Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
Wednesday, March 19
7:30 PM
MELISSA GIRA GRANT
PLAYING THE WHORE: The Work of Sex WorkThe sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen the proliferation of stories focused on the intersection between the internet and sex work and reports on the supposed increase in human trafficking. The panic over “online red-light districts,” which are said to seduce vulnerable young women into a life of degradation, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s live tweeting of a Cambodian brothel raid, and the work of “video vigilantes” like JohnTV typify the fearful, salacious stories about sex work told by news organizations and the high-profile NGOs that see themselves as the saviors of helpless young women.
Rarely do such stories come from sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished—a position common among feminists and conservatives alike.
In PLAYING THE WHORE, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, her narrative dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the “legitimate” economy only harms those who perform sexual labor.
Demonstrating how distorted the popular conception of sex work has become, and the scant attention our society pays to the concerns of those who make their livelihood from it, the book affirms that sex work is work, and sex workers’ rights are human rights.
Melissa Gira Grant is a writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Glamour, the Guardian, the Nation, Wired, and the Atlantic. She is also a Contributing Editor to Jacobin.
Friday, March 21
6:30 - 9:30 PM
BOOKSWAP: FARM FRESH EDITION with NOVELLA CARPENTERJoin us on the first day of spring for the first Bookswap of 2014!
If you've never been to Bookswap, imagine this.
You pick a book you love. We close the store early, open the wine, serve some dinner, hand you a coupon, and turn you loose inside the bookstore with 30 of your new friends.
At the end, we have a big, rowdy, white elephant-style swap. You'll part with your book, and leave with a book someone else adores.
Sounds like an okay Friday night? Good, because that's not all.
Joining us for March will be NOVELLA CARPENTER. Her memoir FARM CITY has just been chosen for One Book, One Marin, and she runs one of the most delicious blogs on the internet. We'll ask her about pigs, conditional use permits for growing chard in Oakland, and her new book, Gone Feral (out in June).
$25 per person, includes drinks, dinner, and discounts. Tickets must be purchased in advance in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online.
Wednesday, March 26
7:30 PM
DINAW MENGESTU
ALL OUR NAMES
This is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart -- one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom.
Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, ALL OUR NAMES is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.“. . . Split across two narratives—one in the past, one in the present—All Our Names dramatizes the clashes between romantic idealism and disillusioned practicality, as well as between self-preservation and violence, all while blurring the identities of those who can move on, those who stay behind, and those who simply change.” -- The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great 2014 Book Preview”
Dinaw Mengestu, a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of two novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How To Read the Air. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University's MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 Award from The New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper's, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and currently lives in New York City.
Friday, March 28
7:30 PM
TEJU COLE
EVERYDAY IS FOR THE THIEFFor readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.
Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.
A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life -- creative, malevolent, ambiguous -- and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF was originally published in Nigeria in 2007; this revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like it because no one writes like Teju Cole.“Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author’s deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.” -- Salman Rushdie
Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography has been exhibited in India and the United States. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Monday, March 31
7:30 PM
DUSTIN LONG
BAD TEETHA deadpan comic feast of love, literature and intrigue told in four interlocking sections across four different cities, featuring a translator’s quest to track down a reclusive novelist, the key to practical magic, a mysterious group of social activists and the links that secretly connect them, BAD TEETH follows a cast of young literary men and women in four very American cities -- Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. It’s four (or more) books in one, a Pynchonesque treat: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoner’s reverie, and a quadruple love story. Its wonderfully evoked storylines of young writers, each in a period of formation, collect around the search for one mysterious author—"the Tibetan David Foster Wallace," who might in fact be a plagiarist.
Following leads (and lovers and friends) across the country, Judas hopes to advance his literary career by securing a much desired interview with the reclusive writer. All the while, he is confronted by SOFA, a protest group so mysterious their very initials are open to interpretation.
Dustin Long is also the author of Icelander. He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in American Literature, and he teaches literature at a private institution in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée and son.
Wednesday, April 2
7:30 PM
THE MINIMALISTS
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus
Everything That RemainsImagine your life a year from now. Two years. Five. What will it look like?
Imagine a life with less: less stuff, less clutter, less stress and debt and discontent. A life with fewer distractions.
Now imagine a life with more: more time, more meaningful relationships, more growth and contribution and contentment. A life of passion, unencumbered by the trappings of the chaotic world around you.
What you’re imagining is an intentional life. Not a perfect life, not even an easy life, but a simple one. What you're imagining is your life once you get the excess out of the way and start focusing on everything that remains.
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, better known to their 2 million readers as The Minimalists, share their story of living with less and celebrate their new book, EVERYTHING THAT REMAINS.
At age 30, Joshua and Ryan left their six-figure corporate careers, got rid of most of their material possessions, and began living more deliberately. Come listen to them speak about their journey into the simple life, followed by a short reading from their new book, a brief Q&A session, and book signing.
With special guest Leo Babauta, author of the online Zen Habits and the book The Power of Less.