Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
The sequel to Little Brother!
Thursday, February 7
7:30 PM
CORY DOCTOROW
HOMELAND
In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco -- an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.
A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff -- and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him -- but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.
Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother -- a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of young adult novels like Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. His adult novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been named one of the Web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.
Co-sponsored and co-hosted by The Believer:
Wednesday, February 13
7:30 PM
DAVID SHIELDS
HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE
“I think just about everything David Shields writes is pretty much indispensable.” – Bret Easton Ellis
In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature.
Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal’s Penséesto Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable.
Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his “ridiculous” ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants “literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this -- which is what makes it essential.”
How Literature Saved My Life is a captivating, thought-provoking, utterly original way of thinking about the essential acts of reading and writing. We’re thrilled to welcome him back to The Booksmith and to have The Believer as our co-host.
“[This book] defies easy categorization (as have others of Shields' works): It is both a paean to the power of language and a confrontation with the knowledge that literature can't, after all, fulfill deeper existential needs. A work of contradictions, subversions, depression, humor and singular awareness; Shields is at his finest when culling the work of others to arrive at his own well-timed, often heartbreaking lines.” – Kirkus Reviews
David Shields is the author of thirteen previous books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times best seller), Black Planet (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). He has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Village Voice, The Yale Review, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and The Believer.His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Tuesday, February 19
(rescheduled from January)
7:30 PM
KRIS SAKNUSSEMM
SEA MONKEYS:
A Memory Book
From the universally acclaimed cult novelist Kris Saknussemm comes a sixties coming-of-age memoir that is just as revolutionary as his fiction.
Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeys -- the story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s.
Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father’s church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of the Civil Rights Demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as “one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”
Kris Saknussemm’s books include the poetry collection In the Name of the Father, the novels Enigmatic Pilot, Zanesville, and Private Midnight, and a portfolio book of his paintings titled The Colors of Compulsion.
Launch Party!
Thursday, February 21
7:30 PM
KEVIN SMOKLER
PRACTICAL CLASSICS
Fifty Reasons to Reread 50 Books
You Haven’t Touched Since High School
Remember reading Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby in high school? How about Slaughterhouse-Five and Pride and Prejudice? Would you read them again now that no one’s grading you, just for your own enjoyment?
Practical Classics helps you do just that. Kevin Smokler guides you through fifty books commonly assigned in high school English class and shows you why you’d probably enjoy rereading the same books as an adult. Smokler’s essays on the classics -- witty, down-to-earth, appreciative, and insightful -- are divided into ten sections, each covering an archetypical stage of life, from youth and first love to family, loss, and the future. He not only reminds us of the essential features of each great book but gives us a practical, real-world reason why revisiting it in adulthood is not only enjoyable but useful. That’s right: enjoyable and useful!
Can The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn help you cope with aging? What does To Kill a Mockingbird have to say about being a parent? How about Fahrenheit 451 on not getting stuck in a crappy job? We can’t wait to find out, all over again!
Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Believer. He’s also a Booksmith neighbor, and you’re invited to join us in raising a celebratory glass to him this evening.
Launch Party!
Wednesday, February 27
7:30 PM
ANDREW LAM
BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST
The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of new Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. Past memories -- of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity --are ever present Andrew Lam’s wise and compassionate stories.
The past plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette's Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.
"Andrew Lam's Birds of Paradise Lost brilliantly engages the fundamental theme of much great literary work: who am I and what is my place in the universe? His stories are elegant and humane and funny and sad. Lam has instantly established himself as one of our finest fiction writers." -- Robert Olen Butler
"Read Andrew Lam, and bask in his love of language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those from far away. He reminds us that we have history in common; we can laugh and cry together." -- Maxine Hong Kingston
Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, andEast Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. He is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in the US. He was a regular commentator on NPR'’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others.
Thursday, February 28
7:30 PM
A JOHN CAGE RETROSPECTIVE WITH SALON97
Hosted by Cariwyl Hebert
“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.”
― John CageYou probably heard of John Cage well before people the world over celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth in September. Since then, Cage has re-entered the popular vernacular and inspires a fresh batch of art, cartoons, music, and more.
Join Booksmith and Salon97 for a night of all things John Cage -- music, art, poems, and some of the art he inspired. Come listen to (and see) some of his creations and perform one, too! We’ll also share samples of work inspired by John Cage’s groundbreaking ideas.
Salon97 is a community-based organization that makes classical music inclusive, educational — and awesome — for people with an interest in arts and culture, but who find the formal nature of the concert hall intimidating. Through a series of curated, themed listening parties and other hosted events, attendees learn about and discuss classical music, form new friendships and business relationships, and have a great time!