Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Thursday, March 21
7:30 PM
EMILY RAPP
THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD:
A Mother’s Story
“The Still Point of the Turning World is about the smallest things and the biggest
things, the ugliest things and the most beautiful things, the darkest things and the brightest things, but most of all it’s about one very important thing: the way a woman loves a boy who will soon die. Emily Rapp didn’t want to tell us this story. She had to. That necessity is evident in every word of this intelligent, ferocious, grace-filled, gritty, astonishing starlight of a book.” -- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education.But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months. Rapp and her husband were forced to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about parenting. They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment, to find happiness in the midst of sorrow, to parent without a future.
Rapp’s response to her son’s diagnosis was a belief that she needed to “make my world big” – to make sense of her family’s situation through art, literature, philosophy, theology, and myth. Drawing on a broad range of thinkers and writers, from C. S. Lewis to Sylvia Plath, Hegel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rapp learns what wisdom there is to be gained from parenting a terminally ill child. In luminous, exquisitely moving prose she reexamines our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a good parent, to be a success, and to live a meaningful life.
Emily Rapp was born in Nebraska and grew up in Wyoming and Colorado. Born with a congenital defect, her left foot was amputated at age four, and she has worn a prosthetic limb ever since (about which she wrote in Poster Child: A Memoir, her first book). A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, she was educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. She has received awards and recognition for her work from The Atlantic Monthly,StoryQuarterly, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Valparaiso Foundation. She was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University and has received a Rona Jaffe Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Sun, The Texas Observer, Body & Soul and many other publications. Emily has taught writing in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, The Taos Writers' Workshop, University of California - Palm Desert, and the Gotham Writers' Workshops. She is currently professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“A masterpiece, pure and simple.” *
Friday, March 22
7:30 PM
RUTH OZEKI
A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace -- and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox -- possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
“An extraordinary novel about a courageous young woman, riven by loneliness, by time, and (ultimately) by tsunami. Nao is an inspired narrator and her quest to tell her great grandmother’s story, to connect with her past and with the larger world is both aching and true. Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists and here she is at her absolute best—bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page.”
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
* “Magnificent . . . brings together a Japanese girl’s diary and a transplanted American novelist to meditate on everything from bullying to the nature of conscience and the meaning of life. . . . The novel’s seamless web of language, metaphor, and meaning can’t be disentangled from its powerful emotional impact: These are characters we care for deeply, imparting vital life lessons through the magic of storytelling. A masterpiece, pure and simple.” -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Ruth Ozeki’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Shambhala Sun, and More, among other publications. She is a filmmaker and the author of the much-loved My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. In June 2010, she was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and serves as editor of the Everyday Zen Foundation’s website. She lives in British Columbia and New York City.
Tuesday, March 26
7:30 PM
JOELE FRASER
THE FOREST HOUSE:
A Year’s Journey into the Landscape of Love, Loss, and Starting Over
“We were moving to a beautiful but slightly dangerous place, a tiny one-bedroom house on ninety-seven wooded acres at the end of Diamond Fall Road, at the county line, just before the pavement ends and the road turns to dirt and tunnels into the trees. The driveway is a steep narrow dirt road, a quarter mile long, with two doglegs on the way up. Like the few other houses out this way, mine is hidden, much like a little nest, in the forest that begins here and continues for hundreds of miles into the mountain ranges of the northern Sierras and southern Cascades. This felt truly to be the edge of the world I knew.”
Reeling from a divorce and devastated by the reality of joint custoday – losing half of her young son’s life – Joelle Fraser resolves to stay in the small mountain town where her son’s father lives. The only place close enough, yet far enough away, is an ornery one-bedroom home tucked away on a lonely back road in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Miles away from town and the nearest neighbor, Joelle must quickly become self-sufficient. Her first winter brings severe storms and power outages, and the realization that mountain lions and rattlesnakes might be the least of her fears in this place of strange silence and endless wilderness.
As months pass and seasons change, Fraser learns how to live on her own – all on her own – aside from her son’s visits. Delving into the history of her family from the confines of the forest house, Fraser recounts the tragic story of her great-grandmother, who in 1919 emigrated from Sweden leaving her six children behind. Ultimately, fraser learns to accept her choices, and discovers gratitude beneath her pain.
Joelle Fraser has MFAs from Eastern Washinton University and the University of Iowa; she is a two-time MacDowel Fellow. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Hawaii Pacific Review, High Desert Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, and The Iowa Review. She’s also the author of The Territory of Men. Fraser lives near Reno.
Wednesday, March 27
7:30 PM
ELLEN SUSSMAN
THE PARADISE GUEST HOUSE
It starts as a trip to paradise. Sent on assignment to Bali, Jamie, an American adventure guide, imagines spending weeks exploring the island’s lush jungles and pristine white sand beaches. Yet three days after her arrival, she is caught in Bali’s infamous nightclub bombings, which irreparably change her life and leave her with many unanswered questions.
One year later, haunted by memories, Jamie returns to Bali seeking a sense of closure. Most of all, she hopes to find Gabe, the man who saved her from the attacks. She hasn’t been able to forget his kindness -- or the spark between them as he helped her heal. Checking into a cozy guest house for her stay, Jamie meets the kindly owner, who is coping with a painful past of his own, and a young boy who improbably becomes crucial to her search. Jamie has never shied away from a challenge, but a second chance with Gabe presents her with the biggest dilemma of all: whether she’s ready to open her heart.
Ellen Sussman is the author of the novels French Lessons and On a Night Like This, both national bestsellers.She’s the editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, and has published numerous essays in anthologies, including The Other Woman, and a dozen of her short stories have appeared in literary and commercial magazines. She has been awarded fellowships from The Napoule Art Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ledig House, Ucross, Ragdale Foundation, Writers at Work, Wesleyan Writers Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught at Pepperdine, UCLA and Rutgers University, and now teaches through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes.
Thursday, March 28
7:30 PM
JEN LARSEN
STRANGER HERE:
How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head
The number of weight-loss surgeries performed in the United States has grown
steadily over the years. As a culture, we are fascinated by dramatic weight loss
stories and fervently follow along when stars go under the knife. But when it
comes to weight loss, there’s a lying fairy tale being told: “The world is a completely
different place when you are thin -- when you lose the weight, you will also lose all
the flaws; you will magically become the completely different person you always
hoped you’d be.”
Jen Larsen fell for that fairy tale. She thought that if she could only lose the weight,
she would be unstoppable. She was convinced that once she found a way to not be
fat any more, she would have the perfect existence she’d always imagined. When
diet after diet failed, she decided to try bariatric surgery and it worked. In a year
and a half, she lost 180 pounds, going from 316 to 135 pounds. But as the weight fell
away, Larsen realized that getting skinny was not the magical cure she thought it
would be -- suddenly, she didn’t know who she was anymore.
Stranger Here is the brutally honest, revealing, and raw story of one woman going from one extreme of the weight spectrum to the other, and how bizarrely alike those extremes can be. From terrified and lonely, in a dead-end relationship and going-nowhere job, to a woman who drastically changed her entire life in order to figure out what she wants, Larsen is insightful and unsparing in her self-examination.
"For all the noise our culture makes about fat and thin and health and perfect bodies, Jen Larsen's voice rises above the clamor, disarming and funny but unflinching, too. Combining stark honesty with generosity of spirit, this story of loss and recovery is like no other." -- Wendy McClure, columnist for BUST Magazine and author of The Wilder Life
Jen Larsen is a writer and editor living in Ogden, UT. In 2006, she underwent weight loss surgery and lost almost 200 pounds. Six years later she's still trying to figure out what that means in terms of health and body acceptance, but feels lucky to have experienced the full spectrum of weight and size issues on either end of the scale.For two years Larsen was the featured blogger at Condé Nast's Elastic Waist. Her columns have also been syndicated on Yahoo!'s Shine Network for Women. She is a contributor to Big Fat Deal, a blog about weight in media and popular culture, and her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Word Riot, Emprise Review, andSouth Loop Review, among other publications. She is obsessed with tattoos as a way to transform your body, and has an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco.