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Friends,

below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)

Thursday, April 3
7:00 PM
Presented by WriteClub SF and The Booksmith:
SHIPWRECK: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

For Easter, we're taking on Narnia.

Good theatre for bad literature? Marital aid for book nerds? A literary erotic fanfiction competition for the ages? Shipwreck is all of these things.

Six Great Writers will destroy one Great Book, one Great Character at a time, in service of the transcendent and the profane (and also laughs). Marvel as beloved characters are plucked from their worlds and made to do stuff they were never meant to do in places they were never meant to see.

You choose the best Ship. The winning writer chooses their character for the next Shipwreck, and returns to defend their title.

All stories will be recited by Shakespearean Thespian in Residence, Sir Steven Westdahl, from his private chamber at Booksmith Castle, both to preserve the majesty of the written work and to ensure the honesty of the audience when voting for a winner.

WRITERS: Ken Grobe, Lauren O'Niell, Ignacio Zulueta, Turi Fesler, Carolyn Ho, and March's winner , Alan Leggit.

Tickets $10 (includes drinks) available in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online. 21+, please.


Monday, April 7
7:30 PM
WENDY MacNAUGHTON
MEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO: The City in Its Own Words

and

JULIA ROTHMAN
HELLO, NEW YORK: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Five Burroughs

East Coast or West Coast? New York or San Francisco? Whichever way you lean, Wendy MacNaughton and Julia Rothman battle to give you ever more reasons for sticking with your preferred city this evening when they deliver their passionate tributes to their own cities.

If San Francisco could talk, what would it say? With her beloved city as a backdrop, a sketchbook in hand, and her natural sense of curiosity, New York Times-bestselling illustrator Wendy MacNaughton asked dozens of locals to describe their lives in the city in their own words. The result isMEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO, a street-smart collection of intimate explorations as diverse and beautiful as San Francisco itself.

Readers meet produce vendors at the Civic Center farmers market, patrons combing the shelves at the San Francisco public library, mah jongg players in Chinatown, MUNI drivers getting ready for the day’s run, early-morning dogwalkers, Critical Mass bicyclists, fearless ocean swimmers, and much more. Complete with a removable book jacket that folds out into a beautiful, illustrated poster-sized map, MacNaughton's newest work is graphic journalism that offers both residents and visitors a priceless opportunity to see the city with new eyes.

Anyone who loves New York will delight in HELLO, NEW YORK. Author, and lifelong New Yorker Julia Rothman brings humor and tenderness to an eclectic assortment of historical tidbits (how the New York Public Library lion sculptures got their names), idiosyncratic places to visit (where to find the tennis courts at Grand Central Station), interviews with locals (thoughts on love from a Hasidic Jewish landlord), and personal recollections from growing up in the Bronx (fried fish at Johnny’s Reef)—all illuminated in her beloved signature style. Part memoir, part guidebook, Rothman's book is a personal tour through New York’s offbeat treasures through the eyes of a beloved indie.

Wendy MacNaughton is an illustrator based in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, theWall Street Journal, and Print magazine. She is the illustrator of Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation and GPS Technology and the New York Times bestseller The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert.

Julia Rothman is the coauthor of The Exquisite Book and The Where, The Why, and The How, and her illustrations have been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, New York magazine, and theWall Street Journal. A lifelong New Yorker, she currently lives in Brooklyn.


Wednesday, April 9
7:30 PM
TOM FITZGERALD and LORENZO MARQUEZ
EVERYONE WANTS TO BE ME OR DO ME:
Tom & Lorenzo’s Fabulous & Opinionated Guide to Celebrity Life & Style

Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez were your typically paired-off gay couple of ten-plus years: no kids, lots of antiques, single-digit body fat, and one cat too many, when they decided to throw a couple curveballs at life. They launched a blog called “Project Rungay,” which punctured the self-importance and silliness of the fashion and celebrity worlds. The pair’s gentle snark and wit quickly amassed a cult following, and the blog becameTomandLorenzo.com, which now receives 10 million page views a month and 6-7 million monthly visitors.

TLo, as the pair are affectionately known, have been featured in People, Marie Claire, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, but they haven’t lost the hilarious voices that make them so beloved.

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE ME OR DO ME is the proof: with insight, humor, and takedowns of the myths of celebrity cultures, it offers TLo's very best advice on how to dress, act, and think like a celeb. Let them teach you celebrity affirmations! How to get famous in three easy positions! How to obliterate your weaknesses! How to muster an army of rabid online defenders out of a socially awkward fanbase! How to have a public meltdown -- and so, so much more.
Tom & Lorenzo have 248,000 (and counting) Twitter followers. They are currently shooting a piece for a Sundance channel show about fashion and continue to make semi-regular appearances on Sirius Radio. Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez were married in July. They live in Philadelphia. But they'll be at The Booksmith tonight.

Please note: reserved seats available when you purchase a copy of Everyone Wants to Be Me or Do Me at The Booksmith before the event. Please ask for a seat voucher at the time of purchase. Standing room, will, of course, be available.

Thursday, April 10
7:30 PM
ARLO CRAWFORD
A FARM DIES ONCE A YEAR

The rhythms of a farm are familiar to Arlo Crawford: rise, eat, bend, pick, sort, sweat, sleep. Raised on New Morning Farm, seventy-five acres in south-central Pennsylvania where his parents have grown organic produce since the 1970s, Crawford chronicles his homecoming and one full season on the farm, from the smallest triumphs and inevitable setbacks to celebrated harvests and sold-out markets, in A FARM DIES ONCE A YEAR: A Memoir.

Crawford’s intimate, gorgeously observed memoir is the story of a man reconnecting with his past and a behind-the-scenes look at the realities of organic farming. The strategy, back-breaking work, and emotional investment required to nurture a crop from seed to harvest is staggering, enough to banish any idyllic preconceived notions about farm life. New Morning Farm grows nearly 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables, from corn and okra to strawberries and spinach. Tomatoes, the largest crop, can bring in up to $100,000. Nearly every weekend, Jim Crawford and a team of full-time farm apprentices drive 120 miles to sell produce at Washington, DC farmers markets. They also make regular deliveries to specialty grocery stores, food co-ops, and restaurants, even to the French Embassy in DC.

In 2009, the farm lost their entire tomato crop to blight and the apprentices had to burn down each tomato plant with a propane torch. Because farms of New Morning’s size can’t afford crop insurance and they receive no government subsidies, they lost what could have been $100,000 in sales. Fortunately, they were carried through by a robust raspberry harvest.

Crawford delves into not only the crops and the losses, but also the 1990 murder of Bert DeLeeuw, a family friend and well-known activist, who was shot point-blank in his field by his neighbor George Robb. What began as an argument between neighboring farmers about unruly dogs became an intensely personal attack. DeLeeuw came to Pennsylvania to farm after years of organizing political campaigns and fighting for justice. Robb accused DeLeeuw of having no respect for the locals. Crawford writes, “Robb had nothing to believe in, and he was jealous of the man who did.”

Beautifully written and refreshingly honest, A FARM DIES ONCE A YEAR is a meditation on family, farming, and of taking a risk to find purpose and satisfaction, even on an unconventional path.

Arlo Crawford grew up on New Morning Farm, his family's organic vegetable farm in rural Pennsylvania. He has written for The New York Times Magazine and Gastronomica and has worked as an assistant in book publishing, at an art museum, and as a vegetable seller. He lives in San Francisco.

ABOUT NEW MORNING FARM
In the 1970s, well before the explosion of the farm-to-table and slow food movements, Jim Crawford left law school and decided to give farming a try. With little capital and next to no experience, Jim and his wife established New Morning Farm, which has grown into a well-respected and profitable business. Popular with many top DC chefs and restaurateurs, New Morning Farm now sells its produce at farmers markets in Washington, DC. In 2008, Jim’s dedication was recognized with the honor of overseeing the creation of the White House kitchen garden. www.newmorningfarm.net

Wednesday, April 16
7:30 PM
ELIZABETH SCARBORO
MY FOREIGN CITIES
and

LOUISE ARONSON
A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT ILLNESS

Two writers, two books that take you behind the scenes at the hospital in very different ways. One a memoir, one fiction, both filled with stories, large and small, that bring these corridors to life and give a window into their complexity. Elizabeth Scarboro and Louise Aronson will talk about their vantage points as doctor/patient-writers, and how their work fits into the larger conversation of health care reform.

Louise Aronson, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the UCSF Medical Humanities Division, describes the process of becoming a doctor as being a bit like joining a cult: you are deprived of sleep, food, and countless other everyday activities while learning what amounts to an entire new language and how to act rather than react in the face of a continuous onslaught of disease and suffering. At the end of that grueling process, she felt as if her imagination and creativity had atrophied, as muscles do when not exercised, and also that she was overflowing with stories of the people she had cared for and worked alongside. In A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT ILLNESS's elegant stories, Aronson offers a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in America today. An elderly Chinese immigrant sacrifices his demented wife’s well-being to his son’s authority. A busy Latina physician’s eldest daughter's need for more attention has disastrous consequences. A young veteran’s injuries become a metaphor for the rest of his life. A gay doctor learns very different lessons about family from his life and his work, and a psychiatrist who advocates for the underserved may herself be crazy. Together, these honest and compassionate stories introduce a striking new literary voice and provide a view of what it means to be a doctor and a patient unlike anything we’ve read before.

Louise Aronson has an M.F.A. in fiction from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. She has won the Sonora Review prize and a New Millennium Writings award for short-short fiction, and has received three Pushcart nominations. Her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Northwest Review, Sonora Review, Seattle Review, Fourteen Hills, and the Literary Review, among other publications. She is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she cares for older patients and directs the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center and UCSF Medical Humanities.

In MY FOREIGN CITIES, now in paperback, Liz Scarboro delves into the repercussions of marrying a man with a degenerative illness and poor prospects of surviving past his 30s, asking, what would any of us do for love?

Scarboro's teenage years were marked by fierce independence and wanderlust. Settling down and being married were low, if nonexistent, priorities. Yet she soon felt for a kindred spirit, whose cystic fibrosis -- and short life expectancy -- gave their fledgling affair a different kind of recklessness. Exchanging globetrotting for trips to and from doctors' offices, they wed with the intention of testing CF's limits. Advance in treatment have helped prolong the lives of suffers and created a host of new opportunities -- college, career, family -- that inspired tremendous hope and large dose of fearlessness in the new couple.

And it was fearlessly that the two engaged life together, immersing themselves in the outdoors, pushing their intellectual boundaries, and developing new friendships. In unflinching prose, Scarboro scrutinizes their devoted but flawed relationship, and the brutal truth of caring for a painkiller-addicted transplant recipient, while finding joy and laughter in the face of such horrible odds.

Elizabeth Scarboro is the author of two children's novels and a winner of the Giga and Paul Menn /Foundation Prize for fiction. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two children.

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