bonds in time to fight for her life?
Talking and reading with Melanie this evening is Pam Houston, the amazing author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, Sight Hound, A Little More About Me, and the new Contents May Have Shifted, and about whom Melanie writes, “In addition to being an amazing writer, Pam is also a kind and generous person and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. I was lucky enough to work with her at UC Davis for several years and she was the chair of my graduate thesis committee, which advised me on the very first draft of Hand Me Down, though it was originally titled something less interesting that no one liked.” What a pleasure it is to welcome bothMelanie and Pam this evening!
Thursday, April 19
7:30 PM
JULIE BRUCK
MONKEY RANCH
The compassionate and precise eye for which her earlier books
The compassionate and precise eye for which her earlier books were praised is given a wider, more ambitious scope in Monkey Ranch, Julie Bruck’s third collection. What, these poems ask, is sufficient, what will suffice?
A mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighborhood, a long marriage and even a spoon grapple with this conundrum—sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head out a truck’s passenger window.
“Monkey Ranch has all the antic sensuality and thrilling precision we’ve come to expect from Julie Bruck’s work. This volume has a pitch-perfect elegance that calms the ruckus just long enough for us to glimpse the vulnerability of everyone involved. Monkey Ranch is like the best sort of letter from a friend—full of gossip, lively observation, and serious wit.” – Sharon Thesen
“I have long considered Julie Bruck to be one of our most committed and humane voices. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.” – Cornelius Eady
Julie Bruck is the author of two previous books, The End of Travel, and The Woman Downstairs. Her recent work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Literary Mama, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and The Walrus, among other publications. A Montreal native, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter, and two enormous, geriatric goldfish.Sunday, April 22
10:30 - 11:45 AMTake My Word for It! Kids' Writing Classes Begin at The Booksmith
“Take My Word For It!” is a one-of-a-kind creative writing program for enthusiastic and reluctant writers alike. We’ll thrill you and your pencil with lots of innovative activities to explore your author-self. Students have the opportunity to share their work at our reading for parents and friends at the end of the session.
For this inaugural class at Booksmith, we'll be exploring where to find inspiration and ideas for your writing, how to spice up what you put on the page, and how to get better acquainted with metaphors, similes, alliterations and more!
So if you love to write or would like to make better friends with the written word in a safe, supportive environment, come check us out!
Who: Kids 8 - 12 years old
When: 6 week session Sundays, Aril 22 - June 3 [no class 5/27]10:30 – 11:45 AM at The Booksmith
Where: The Booksmith (in the secret upstairs creative space!)
Fee: $108. Early bird discount of 10% if you register by April 11. Min. 8 kids. (1 scholarship is offered once minimum enrollment is met.)
Register and pay online!
Questions? Email usTuesday, April 24
7:30 PM
AMELIA GRAY
THREATS
Amelia Gray has a singular voice and imagination; the world of THREATS is full of psychological twists and turns that are eerie yet familiar, violent yet tender. With ability and precision far beyond her years, Gray grabs you from the first page and never loosens her grip.
The dead of winter in an unnamed Ohio town is the scene of a painful death. David has had a rough couple of years. When his dentist license was revoked, he found his equilibrium slip. When Franny, his wife, dies of incomprehensible causes, he begins to lose his grasp on reality.
As David attempts to uncover the mystery of Franny’s death, he begins finding a series of threats hidden around his home, whose quickly escalating messages delve deeply into his innermost fears:
I will lock you in a room much like your own until it begins to fill with water.
If you’re here, don’t leave. I’m here in the house. If you’re here, I will find you.
Detective Chico would also like to know the truth behind Franny’s end. A psychiatrist stations her office in David’s garage and strange occurrences proliferate, possibly imagined. As David attempts to navigate life without Franny, and uncovers more threats, a dark comedy unfolds. Our perspective is rooted in David’s mind, a place where reality and paranoid fantasy are indecipherable from one another.
“The first time I encountered Amelia Gray’s fiction, it slugged me in the jaw. The second time, too, and the third. Said jaw-slugging has ensued nearly every time I’ve read something of hers, except for when instead it whispered sad and surprising but unreliable truths about the difficulty of intimacy and sense in the wretched blastoscape of modern life. And then it made me a grilled cheese sandwich to prove that the world can be a kind place, and it waited until I had sated myself and wiped away the crumbs before slugging me in the jaw again.”
—Doug Dorst, author of Alive in Necropolis
Amelia Gray is the author of two previous books, both acclaimed by critics, AM/PM and Museum of the Weird. She financed her tour for AM/PM through Kickstarter, renting a van and travelling around the country to read in bars and indie bookstores. Building a following one stop at a time, she wowed audiences with her riveting reading, which led to appearances at the AWP Conference, the Texas Book Festival, and others.
Wednesday, April 25
7:30 PM
RAFE SAGARIN
LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS:
How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease
Whether discussing responses to terrorism, natural disaster, or disease, the past decade is full of failures. Many disasters were evaded only because of slip-ups on the part of the enemy: the underwear bomber’s underwear didn’t explode; SARS just wasn’t that bad. Other disasters landed full body blows, yet the response was more of the same: add a new charade to the security checkpoint, another meter to the levee wall. This time, the argument goes, we’ll finally have the risk—suicide bomber or hurricane—beat. Inevitably, we will find, we don’t.
Ecologist Rafe Sagarin offers a revolutionary prescription for security systems in society: applying lessons from 3.5 billion years of evolution to fortify ourselves against disaster and war. More than copying what nature looks like, Sagarin argues that we must learn from how nature is organized, how it acts, and how it continually grows and diversifies on this dangerous and unpredictable planet.
Sagarin brings the abstractions of ecology to life to uncover nature’s examples of how can we detect danger, understand behavior, and defend against disaster or disease outbreaks. What can we do to avoid threats? Learn from the octopus, the picture of variability, from its ability to change color to its capacity to learn how to use coconut shells as body armor. Both traits evolved, but where one was preprogrammed, the other is open-ended, making use of whatever’s available. Within that combination of long- and short-term variability lays powerful protection.
LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS gathers wisdom from the hedgehog and the salmon, mangrove swamps and viral parasites, showing how nature’s lessons can transform our security systems from a series of after-the-fact, one-time interventions to proactive, holistic, and adaptable strategies that not only protect us from the threats we know about, but prepare us to respond efficiently and effectively to danger lurking around the corner. No system will ever be perfect, but that’s nature’s, and Sagarin’s, point: it’s not possible to eliminate all risk. Given how many species have been able to survive millions of years despite being under constant existential threat, learning from nature should enable us to do at least half as well. It’s all here in Sagarin’s timely, original, and totally game-changing book.
Rafe Sagarin is a marine ecologist and Environmental Policy Analyst at the University of Arizona. His research has appeared in Science, Nature, and Foreign Policy, among other publications.
Thursday, April 26
7:30 PM
DAVID VANN
DIRT
David Vann’s widely celebrated Caribou Island solidified this writer’s reputation as one of the rising stars of the literary world. Routinely compared with writers such as Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, Vann is being published in eighteen languages and has won fourteen prizes for his work, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger and Spain’s Premi Llibreter. His much-anticipated new novel, DIRT, is a savagely funny tragedy that once again displays “the beautiful exactness of language, the unerring eye for detail” (New York Times Book Review) that are hallmarks of Vann’s work.Set in 1985 in a secluded house with a walnut orchard in the suburbs of Sacramento, DIRT is the story of twenty-two-year-old Galen, who lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a kind of eccentric isolation. He has no idea who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his dementia-afflicted grandmother is in a nursing home. The family inheritance is in danger from a grasping aunt and cousin. A New Age believer bent on finding transcendence, Galen is prone to manic binges. When the family visits an old cabin in the Sierras, tensions build, and Galen is shocked to discover just how far he will go to achieve that transcendence he craves.
Like Caribou Island, “I think of DIRT as a play written through landscape,” Vann says. “It’s very traditional tragedy, from the Greeks, focusing on a primary relationship (in this case a mother and son) put under pressure until the characters break and are revealed. The book ultimately is about how philosophy leads to brutality. It’s also about a family legacy of abuse, passed down through a couple generations.” Readers may be surprised to discover more humor in this book than in Vann’s previous work, as he pokes fun at New Age beliefs and practices. But, as with all his work, Vann is concerned with relationships and the enveloping landscape that provides their metaphors.David Vann’s books—Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth—have appeared on sixty-five best books of the year lists in a dozen countries, and he’s been shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Sunday TimesShort Story Award, and longlisted for the Story Prize. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Stegner fellow and NEA fellow, he is a professor at the University of San Francisco, and has written for The Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, the Sunday Times, theObserver, and many others, and appeared in documentaries with the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.