Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Wednesday, July 18
7:30 PM
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER
THE AGE OF MIRACLES
“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
On a seemingly routine Saturday morning, eleven-year-old Julia and her family wake to an alarming news report announcing the slowing of the earth’s rotation. As a result of the “slowing,” the 24-hour day grows to 25 hours, then 26, increasing by several more minutes of sunlight and darkness each day. What follows is an undoing of life as we know it; crops dry, food and water supplies dwindle, unknown illnesses befall large swaths of the population, and entire species drop out of existence. A government mandate to follow the once universal 24-hour clock drives a societal splinter between those who observe traditional time -- ‘clock-timers’ -- and ‘real timers’, radicals, who mark the passing of days by the rise and fall of the sun. And yet, amid this portentous upheaval, Julia remains a typical young girl, making her way through the tumultuous terrain of adolescence -- the slights that cut so deeply at that age; friendships that dissolve for no apparent reason, the flawed humanity of her parents and their marriage, and the wonder of first love.
Extraordinary for its startlingly original concept, unforgettable characters and poetically punctuated prose, THE AGE OF MIRACLES is moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.
“This is what imagination is. In The Age of Miracles, the earth’s rotation slows, gravity alters, days are stretched out to fifty hours of sunlight. In the midst of this, a young girl falls in loves, sees things she shouldn't and suffers heartbreak of the most ordinary kind. Karen Thompson Walker has managed to combine fiction of the dystopian future with an incisive and powerful portrait of our personal present.” -- Amy Bloom, author of Away
Karen Thompson Walker holds an MFA from Columbia University and is a former editor of fiction and non-fiction at Simon & Schuster. A native of Del Mar, California, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband. This is her first book.
NPR includes The Age of Miracles in its Literary Look Ahead: 13 Great Books On The Horizon
Movie rights for The Age of Miracles have been optioned by River Road Entertainment, with Seth Lochhead attached to adapt. River Road is the production company for The Tree of Life, Into the Wild, Brokeback Mountain, and more. Lochhead most recently wrote the screenplay for Hanna.
Thursday, July 19
7:30 PM
MAX and WHIT ALEXANDER
BRIGHT LIGHTS, NO CITY: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan
Take two brothers -- one a cofounder of the Cranium board game and the other a journalist who worked for Variety and People -- and send them off to Ghana on an adventure that will test notions of charity and entrepreneurship even among the most environmentally conscious among us. Mix in a few tangential challenges -- deadly insects, terrible roads, and an assortment of culinary, religious, and governmental issues -- and you have BRIGHT LIGHTS, NO CITY.
Whit Alexander, Max’s younger brother, spent several years as a young man living in Western Africa working in development. He saw firsthand that while various aid projects did undoubtedly make a giant difference in many lives, he came to realize that truly long-lasting change needed to come from the African marketplace itself, not Western handouts. He returned to States to pursue a
career in technology but Africa was never far from his mind.
Fast-forward to 1997 when Whit, and a colleague from his old job at Microsoft, created a board game called Cranium. His older brother Max, a journalist covering pop culture, didn’t get the appeal of the game; though he helped write some of the questions for the first edition. Max was sure it was an idea destined to fail. How wrong he was: the game launched Whit Alexander onto the cover
of Inc. Magazine and great success.
Then, in 2008, Bill Gates addressed the Davos World Economic Forum on what he called “creative capitalism,” and challenged businesses to start innovating products that would benefit those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Whit Alexander took up this challenge (that has always been in his heart) and headed back to his first love: Africa.
Burro, Whit Alexander’s new business, was begun in Ghana, renting batteries to people who earn a dollar a day. The rechargeable batteries would allow those living largely off-grid to have battery-operated lanterns (allowing kids to do homework), radios, and chargers for their cellphones in a country where regular phone service is not available. However, Ghana was also a place where the
annual inflation rate exceeded 20 percent, and the country has a history of deadly military coups -- not exactly the stable marketplace in which to launch a fledgling business. Whit asked Max to come along and see for himself what this kind of start-up looks like in the making. The business has had its trials: from signing up customers who have little income or none at all, to training employees who have no Western-style work experience, plus dealing with manufacturers who are used to creating junk for Africans, not long-lasting, durable goods.
BRIGHT LIGHTS, NO CITY is a picaresque story with a business plan. Max Alexander is the perfect guide: skeptical at first, hilariously observant, worried about much that he is asked to plunge into, and finally inspired by what he sees. It’s also a story of two grown brothers and how this seminal adventure tests and finally redefines their relationship.
Max Alexander is an American journalist, author and failed politician. Man Bites Log, his 2004 memoir of moving from New York to Maine (which details his unsuccessful local election campaign) has been called "a hilarious how-not-to". He is a former senior editor at Peoplemagazine and, before that, the executive editor of Variety and Daily Variety. He has co-written several books on subjects ranging from cooking to personal finance, and he edited George Plimpton's last book, about the Antarctic explorer George Shackleton. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Money, Reader's Digest, TV Guide, This Old House and many other publications. He lives in Maine with his wife, the owner of an online retailer of natural handmade toys, and their two sons.
LAUNCH!
Thursday, July 26
7:30 PM
ROB REID
YEAR ZERO
“Can you imagine The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy combined with The Social Network? Of course you cannot: because ONLY ROB REID CAN. Hilarious, provocative, and supersmart, Year Zero is not merely the first IPSF (intellectual property SF) epic EVER WRITTEN, it is also a plain brilliant novel to be enjoyed in perpetuity, in the known universe and all unknown universes yet to be discovered.” -- John Hodgman, Resident Expert, The Daily Show
An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.
Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .
In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes us on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe -- and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.
Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news.The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything -- and the aliens are not amused.
Nick Carter has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly, and he’s an unlikely galaxy-hopping hero: He’s scared of heights. He’s also about to be fired. And he happens to have the same name as a Backstreet Boy. But he does know a thing or two about copyright law. And he’s packing a couple of other pencil-pushing superpowers that could come in handy.
Soon he’s on the run from a sinister parrot and a highly combustible vacuum cleaner. With Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.
“What if aliens heard our music – and really liked it? You could ‘what if’ for the next millennium and still not come up with as many zany scenarios as Rob Reid does in this tale of copyright law, astrophysics, biophysics, and crazy physics that hasn’t yet been invented. So sit back, hold your sides to ease the laughing pains, and find out whether Earth survives.” -- Jill Tarter, director, Center for SETI Research
Rob Reid was the founder of Rhapsody, the world's largest seller of music downloads until it was eclipsed by iTunes. He is the author ofYear One, a memoir about student life at Harvard Business School, where he received his MBA, and also of Architects of the Web, the first true business history of the Internet. He has spent years as a venture capitalist, working with Internet-related businesses. Year Zerois his first novel. Reid lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, Morgan Webb, who hosts X-Play, the world's most popular video-gaming-related TV show, airing daily on NBC's G4 network.Wednesday, August 8
7:30 PM
KAYA OAKES
RADICAL REINVENTION
Having spent more time in mosh pits and pro-choice rallies than kneeling in a pew, Kaya Oakes was not exactly a poster-child for Catholicism. But, despite a youth spent immersed in the Bay Area punk rock scene, proudly waving her atheist flag, something kept drawing her back to the religion of her Irish roots.
Maybe it’s the so-called God-gene? Or maybe, just being a practicing Catholic amidst her atheist Gen-X peers was the most rebellious thing she could do. Whatever the reason, after running away from the church for thirty years, Kaya decides to return. In spite of her frustration with Catholic conservatism, nothing brings her peace like Mass, and after years of searching to no avail for a better religious fit, she realizes that the only way to find harmony – in her faith and her personal life – is to confront the church she’d left behind.
Rebellious and hypercriticial, Kaya relearns the catechisms and achieves the sacraments, all while trying to reconcile her liberal beliefs with contemporary church philosophy. Along the way she meets a group of feisty feminist nuns, a “pray-and-bitch” circle, an all-too handsome Italian priest, and a motley crew of misfits doing their best to find their voices in an outdated institution.
The result is a story of transformation, no only Kaya’s from ex-Catholic to amateur theologian, but ultimately of the cultural and ethical pushes for change that are rocking the world’s largest religion to its core.
Kaya Oakes is the author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, the poetry collection Telegraph, and cofounder ofKitchen Sink, winner of the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine. She teaches at the UC Berkeley.
Thursday, August 9
7:30 PM
OKSANA MARAFIOTI
AMERICAN GYPSY
Oksana Marafioti’s parents performed in a traveling Romani ensemble until she was 15, when they moved to America. Growing up, she saw the Mongolian deserts and the Siberian tundra, watched her father get into bar fights with Nazis, learned about sex by sneaking into illicit movies, and endured the hostility of school bullies who would stick pieces of paper on her back that read “Gyp.” But in America, Oksana had a whole new life to get used to, which included rifling through curbside trash in Beverley Hills and wondering if it belonged to George Michael, reading Harlequin romances and using her Russian-American dictionary to decipher the phrase “burning loins,” and trying desperately not to make one of those typical mistakes immigrant families make -- like confusing cat food for canned tuna.
In AMERICAN GYPSY, she takes us through family revelations, cultural misunderstandings, and gives us a never-before-seen look at the realities of what it’s like to be a gypsy – and offers a fine look at the clash of two very different cultures.
Oksana Marafioti was recently awarded the BMI-Kluge Fellowship in partnership with the Library of Congress, a nine-month fellowship program offered to published writers and public intellectuals whose work ranges away from the American experience and into international terrain. Trained as a classical pianist, Marafioti has also worked as a cinematographer. She lives in Las Vegas.