Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Friday, October 26
7:30 PM
MCSWEENEY’S POETRY SERIES Inaugural Reading
We’re so excited to celebrate McSweeney’s brand-new poetry series with writers ALLAN PETERSON, author of Fragile Acts,REBECCA LINDENBERG, author of Love: An Index, and ZUBAIR AHMED, author of the forthcoming, in December, City of Rivers.
Rebecca Lindenberg is the grateful recipient of a 2012 MacDowell Arts Colony residency, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a 2009-2010 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. Her poetry, essays, and criticism appear in The Believer, POETRY, Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, 32 Poems, Conjunctions, Huffington Post, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She lives and writes in northern Utah.
“Love, an Index is an utterly startling, muscular, heartbreaking book –
poems pulled into existence by an event anyone who reads them wants
only to reverse. Yet facing the irreversible fully, and still finding words,
is what poems do. They demonstrate what it is to go on. I wish this book were not here to be read. But it is. And be read it will, with gratitude, stopped breath, amazement.” -- Jane Hirshfield
Allan Peterson has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize ten times. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, Agni, The Believer, and The Paris Review, as well as several anthologies. Peterson’s collection, Anonymous Or, won the Defined Providence Press Competition, and his follow-up volume, All the Lavish in Common, won the prestigious Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts. He divides his time between Florida and Oregon.
“Allan Peterson’s collection Fragile Acts is a spacewalk on the wild side. I loved it. He puts music to the tension between the desperate human experience and the cool removal of the cosmos. His poems are refreshingly discrete artifacts—perfected and edgy—raw at the same time. They stand alone but gain power in one another’s presence. This is an exciting new voice, one we’ve been waiting for.” -- Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains
Zubair Ahmed was born in 1988 and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2005, his family won the Diversity Visa Lottery, which granted them the opportunity to immigrate to the US. During the year-and-a-half before moving, Ahmed dropped out of school and became a professional video gamer. In 2005, Ahmed’s family moved to Duncanville, Texas, where he finished high school. Ahmed now studies mechanical engineering and creative writing at Stanford University. He is a member of the Stanford Solar Car Team, president of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society, and has recently delved into business and startups.
"We used to play soccer in the monsoon rains.
Through my windows, I can see acres of fields,
Lying in the ruins of the wind."
Monday, October 29
7:30 PM
A Mini-Workshop for Writers & Would-be Writers with
CONSTANCE HALE
VEX, HEX, SMASH, SMOOCH
God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun. – Buckminster Fuller
They are the “pivot points” of a sentence; they “put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.” But somehow, in our noun- and adjective-addled Internet culture, where showy search terms and descriptors clutter our screens and inboxes, we seem to have lost sight of the power of the almighty Verb.
Constance Hale hopes to change that. Bringing the same witty, relaxed approach that made Sin and Syntax such a sensation, Hale reminds us, in VEX, HEX, SMASH, SMOOCH, that great writing harnesses the power of verbs. At the heart of every great sentence, Hale shows us, beats a great verb.
Blending pop culture, history, literature, linguistics, and grammar to answer how verbs entered English and why they’re so central to writing well, Hale writes, “[W]ithout verbs,we can’t have verbal dexterity, which is what this book aims to give you: the art of making sentences that are as enticing, graceful, sexy, and smooth as the tango.”
Whether she’s using Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I Woman” to refute the rule against the use of “ain’t” or pointing to the opening of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to undermine the rule against passive voice, Hale reminds us time and again that “it’s not verbs themselves we care about, but the creative impulse, the urge to capture the human condition.”
VEX, HEX, SMASH, SMOOCH is more than just a writing handbook; it’s a key to unlocking every writer’s innate creativity by offering countless paths to verbal expressiveness. This evening, Connie turns the principles in the book into some fun exercises, challenges and even contests in which the members of the audience try new things and even win prizes.Thursday, November 1
6:00 – 9:00 PM
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND DUMB
THE STRANGER VS. BELIEVERWatch as writers from The Believer and Seattle's The Stranger go head-to-head with tales from their youth. Jesus! LSD! Virginity! No topic is off-limits.
This storytelling event features Believer's Brian McMullen, Laura Howard, and Daniel Levin Becker and The Stranger's Lindy West,Christopher Frizzelle, and Bethany Jean Clement (who will be signing their new book How to Be a Person afterward). Free drinks with book purchase while supplies last!Booksmith at the Make-Out Room (3225 22nd Street San Francisco)
Friday, November 2
6:30 – 9:30 PM
READ UNTIL THE WORLD ENDS HALLOWEEN BOOKSWAP!
The Mayans said the apocalypse will be in December. Let's die the way we lived: clutching a book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other at our Read Until The World Ends Halloween Bookswap!
Bring a dystopian book that you love well enough to take into the afterlife. $25 gets you dinner and an open bar, a bookstore all to yourself and 40 of your new best friends, discounts and swag, a chance to rub elbows with amazing local authors, and tons of surprises. Amy Stephenson hosts.
Prizes for awesome costumes, so dress to impress! The deader the better.
Tickets in the store, or online at Brown Paper Tickets or 800-838-3006.
Wednesday, November 7
7:30 PM
RICHARD KRAMER
THESE THINGS HAPPEN
Richard Kramer is the Emmy and multiple Peabody award-winning writer, director and producer of numerous TV series, includingThirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Tales of the City, and Once and Again. His charming debut novel, These Things Happen, told in an ensemble of voices, reminds us that sometimes we’re capable of more than we realize, capable of greater love, greater insight, greater honesty – and even a redeeming forgiveness.
These Things Happen, a not-quite-coming-of-age story about a modern family, introduces a bright tenth-grader with a bright future. We’ve all met someone like Wesley – the earnest, sweet kid with a formidable intelligence who is nonetheless still a bit awkward. Wesley’s quickly gaining confidence though, as is his lifelong friend Theo. And then Theo surprises everyone, including Wesley, by outing himself at school…and Theo has some general questions about his future, and he wants Wesley to ask his dad, a prominent gay activist and lawyer. Who will actually listen – Wesley’s dad? Mother, or her husband? Or dad’s partner George?
“Like its two main characters it so unforgettably etches, [this] novel exemplifies the virtues of both youth and maturity: it manages to be both wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, deeply funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching…”
– Daniel Mendelsohn
“Artful, thoughtful and extremely funny, this is a wonderful first novel about artifice and the discovery of true feeling, about the roles we play and what we choose to make of them.” – Cathleen Schine
LAUNCH PARTY!
Thursday, November 8
7:30 PM
VIRGIE TOVAR and friends
HOT & HEAVY: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion
Fat activist and sex educator Virgie Tovar brings together voices from an often-marginalized community to talk about and celebrate their lives. In Hot & Heavy, Tovar rallies together a bold group of women who open up about their desires, struggles, and internal dialogues as they learn to embrace and exalt their womanly curves. Hot & Heavy celebrates the many fabulous aspects of being fat -- building fat-positive spaces, putting together fat-friendly wardrobes, learning how their bodies inform their personal politics, and creating supportive, inclusive communities. The contributors offer a diverse set of viewpoints, revealing a complex set of fat-positive beliefs and desires.
Ground-breaking and long overdue, Hot & Heavy is a fierce, sassy, thoughtful, authentic, and joyous collection of stories about unapologetically -- and unconditionally -- loving the body you’re in.
Celebrate with cupcakes and champagne, Virgie, us, and these contributors!
Tigress Osborn is the owner of Full Figure Entertainment, a night-club promotion company for full-bodied ladies and their friends. FFE hosts nightclub parties and other events in Oakland, California.Jessica Judd is a long-time dancer and current co-artistic director for the Phat Fly Girls, Big Moves’ resident size-positive dance company. A research analyst in a former life, Jessica is now a free-range fat activist and stay-at-home mother of two.
Genne Murphy is a playwright and arts educator. Her first full length play, Hope Street and Other Lonely Places was a 2011 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference finalist. Her short plays and monologues have been featured by Azuka Theater, Flashpoint Theater Company, Madhouse Cabaret and many more.
Abby Weintraub serves on the NOLOSE Board of Directors and is currently working on a collection of short stories about illness, awkward sexual experiences, and false alarms.Deb Malkin is a fat, queer, cheetah-print-wearing body liberationist, organizer, rabble-rouser and the owner of ReDress, an online vintage and resale boutique for women size 12 and up.
Kimberly Dark is a writer, mother performer, and professor. She is the author of five award-winning solo performance scripts, and her poetry and prose appear in a number of publications. Kimberly’s shows have twice been named on Curve magazines’ top-ten performances of the year.