Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Tuesday, March 5
7:00 PM
WORD/PLAY: Revenge of The Booksmith
The staff's been talking trash for months. Tonight, they'll finally get their chance at glory.
We'll have three of our wittiest staff members take on three writers who aren't afraid to challenge them without home court advantage. As always, the points are arbitrary, the bar is open, and the pizza is plentiful.
$15 = pizza, open bar, shenaniganery of the highest brow. Tickets available in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online (or 800-838-3006).
Wednesday, March 6
7:30 PM
MICHAEL LAVIGNE
THE WANTING
From the author of Not Me, this powerful novel about an Israeli father and his daughter brings to life a rich canvas of events and unexpected change in the aftermath of a suicide bombing.
In the galvanizing opening of The Wanting, the celebrated Russian-born postmodern architect Roman Guttman is injured in a bus bombing, causing his life to swerve into instability and his perceptions to become heightened and disturbed as he embarks on an ill-advised journey into Palestinian territory. The account of Roman’s desert odyssey alternates with the vivacious, bittersweet diary of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Anyusha (who is on her own perilous path, of which Roman is ignorant), and the startlingly alive witnessings of Amir, the young Palestinian who pushed the button and is now damned to observe the havoc he has wrought from a shaky beyond.
Enriched by flashbacks to the alluringly sad tale of Anyusha’s mother, a famous Russian refusenik who died for her beliefs, The Wanting is a poignant study of the costs of extremism, but it is most satisfying as a story of characters enmeshed in their imperfect love for one another and for the heartbreakingly complex world in which that love is wrought.
Michael Lavigne was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Millersville State College and the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work on the Committee on Social Thought. His first novel, Not Me, received the Sami Rohr Choice Award for emerging Jewish writers and was named an American Library Association Sophie Brody Honor Book and a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection; it was also translated into three languages. Lavigne has worked extensively in advertising, for which he has won many awards, is a founder of the Tauber Jewish Studies Program at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, and spent three years living and working in the Soviet Union. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Gayle Geary.
Thursday, March 7
7:30 PM
MICHAEL HAINEY
AFTER VISITING FRIENDS:
A Son’s Story
Michael Hainey’s father died when he was six years old. At the age of thirty-six, Bob Hainey was found dead, alone near his car, on Chicago’s North Side. Years later, in his early twenties, Michael looked up his father’s obituaries, and they didn’t seem to tell the same story. “Died After Visiting Friends,” one said. What friends? How? The ten years Hainey spent searching for answers are chronicled in the haunting After Visiting Friends. .
In his quest for the truth about his father’s life and death, Hainey beautifully conjures a Chicago of a bygone era -- when the city had five thriving papers, each with its own designated bar where the staffers drank and told stories -- a world which Bob Hainey, a newspaper man through and through, knew all too well.
At its heart, though, Hainey’s is a moving account of one man’s attempt to uncover his
family’s long-buried secrets. Combining his journalist’s investigative skills and his poet’s ear for language, Michael Hainey vividly renders his search, both factually and existentially, for the truth about his father, in the process renewing and deepening his relationship with his mother.
“Michael Hainey's After Visiting Friends is my sort of book, a Chicago book,
a family book of secrets. The powerful mystery at the heart of this story will
pull you through to the moving ending, but its Hainey's straightforward and
harrowing honesty that will grip you and stay with you.
There's great dignity in the way Hainey treats his people, and this lost story.”
-- Peter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love
“A book whose heartbreak and humor, in the true Irish tradition, can't be untangled. It's a kind of detective story, but the mystery is the past itself.”
-- John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
“Is there any more powerful story in the world than a boy looking for his father? Michael Hainey's memoir begins with a mysterious death, proceeds through years of unanswered questions, builds into a relentless investigation, and ends with the stubborn alchemy of a heart transformed. This is a beautiful work of reporting and redemption. Parts of this story will stay with me forever. I finished it in tears."
-- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed
Michael Hainey is the deputy editor of GQ and has been with the magazine for 10 years. His poetry has appeared in Tin House, amongst other places. Hainey attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and currently lives in New York City.
Friday, March 8
8:00 PM
LITERARY CLOWN FOOLERY: Ladies Night Edition
March is Women's History Month, so throw out your razors, grab your diva cup, join us for 90-minutes of she-woman man-hating misandry.
Ladies drink free, all night long!
$10, open bar, live performances. Tickets available in the store or online at Brown Paper Tickets (or 800-838-3006).
A LIT DOUBLE-HEADER
Wednesday, March 13
7:30 PM
SAM SHERIDAN and
PANIO GIANOPOULOS
In Sam Sheridan’s The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse, survival expert Sam embarks on a quest to prepare himself and his family for the end of the world. He had traveled the world as an EMT, a mixed martial arts fighter, a sailor, a firefighter, and a construction worker at the South Pole. So he is probably more prepared to handle a life or death situation than any of us. Yet when Sam became a father he was beset with nightmares about being unable to protect his son. If a rogue wave hit his LA beach community, would he be able to get out? If a big earthquake caused the power grid to go down, did he have enough food and water for his family? Unable to set aside his fears, he decided instead to confront them by acquiring as many skills, in as many different doomsday situations, as he possibly could.
To prepare, Sam spends several weeks in the desert training with wilderness expert Cody Lundin, studies hand-to-hand knife combat, practices stunt car driving with a Hollywood trainer, and learns how to build an igloo from the Inuit in northern Canada. Sheridan left no stone unturned. Did he learn enough to survive if a meteor struck the earth? Sheridan can’t be one hundred percent sure, but as he points out, it would be a damn shame to live through the initial impact only to die a few days later because he didn’t know how to build a fire.
“Sheridan’s matter-of-fact tone is informational and gripping, and he never descends into a paranoid, ‘us or them’ tone. Ultimately, learning to live through an apocalypse is about learning to be a human being; it takes an appetite for knowledge, the ability to cooperate, and most of all, adaptability. Anyone who thinks humankind is getting soft should read this book— no matter what happens, it’s clear that some of us will survive.”
--Daniel Wilson, author of Amped, Robopocalypse, and How to Survive a Robot Uprising
“A rollicking, brave, and surprisingly affecting account of one man's quest to prepare himself and his family for the end of the world. Traveling from desert to arctic waste, Sheridan hurls himself fearlessly into learning every kind of skill you might need once the lights go out, and finds that what you know isn't as important as how you carry yourself—an apt lesson for every life, not just those beset by zombie hordes.” -- Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger
Sam Sheridan joined the U.S. Merchant Marines after high school and then attended Harvard College, graduating in 1998. He has written for Newsweek and Men’s Journal and is the author of two books, A Fighter’s Heart: One Man’s Journey Through the World of Fighting and The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game.
Panio Gianopoulos’ A Familiar Beast is an elegant, darkly moving, and haunting tale of a man’s search for redemption.
In the wake of an affair that has cost him his marriage and career, Marcus is a lost man. Desperate for reprieve from his loneliness and regret, he accepts an invitation to go to the wilds of North Carolina and visit Edgar, an old high school classmate burdened with mysterious troubles of his own. In Edgar’s beautiful, empty home, their separate sorrows draw Marcus into a series of unnerving situations, culminating in a proposed deer hunt. Marcus agrees, despite his inexperience and aversion to killing, and as the hunt draws closer, he must confront the violent prospect with a candor and recognition that have, until now, evaded him.
“Elegant, erudite and witty, this extremely well-observed story offers more insights into love and human relationships than most authors manage in works three times as long.” -- Adam Langer, author of The Thieves of Manhattan
Panio Gianopoulos’s writing has appeared in various publications, including Northwest Review, Tin House, The Rattling Wall, The Brooklyn Rail, Nerve, and FiveChapters. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for nonfiction literature, he has been included in the anthologies Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Nonfiction Reader, The Bastard on the Couch, and The Encyclopedia of Exes: 26 Stories by Men of Love Gone Wrong. He lives with his wife Molly Ringwald and their three children in Los Angeles.
Wednesday, March 20
7:30 PM
TAIYE SELASI
GHANA MUST GO
Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku’s death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before. Ghana Must Go is their story. Electric, exhilarating, beautifully crafted, it is a testament to the transformative power of unconditional love, from a debut novelist of extraordinary talent.Moving with great elegance through time and place, Selasti charts the Sais’ circuitous journey to one another. In the wake of Kweku’s death, his children gather in Ghana at their enigmatic mother’s new home. The eldest son and his wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; the baby sister, now a young woman: each carries secrets of their own. What is revealed in their coming together is the story of how they came apart: the hearts broken, the lies told, the crimes committed in the name of love. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain, believing that what has been lost can never be recovered -- until, in Ghana, a new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge.
“Selasi does more than merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel, period. An astonishing debut."
-- Teju Cole, author of Open City"Gorgeous. Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri but with even greater warmth and vibrancy, Selasi’s novel, driven by her eloquent prose, tells the powerful story of a family discovering that what once held them together could make them whole again."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in American studies from Yale and an M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford. “The Sex Lives of African Girls” (Granta, 2011), Selasi’s fiction debut, will appear in Best American Short Stories 2012. She lives in Rome.