Archive
Below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
DUE TO LOCAL PROBLEMS THIS WAS COPY AND PASTED WITHOUT EDITING:
Events are free of charge unless otherwise noted
New Voices, New Stories indicates a debut writer of particular interest about whom we have significant enthusiasm.
Tuesday, September 2
7:30 PM
GINA ARNOLD
Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville"Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman. For these crimes, Liz Phair was run out of her hometown of Chicago, enduring a flame war perpetrated by writers who accused her of being boring, inauthentic, and even a poor musician.
With Exile in Guyville, Phair spoke for all the girls who loved the world of indie rock but felt deeply unwelcome there. Like all great works of art, Exile was a harbinger of the shape of things to come: Phair may have undermined the male ego, but she also unleashed a new female one. For the sake of all the female artists who have benefited from her work—from Sleater-Kinney to Lana Del Rey and back again—it’s high time we go back to Guyville.
Gina Arnold is the author of Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana and Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense. She has written for Spin, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice. Currently, she is finishing up her PhD at Stanford University.
Wednesday, September 3
7:30 PM
DEAN RADER, GILLIAN CONOLEY, BARBARA BERMAN, KEITH EKISS, JULIE BRUCK, and HIYA SWANHUYSER
99 POEMS FOR THE 99 PERCENTAmerican poetry has a rich tradition of taking on important political and social events. The 99 poems in this diverse and dynamic new collection demonstrate how engagement with what Wallace Stevens called “the actual world” does not diminish poetry’s punch—rather it makes it hit harder.
Born out of a popular blog began by Dean Rader at the height of the recession and at the infancy of the Occupy movements, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent shows that the aims of poetry and the aims of democracy are hand-in-hand. These are poems of anger, love, protest, humor, contemplation, hope, frustration, and beauty. These are poems by the famous and the marginal, by the heard and the ignored. These are poems the real America.
Contributors include Robert Pinsky, Camille T. Dungy, Edward Hirsch, Dana Levin, Timothy Donnelly, Bob Hicok, Heid Erdrich, Dorianne Laux, Troy Jollimore, Brian Clements, Patty Seyburn, LeAnne Howe, Ray Gonzalez, Fred Marchant, Martha Collins, Lee Sharkey, Matthew Zapruder, Gillian Conoley, Jon Davis, Alexandra Teague, Rachel Loden, Janice Harrington, & 69 others.
With us this evening:
GILLIAN CONOLEY'S new book is Peace. She is author of seven collections of poetry, and has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Her poems have been anthologized widely, most recently in Postmodern American Poetry, Norton’s American Hybrid, and Best American Poetry. Conoley's translations of Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux, is also new. Editor of Volt, she teaches at Sonoma State University.BARBARA BERMAN reviews poetry for The Daily Rumpus. Her poetry and prose have appeared over the years in The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, 100 Poets Against the War, Poets Against the War, Coracle, Lilith, Gargoyle, and many other literary journals. The author of a chapbook, The Generosity of Stars, she organized one of the first independent book festivals in the country, in 1979 in Washington, D. C. She lives in San Francisco, with her husband, Clifford Lee, an environmental lawyer.
KEITH EKISS is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is the author of Pima Road Notebook and the translator of The Fire’s Journey, an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio forthcoming in four volumes. In the summer of 2013, he was the Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
JULIE BRUCK has published three collections, most recently Monkey Ranch, which won Canada’s 2012 Governor General’s Award for poetry. Her poems have appeared in many Canadian and U.S. magazines, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Ms. More info can be found at www.juliebruck.com.HIYA SWANHUYSER is a writer from Western Sonoma County, now living in San Francisco. She spent ten years writing about local independent culture for alt-weekly newspapers and is now a freelance writer with a blog about rosé wine (http://lavienrosewine.blogspot.com). She collects vintage manual portable typewriters so she can bring them to bars, where people write political letters on them. Her work has appeared in 7x7, Bitch, Petals and Bones, Know Journal, and Specious Species. She is at work on an upcoming book, A Bunch of Stupid Shit That Saved My Life and attends the University of San Francisco’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. She once interviewed Nick Cave face to face; later, he hugged her. He also kissed her. On the cheek. Twice.
DEAN RADER’S debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His newest book is Landscape Portrait Figure Form. Recent poems appear or will appear in Best American Poetry 2012, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Blackbird, and American Poetry Review. He is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco and is the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent.
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Thursday, September 4
7:00 PM
SHIPWRECK: The Maltese FalconGood 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.This month's talent: announced soon!
Tickets $10 (includes drinks) available in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online. 21+, please. Buy your ticket ahead of time, and we'll reserve you a seat.
Tuesday, September 9
7:30 PM
DAISY HERNANDEZ
A CUP OF WATER UNDER MY BEDIn her lyrical coming of age memoir, Daisy Hernánderz, the daughter of a Colombian mother and Cuban father, chronicles what the colorful women in her community taught her about race, sex, money, and love.
On the outskirts of New York City, Daisy starts out in English as a Second Language classes and later ends up writing for The New York Times. In between, she struggles to come out as a bisexual and rebels against her family's expectations that she become white--like the Italians. A touching and heartfelt exploration of family and identity, A CUP OF WATER UNDER MY BED is about sexuality, immigration, race and class issues, but it is ultimately a daughter's story of shaping lessons from home into a new, queer life.
"A Cup of Water Under My Bed is a wonderful, heartbreaking, necessary story for all women and men, but foremost for other women of color. I wish this book had been available for me when I was making my foolish way in my perilous twenties, but how glorious that it's available now. During a time in history when so much is said about women of color, working-class folks, immigrants, Latinas, poor people, and los depreciados, but seldom from them, Hernández writes with honesty, intelligence, tenderness, and love. I bow deeply in admiration and gratitude."
– Sandra Cisneros, author of House on Mango St.“Daisy Hernández writes with grace and clarity about the singular joys and unique pains of growing up in two worlds. A Cup of Water Under My Bedis a marriage of power and poetry.” – Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son.
Daisy Hernández is the coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and former executive editor of ColorLinesmagazine. She speaks at colleges and conferences about feminism, race, and media justice, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Ms. magazine. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Wednesday, September 10 SOLD OUT
RANDALL MUNROE
WHAT IF? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions7:30 PM at Public Works (161 Erie Street, San Francisco)
xkcd -- the brilliant webcomic beloved by millions of readers every week -- creator Randall Munroe delivers hilarious and informative answers to questions you probably never thought to ask. It's time to meet your hero.Munroe's stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions -- queries ranging from merely odd to downright diabolical:
• What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?
• Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?
• What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?
• Are fire tornadoes possible?His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.
Munroe's new book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.
Randall Munroe is the author of the popular webcomic xkcd and the science question-and-answer blog What If. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006, he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full-time, supporting himself through the sale of xkcd t-shirts, prints, posters, and books. He likes candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach. Very long walks. Lots of people say they like long walks on the beach, but then they get out on the beach and after just an hour or two, they say they're getting tired. Bring a tent. He lives in Massachusetts.
Tickets available only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006
$10 standing room
$20 guaranteed seat
$34 guaranteed seat plus one copy of What If?
The bar at Public Works will be serving drinks before, during, and after the program. This event is necessarily limited to people 21 and older.
Thursday, September 11
7:30 PM
JIM RULAND
FOREST OF FORTUNE
with
JOSHUA MOHRSomething’s not right at Thunderclap Casino…
FOREST OF FORTUNE tells the story of three haunted souls -- an alcoholic, an epileptic, and a gambling addict -- who try to turn their luck around at a decrepit Indian casino. As they try to come to terms with the ways in which they are haunted by the past and struggle with their addictions, they must confront the malevolent force that won’t rest until old wrongs have been made right.
“Beguiling, nimble, and wonderfully weird, The Forest of Fortune is an out-of-left-field gem.” -- Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers
“A little spooky, very funny, and thoroughly engrossing from start to finish. Ruland writes with real aplomb and takes no prisoners.” -- Fiona Maazel, author of Woke Up Lonely
Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and co-author with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch of Giving the Finger. He is a freelance book reviewer for San Diego CityBeat and the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for Razorcake, America’s only non-profit independent music zine. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The Believer, Esquire, Granta, Hobart and Oxford American Magazine, and his work has received awards from Canteen, Reader’s Digest and the National Endowment for the Arts. He runs the Southern California-based reading series Vermin on the Mount, now in its tenth year.
Joshua Mohr is the author of four novels, including Damascus, whichThe New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written Fight Songand Some Things That Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well asTermite Parade, an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List. His novel All This Life arrives next May.
Monday, September 15
7:30 PM
ROSE CARAWAY
THE SEXY LIBRARIAN'S BIG BOOK OF EROTICA
with RACHEL KRAMER BUSSELImagine a library—a very special one run by a librarian whose only concern is pleasing her patrons. In fact, this librarian will stop at nothing to service her readers. To that end, she has carefully collected a fantastic and fantasy-filled set of stories guaranteed to satisfy literary lusts in The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica. This voracious volume is simply bursting at the binding with amorous archives and bibliophilic bliss; it is a veritable dictionary of desires with stories by top eroticists Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tamsin Flowers, and Salome Wilde, as well as Rose Caraway, the sexy librarian herself.
Finding stories for your enjoyment is the librarian’s job. Some days you want nothing more than to fall into a steamy Romance, a nostalgic Classic Fiction or a Fantasy because it helps you relax and discard the day’s stress. It is no secret to her that some nights, nothing can get your blood pumping faster than if you were to read a chilling Erotic Horror, a Supernatural Thriller or an explicit Sci-fi. And, on rare occasion, she knows that you desire to be challenged to the very brink of ecstasy. This librarian has curated a collection for every taste, with samplings from every imaginable genre, to satisfy even the choosiest reader. Go ahead and take a look. Let the Sexy Librarian find the perfect story for you.
Rose Caraway is a native Northern California writer, editor, narrator, and podcaster on the hit shows “The Kiss Me Quick’s” and “The Sexy Librarian Blog-cast”. Although her specialty is erotic fiction, she also has a passion for writing suspense, horror, fantasy, and romance works. In addition to writing, Rose’s other passions revolve around keeping an active lifestyle, and a deep love of music and its many incarnations.
Rachel Kramer Bussel, a frequent Booksmith guest, is a New York-based author, editor, blogger and event organizer. Her most recent book isHungry for More.
New Voices, New Stories
Tuesday, September 16
7:30 PM
COURTNEY MORENO
IN CASE OF EMERGENCYWhat do you do when you can’t function? After rookie EMT Piper Gallagher responds to a call outside a Los Angeles shopping mall for a man who can only tell her, “I can’t function,” the question begins to haunt her. How will Piper continue to function despite the horror she sees working in South Central, and despite her own fractured past? And how will the woman Piper loves continue to function as she experiences the aftershocks of her time spent serving in Iraq? Piper’s experiences as a rookie break her down and open her up as her genuine urge to help patients confronts the daily realities of life in the back of an ambulance and a hospital's hallways. This vivid and visceral debut is a rich study in trauma—in its causes and effects, in its methods and disguises, in its power and its pull.
"Moreno writes about physical and emotional damage with such precision that the reader feels supine, strapped into her own ambulance, careening from page to page. It's a story about the greatest emergency of all: the plight of being a human with a fragile heart, beating amidst all these dangers." -- Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me
“In Courtney Moreno's In Case of Emergency the working class saves the world and themselves. A wonderful first book!” -- Ali Liebegott, author of Cha-Ching!
“In Case of Emergency is here for you. To startle you into awareness. To remind you once again of the visceral urgency of desire, the urgency of fear, of loss, and of the fear of loss. To teach you about the eerie structures that undergird all that desire and fear and loss: organs and city streets, nerves and neighborhood maps, bones and veins and arteries. The patterns we use to make meaning from chaos. Also: the mysterious allure of risk, fear, and disaster. The calamitous pleasures of a thumping heart. You’ll love this book.” -- Stephen Beachy, author of boneyard
Courtney Moreno’s award-winning writing has been published in LA Weekly and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received a B.S. in molecular biology from UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the USF. During the ten years in between, she worked as an entomologist’s assistant, lab technician, clinical research coordinator, stagehand, set carpenter, modern and aerial dancer, EMT, and field training officer.
Wednesday, September 17
7:30 PM
NOVELLA CARPENTER
GONE FERAL: Tracking My Dad Through the WildNovella Carpenter’s father George officially went missing on October 17, 2009. When the town sheriff calls Novella, six days into their manhunt, she has no answers to offer. The truth is, her father had been missing for most of her life.
George’s disappearance begins a journey of discovery that carries Novella from her Oakland urban farm to her father’s off-the-grid Idaho cabin. He eventually resurfaces, and Novella is forced to confront the reality that her time with her dad, who is in his seventies, is limited and if she is ever to restore their relationship, it must be now. GONE FERAL is the story of Novella’s quest to find out who she is and where she came from. And now more than ever, it is urgent for Novella to find these answers because she is on the verge of becoming a parent herself.
The story begins in Mexico in 1969, where Novella’s parents fall in love. Young and idealistic, they travel the world before settling in rural Idaho where they plan to live out the homesteading dream. They start a family on 180 acres by the Clearwater River, but the harsh reality of living off the land—loneliness, long winters, back-breaking labor—tears them apart. Novella, her mother, and her sister head for the straight life in Washington, while George remains on the ranch, alone, tied to his vision of freedom.
Carpenter attempts to understand why her father chose a solitary life over family. The truth is more complicated than anything she ever imagined. As she comes to know the real George, Novella must reckon with her own past and in doing so uncovers the legacy her father has left her: a love of animals, of nature, of the written word; a dangerous stubbornness and unbreakable independence.
Novella’s bestselling memoir, Farm City, charmed readers with a unique perspective on the local, farm to table food movement. Written with grace, sensitivity, and humor, Farm City was praised as “fresh, fearless,” by theNew York Times and filled with “humor and step -by-step clarity,” by theLos Angeles Times. Gone Feral is written in the same vibrant voice, alive with unforgettable characters, striking vulnerability, and emotional rawness. It marks Novella’s passage from daughter to mother and acknowledges that moving forward sometimes means letting go. In surrender, she finds that love itself is a wild thing: unknowable, fierce, and ever-changing.
Novella Carpenter is the author of the bestselling Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and is the coauthor of The Essential Urban Farmer. She lives and farms in Oakland, with her partner, Billy, and daughter, Frances.
Saturday, September 20
7:30 PM
SARAH WATERS
THE PAYING GUESTSSarah Waters – three-time Booker Prize finalist, two-time Orange Prize finalist, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and a Granta Best Young British Novelist award among many others – is celebrated for her richly drawn characters, propulsive storytelling, authentic period atmosphere, social acuity, and sophisticated romance. She’s built a dazzling reputation as “flawless” (Washington Post), “Dickensian” (Chicago Tribune), and having “the gift of story, the ability to dissolve the distance between reader and subject until nothing but experience remains.” (L.A. Times).
So it is a thrill and privilege to share her new novel THE PAYING GUESTS which a starred Kirkus Review already calls “an exquisitely tuned exploration of class in post-Edwardian Britain—with really hot sex.” When a wealthy, upper class British family loses all its male relations in World War I, the surviving mother and daughter are forced to do the previously unthinkable: take on middle-class boarders, euphemistically termed “the paying guests,” in order to keep up their elegant home. Little do they know just how profoundly the new tenants will transform their lives, or what shocking events will ensue. Deftly paced so suspense builds page after page; psychologically fraught as characters deceive and get knotted in lies; both sensual and cerebral in the highest order; THE PAYING GUESTS is a sheer pleasure to read from the first page to the last.
A triumph of psychological acuity, historical recreation, deep sensuality and emotional force, THE PAYING GUESTS is Waters' finest work yet.
Born in Wales, Sarah Waters has written five previous novels: Tipping the Velvet, which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The Little Stranger, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award.
NEW VOICES, NEW STORIES
Monday, September 22
7:30 PM
PATRICK HOFFMAN
THE WHITE VAN
in conversation with Matt GonzalezAt a dive bar drug-hustling Emily Rosario is drinking whiskey and looking for an escape from her desperate lifestyle. When she is approached by a Russian businessman, she thinks she might have found her exit. A week later—drugged, disoriented, and wanted for robbery—Emily finds herself on the run for her life.
A sharply drawn cast of characters—dirty cops, Russian drug dealers, Chinese black-market traders, street-smart Cambodians, and shady entrepreneurs—all take part in this terrifying tour through San Francisco’s underbelly. Confronted with the intimate details of characters that blur the line between good and evil and twists that surprise until the end, readers of THE WHITE VAN will find their own moral code challenged by the desperate decisions the characters are forced to make.
“The White Van will grip you from the first page and leave you looking over your shoulder for weeks. Patrick Hoffman is nothing less than an emerging master of the crime genre. Whatever he writes, I’ll read.” -- Jordan Bass, executive editor, McSweeney’s
Hoffman, born in San Francisco, worked for 10 years as a both a private investigator, and as an investigator for the San Francisco Public Defenders Office. During his time at the Public Defender's Office he worked in the homicide unit, where he was the sole investigator in numerous murder trials that resulted in not guilty verdicts.
Hoffman spent his days and nights tracking down witnesses in some of the most violent neighborhoods in the Bay Area. He was also writing this novel, and on his lunch hour, he would park his van (a white van) and write for an hour a day. The people he met—from the men and women he defended, to the witnesses, to the victims themselves—all had a profound influence on the characters in his book.
Wednesday, September 24
DAVID MITCHELL
in conversation with Adam Johnson
THE BONE CLOCKS
7:30 PM at the Sundance Kabuki Theater
1881 Post Street, San FranciscoAn elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and master prose stylist, David Mitchell—the prizewinning author of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet—has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit—fiction at its most spellbinding and memorable.
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.
A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.
Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together. It is a thing of enormous beauty.David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas,Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell co-translated from the Japanese the international bestselling memoir, The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.
Talking on stage with David Mitchell this evening is Adam Johnson, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master's Son
Wednesday, September 24 at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, 1881 Post Street, San Francisco
VIP reception 6:30 - 7:15 PM
Program 7:30 PM
Tickets available only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006
$40 (one seat and one copy of The Bone Clocks)
$65 (one seat and one copy of The Bone Clocks, and a private VIP reception with the author, including marvelous hors d'oeuvres and drinks); limited number availableThe bars at Sundance Kabuki will be serving drinks before, during, and after the program. This event is necessarily limited to people 21 and older. David Mitchell will be signing books following his talk.
Thursday, September 25
7:30 PM
NAJA MARIE AIDT
BABOONBeginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common questions of sex, love, desire, and gender relations, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex—but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.
“The emotions unleashed in this tale couldn’t be contained in any nice little talk. They are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov’s portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce’s struggling Dubliners to Jhumpa Lahiri’s uprooted Bengalis.” — Radhika Jones, Timemagazine
Originally from Greenland, Naja Marie Aidt is a Danish poet and author with nearly 20 works in various genres to her name. She has received numerous honors, including the Nordic nations’ most prestigious literary prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, in 2008 for Baboon, and her work has been translated into several languages. Her work has also been anthologized in the Best European Fiction series and has appeared in leading American journals of translation.
NEW VOICES, NEW STORIES
Thursday, September 25
6:00 PM reception, 7:00 PM program at Arion Press/Mackenzie & Harris (The Presidio, 1802 Hays Street, San Francisco) Please RSVP here!Meet novelist Alix Christie at the Bay Area site that inspired her childhood passion for metal type, the M & H foundry, now run by Arion Press.
ALIX CHRISTIE
GUTENBERG'S APPRENTICEBefore there was Zuckerberg there was Gutenberg. Alix Christie plunges us into the world of a more than 500-year-old technological revolution that bears some startling similarities to our own digital transformation.
The year is 1450, and Peter Schoeffer, an ambitious young scribe, is called back from Paris to Mainz, his hometown on the Rhine. There he is unwillingly thrust into a workshop financed by his foster father, the forward-looking merchant Johann Fust. It is a strange, dark place run by a driven master named Johann Gutenberg, its purpose the manufacture of books in a new – and to some, blasphemous – way: with a secret invention known as a printing press.
It is a period of great ferment in a turbulent Holy Roman Empire: Newly wealthy merchants in their Kaufhaus are angling for power; a corrupt Archbishop duels with the Pope; scribes copy both religious and secular texts while priests milk a deeply religious populace for indulgences. Against this backdrop, Schoeffer finds himself torn between two father-figures, between resentment and grudging love for a master both brilliant and stormy, and between hiding or revealing this shocking invention from the woman he loves. As he moves from reluctant apprentice to overseer of a book that will change the world, Peter must steer the Bible and the crew of men creating it through a cataclysmic time, while battling to prevail against seemingly insurmountable obstacles, none greater than the crushing power of the Catholic Church.
Like all of us today, Peter Schoeffer straddles an unnerving and exhilarating fissure between the old ways and the new. At its heart,GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE is both a story about loyalty, betrayal and the price of true human greatness, and a parable of technological transformation.
Alix Christie grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and is an author, journalist and letterpress printer. She learned the craft of letterpress printing as an apprentice to two master California printers, including her grandfather, the foreman of the last hot type foundry in San Francisco, Mackenzie & Harris, which continues as the nation's last commercial foundry, operating in the Presidio as part of Arion Press. Alix owns and operates a 1910 Chandler & Price letterpress. Christie earned her MFA from St Mary’s College, where she studied under Michael Chabon and Susan Straight. She currently lives in London, where she reviews books and arts for The Economist. GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE is her first novel.
Tuesday, September 30
7:30 PM
CHRIS GUILLEBEAU
THE HAPPINESS OF PURSUITOne of the most common laments among people everywhere is how easy it is to feel that routine has taken over our lives. For all of us, it’s easy to look back over the past year and question what we really accomplished.
Chris Guillebeau has never been “that guy.” Chris starts each year like a general drawing up a battle plan. Were it not for that “make every day count” attitude, it’s unlikely he would have pulled off the feat of traveling to every country by age 35. And had he not done all that traveling, it’s unlikely that he would have experienced the epiphany that has led to this book—i.e., that happiness comes from incremental striving (a “quest,” if you will) where we see taking shape, right in front of our eyes, the concrete evidence of what our life has been building toward.
Throughout his 193-country journey, Chris met hundreds of questers like himself who were committed to years-in-the-making projects: jaw dropping, and often thought provoking, attempts to blaze a new artistic trail, reach an intellectual summit, change the world through philanthropy, undergo an endurance-testing adventure, or smash through a physical barrier. And amazingly, even the quests that weren’t superhero scaled—those that consisted of an ordinary job done amazingly well—delivered outsized happiness when tackled in an immersive way.
In THE HAPPINESS OF PURSUIT Guillebeau draws on interviews with hundreds of fellow questers, revealing their secret motivations, their tricks for leaping the hurdles of time and money, the role played by friends and family, and the importance of writing it all down.
Chris Guillebeau is an entrepreneur, traveler, and author. His first two books were The Art of Non-Conformity and The $100 Startup. Recently, he completed his quest to visit every country in the world before the age of 35. Host of the World Domination Summit, an international gathering of creative people, Chris is focused on encouraging individual quests while also “giving back.” His main website, ChrisGuillebeau.com, is visited by more than 500,000 people per month.
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KIDS' WRITING CLASSES RETURN TO THE BOOKSMITH THIS FALL"Take My Word For It!" is a word incubator - a place where kids can feel safe and supported while they grow as writers. Its creative writing program, designed especially for young authors, reminds kids that when it comes to their imaginations, the sky's the limit. So if you love to write or would like to make better friends with the written word in a safe, supportive environment, come check us out!
This fall we’ll be exploring food!
Together we'll explore the literary aspects of food, including meaty metaphors, appetizing alliterations, food mysteries, writing a love letter to our favorite dish, and much more!Sundays, 10:30 - 11:45 AM
September 14 - November 23 (no class October 12)
$180
Minimum 8 students; maximum 20 students
Register and pay online! https://campscui.active.com/orgs/TakeMyWordForItRead samples of TMWFI's young writers’ work and find out lots more at takemywordforit.net
Questions? Email tmwfimaven@gmail.comWednesday, October 1
7:30 PM
Make Your Voice Heard: The Intersection of Craft, Creativity, and ActivismActivists, artists, crafty folks: join us for a feisty, moderated discussion with KIM WERKER (Make It Mighty Ugly), LEANE PRAIN (Strange Material), BETSY GREER (Craftivism),and moderator RENA TAM (founder of Makeshift Society)
RENA TOM is the founder of Makeshift Society, a co working space that offers camaraderie and shared resources to creative freelancers, independent business owners and small teams in San Francisco and Brooklyn. She is also Market Editor at Anthology Magazine and a retail strategist for small-batch makers, brands, stores and organizations. Previously, she owned Rare Device, a bicoastal design-led boutique and art gallery. Rena and her various businesses have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Lucky, Real Simple, Food and Wine and Martha Stewart Weddings. Rena has also operated a successful jewelry design and invitation design business; during the first Web boom, she was a web content management consultant. She lives in San Francisco and on Twitter at @rena_tom.
BETSY GREER is a writer, a maker, and a researcher, and the author of Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism and Knitting for Good! A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change Stitch by Stitch. She runs the blog www.craftivism.com and believes that creativity and positive activism can save not only the soul, but also the world. Betsy lives in Arlington, VA and can be found on Twitter @craftivista.
KIM PIPER WERKER is the author of Make It Mighty Ugly: Exercises and Advice for Getting Creative Even When It Ain’t Pretty. Kim teaches hands-on and discussion-based Mighty Ugly workshops and lecture-conversations that help people confront creative demons, experiment with new approaches to creative expression, and build confidence in what they make and do. She is also the author or coauthor of several crochet books, including Crochet Me and Teach Yourself Visually Crocheting. She lives in Vancouver, BC and on Twitter at @kpwerker.
LEANNE PRAIN is a knitter, author of Strange Material: Storytelling through Textiles and Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery, and co-author of Yarn Bombing: The Art of Knit & Crochet Graffiti (with Mandy Moore). A professional graphic designer, Leanne holds degrees in creative writing, art history, and publishing. She lives and crafts in Vancouver, BC and can be found at leanneprain.com or on Twitter @LeannePrain.
Thursday, October 2
7:00 PM
SHIPWRECK: Stephen King's ChristineGood 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.
This month's talent: Alitzah Oros, Molly Jane Rosen, Cameron Dunkley, Keith Wilsonand Shannon O'Malley of Gay Men Draw Vaginas, and 4-time champ Maggie Tokuda-Hall.
Tickets $10 (includes drinks) available in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online. 21+, please. Buy your ticket ahead of time, and we'll reserve you a seat.
Launch Party! A NEW VOICES, NEW STORIES EVENING
Tuesday, October 7
7:30 PM
DIANE COOK
MAN V. NATUREThis American Life host Ira Glass writes, “What I like most about these stories is that many of them are dispatches from the end of the world, and it turns out to be a surprisingly familiar place.” Indeed, the fictional worlds that Diane Cook has created in her daring collection are both recognizable but also slightly askew. Unsettling and often menacing, these stories are also suffused with humanity and genuine emotion—and once you read them, they are impossible to forget.
Told with perfect rhythm and unyielding brutality, Cook's stories expose unsuspecting characters and readers alike to the realities of nature, to the primal instincts of man, and the dark humor and heartbreak of our struggle to not only thrive but survive. In “Moving On,” a widow is forced to relocate to a shelter with other widows until she can forget her spouse enough to move on and become another’s wife. In “Girl on Girl,” a high school freshman goes to disturbing lengths to help an old friend. And in the title story, a long fraught friendship comes undone when three old buddies get impossibly lost on a lake it is impossible to get lost on.Other stories explore situations pulled directly from the wild, imposing on human lives the danger, tension, and precariousness of the natural world. In “The Not-Needed Forest,” which reads like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” crossed with Lord of the Flies, a pack of not-needed boys take refuge in a murky forest and play a game to determine which of them gets to eat his next meal. Helpless newborns are snatched by a man who stalks them from their suburban yards in “Somebody’s Baby.” And in “The Way the End of Days Should Be,” a man tries to preserve his pristine mansion as the world floods around him and refugees come knocking. Through these characters, Cook asks: What is at the root of our most heartless, selfish impulses? Why are people drawn together in such messy, complicated, needful ways? When the unexpected intrudes upon the routine, what do we discover about ourselves?
“MAN V. NATURE is as close to experiencing a Picasso as literature can get: the worlds in Diane Cook’s impressive debut are bizarre, vertiginous, funny, pushed to the extreme—but just familiar enough in their nuances of the human condition to evoke an irresistible, around-the-corner reality.” —Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
Diane Cook worked as a radio producer on This American Life for six years. She lived the past two decades in Chicago, New England, and Brooklyn and now lives in Oakland.
Wednesday, October 8
7:30 PM
KIM ADDONIZIO
THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONIn her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.
In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father; and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.
Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making.
Kim Addonizio is the author of a previous story collection, In the Box Called Pleasure; two novelsLittle Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street; five poetry collections; and two books on writing poetry. She recently collaborated with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones on My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits. She has received numerous honors for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships, and was a National Book Award Finalist in 2000. She lives in Oakland and New York City and teaches private writing workshops in person and online. She plays harmonica with the word/music group Nonstop Beautiful Ladies and volunteers for The Hunger Project, a global organization empowering the poorest people in the world to end their own hunger and poverty.
Thursday, October 9
7:30 PM
MARLON JAMES
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS“The most original novel I’ve read in years…Astonishingly brilliant, it transported me back to the 1970s Jamaica of Michael Manley’s PNP, and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley by a cabal of Kingston gangsters and the CIA. It’s a vivid plunge into a crazed, violent and corrupt world, told through multiple narrators and executed with swaggering aplomb. On the downside, opening any book after this will be a little anticlimactic.” – Irvine Welsh
Unflinching in his examinations of race, violence, and sexism in the US and Jamaica, Marlon James illuminates dark and uncomfortable truths with wisdom, grace, and humanity. The New York Times Book Review praised his novel The Book of Night Woman as “Beautifully written and devastating writing in the spirit of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker but in a style all his own, James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable—even the unthinkable.”
In his spellbinding new novel A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS centers on the people involved in the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, but spins outward to encompass a breathtaking array of voices: gang members, CIA agents, a Rolling Stone reporter, girlfriends, politicians, drug dealers, the children of the Kingston ghettos, even ghosts. This vast range of characters and dialects allows James to conjure all the individual lives touched by not only Marley’s assassination attempt, but by the sweeping US-Jamaica interchange of music, drugs, sex, violence and political machinations during the 1970s.
Written with depth, insight, authenticity and a mesmerizing mix of tenderness and startling brutality, A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS is a dazzling achievement by a writer of enormous power.
Marlon James was born in Jamaica, in 1970. He is the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James lives in Minneapolis.
A LITQUAKE EVENT:
Tuesday, October 14
7:30 PM
Celebrate Shebooks and its special anthology (in a print edition!) of its best memoirs,WHATEVER DOESN'T KILL YOU.We're delighted to have these marvelous contributors in the house this evening:
Faith Adiele's acclaimed Meeting Faith tells her story of being the first black Buddhist nun in Thailand; she is the author of the Shebook The Nordic-Nigerian Girl's Guide to Lady Problems.
Lucy Bledsoe is an award-winning short story writer and author of the novel The Big Bang Symphony and the Shebook The Found Child.
Jane Ciabattari is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection Stealing the Fire and the Shebook California Tales.
Laura Fraser is the cofounder and editorial director of Shebooks, and the author of the ShebookThe Risotto Guru.
Mona Gable writes about women’s issues, health, science, travel, and international issues and is the author of the Shebook Blood Brother: The Gene That Rocked My Family.
Susan Ito is the author of the Shebook The Mouse Room. She coedited the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption and is a columnist and creative nonfiction editor at the online literary journal Literary Mama.
Mary Jo McConahay is an award-winning journalist, author of Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest, and the Shebook Ricochet: Two Women War Reporters and a Friendship under Fire.
Micah Perks is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here, and a memoir, Pagan Time, about growing up on a commune; her Shebook is Alone in the Woods.
Ethel Rohan is an award-winning short story writer, author of Goodnight Nobody and the Shebook Out of Dublin.
JOIN US TO LAUNCH THE BREWER'S TALE
A LITQUAKE EVENT
Wednesday, October 15
7:30 PM
WILLIAM BOSTWICK
THE BREWER'S TALE: The History of the World According to BeerWhile you drink or sip a beer, have you ever wondered what beer in the past tasted like? Beer critic William Bostwick uncovers the stories behind the brewers who have practiced their craft since the dawn of civilization -- farmers, priests, revolutionaries, and more -- in THE BREWER'S TALE, part travelogue, part history, part culinary adventure.
Beer by beer -- from Babylonian date-and-honey ale to shamanistic Viking grog -- Bostwick tells a history of the world through the brewer’s eyes, unearthing recipes from poems and potsherds to re-create these beers and their long-lost flavors. Jumping through time as he weaves ancient lore with today’s craft scene, Bostwick meets adventurous brewers -- some celebrated, others eccentric unknowns -- who share his path, trading insight, recipes, and ingredients like homegrown hops and wild, Nile Delta yeast. This is history told in the glass, from tongue-numbing mead to sour pediococcus-laced lambic
William Bostwick is the author of Beer Craft and writes about beer for the Wall Street Journal, GQ, and other publications. He is an avid homebrewer, former distiller’s apprentice, beekeeper, baker, and sometime bartender. He lives in San Francisco
Yep, there will be beer this evening!
Monday, October 20
7:30 PM
HECTOR TOBAR
DEEP DOWN DARK: The Untold Story of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them FreeOctober 13, 2014 will be the fourth anniversary of the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners trapped for 69 days in a collapsed gold and copper mine about 2,300 feet below the surface.
The rescue was witnessed around the world. Some of the miners have given interviews and several quick books came out immediately afterwards. However, the miners all agreed on Day 68 of their 69 day ordeal that they would wait to tell the full story of their survival to one writer for one book. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist, Héctor Tobar, is the writer they chose and DEEP DOWN DARK is the book. The miners' experiences below, and the lives that led them there, is a saga not told until now.
For DEEP DOWN DARK, Héctor Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales. These thirty-three men came to think of the mine, a cavern inflicting constant and thundering aural torment, as a kind of coffin, and as a church where they sought redemption through prayer. Even while still buried, they all agreed that if by some miracle any of them escaped alive, they would share their story only collectively/
The result is a masterwork of narrative journalism—a riveting, at times shocking, emotionally textured account of a singular human event. It brings to haunting, tactile life the experience of being imprisoned inside a mountain of stone, the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and the spiritual and mystical elements that surrounded working in such a dangerous place. Ultimately, it captures the profound way in which the lives of everyone involved in the disaster were forever changed.Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Tuesday, October 21
7:30 PM
An Evening with CHUCK PALAHNIUKFrom the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged American male psyche,BEAUTIFUL YOU is about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure. Sisters will be doing it for themselves. And doing it. And doing it. And doing it some more...Penny Harrigan is a low-level associate in a big Manhattan law firm with an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner with one C. Linus Maxwell, aka "Climax-Well", a software mega-billionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth. After dining at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurant, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he precedes, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. What's not to like? This: Penny discovers she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys to be marketed in a nationwide chain of boutiques called Beautiful You. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their rooms with them and stop coming out. Except for batteries. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled word domination must be stopped. But how?
If you've experienced Chuck Palahniuk in person before, you know to expect an evening of storytelling fun and shock, of games and prizes, of participatory Q&A, of all-around entertainment. And if you're a new Palahniuk reader, plan to join the festivities to meet and hear Chuck and to celebrate the publication day of Beautiful You.
Chuck Palahniuk’s ten previous novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by David Fincher; Survivor; Invisible Monsters; Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg; Lullaby; Diary; Haunted; Rant; Snuff; and Pygmy. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, a nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction.
7:30 PM at DNA Lounge (375 Eleventh Street, San Francisco)
$34 - one person, one book
$40 - two people, one book
Tickets available ONLY at DNA Lounge's box office.Note: you'll pick up your autographed copy of Beautiful You when you check in at the box office; there will not be a booksigning following the program.
Launch Party!
Wednesday, October 22
7:30 PM
ALEXIS COE
ALICE + FREDA FOREVER: A Murder in Memphis
in conversation with The Toast's Mallory OrtbergIn 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn’t her crime that shocked the nation – it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell planned to pass as a man and marry seventeen-year-old Freda Ward, but when their love letters were discovered, they were forbidden to ever speak again. Desperate and isolated, Alice pilfered her father’s razor, and on a cold winter’s day, she slashed her ex-fiancée’s throat. ALICE + FREDA FOREVER is a tragic love story with more than a hundred original illustrations of primary source letters, maps, historical documents, and more. It marks a seminal point in the history of same-sex relationships in the U.S., and is not to be missed.
“Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here’s a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down.” — Peter Orner, author of Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge
Alexis Coe is a columnist at The Awl and The Toast. She has contributed to The Atlantic, Slate, The Millions, The Hairpin, LA Weekly, The Bay Citizen, Mission at Tenth, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. Before moving to San Francisco, she was a research curator at the New York Public Library, and a project-based oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Alexis holds an MA in history from Sarah Lawrence College and graduated from the honors college at UC Santa Barbara
Thursday, October 30
7:30 PM
WILLIAM GIBSON
THE PERIPHERAL
“Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer and all the maturity and sly wit of Spook Country. It’s brilliant.”
Cory Doctorow, bestselling author of Little Brother
and Homeland, co-editor of Boing BoingNew York Times-bestselling author William Gibson returns to fiction after four years with THE PERIPHERAL. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Gibson's award-winning debut novel, Neuromancer, which predicted, via his original concept of “cyberspace”, much of today’s Internet. He also conceptualized video games and the rise of reality TV long before they became ubiquitous. After setting his three most recent novels in our science-fictional present, Gibson ventures back the future with a high tech thriller that is also a murder mystery, a provocative social and political commentary, and a far-seeing introduction to the realm of advanced haptics (the science of adding tactile feedback to technological systems).
Flynne, a young woman from a decaying near-future American town, takes a temporary job testing a new computer game, or so she's told. While remotely operating a security drone over a futuristic version of London, she witnesses what she assumes is the simulation of a horrifying murder—or is it real? Soon she finds herself in the 22nd Century, virtually present in a hauntingly beautiful android drone, “a peripheral”, with the fate of her own “past” world depending on her.
William Gibson is the is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Liza Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, and Distrust That Particular Flavor. Neuromancer was the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. He is also a recipient of the Ditmar, and Seiun awards, as well as the Prix Aurora. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. It is an honor to have him return to The Booksmith.