A VERY special afternoon with KHALED HOSSEINI
BOOKSMITH BOOKSWAP: Pride Edition
June means Pride, so get ready for our queerest Bookswap yet! Bring your favorite genre-bender: a queer book you love, a book by a queer author, a story you love illicitly - it all works. You'll talk about it in small groups, and at the end, we'll have a big, rowdy, white-elephant swap.
$25 gets you dinner, an open bar, a closed bookstore all to yourself (and 40 of your new friends), discounts, swag, and MORE.
Special Guests: MICHELLE TEA and ALI LIEBEGOTT!
Michelle Tea is the author of four memoirs, a novel, a book of poetry and the young adult fantasy tale, A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, new from McSweeney's. She has edited anthologies about class, fashion and literature, and is Editor of the City Lights/Sister Spit series. Michelle is founder and Executive Director of RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit that oversees the Sister Spit international performance tours, the monthly RADAR Reading Series in San Francisco, the annual Radar LAB Retreat, and other programs.
Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. In 2010 she took a train trip across America interviewing female poets for a project titled The Heart Has Many Doors; excerpts from these interviews are posted monthly on The Believer Logger. Along with a reprint of her road classic The Beautifully Worthless, her newest novel Cha-Ching! is the latest release from City Lights/Sister Spit. In addition, she is the founding editor at Writers Among Artists whose first publication, Faggot Dinosaur, was released in 2012.
Tickets $25, in the store or at Brown Paper Tickets online
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
ANDREA PITZER / The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works -- notably Pale Fire and Lolita -- The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov brings new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?
Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction -- history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kindof documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is thestory of his century -- and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.
Andrea PItzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her work has also appeared in print in USA Today’s Life section and online at HiLowbrow.com. She presented on Nabokov’s fiction at the 2009 MLA Conference, is a graduate ofGeorgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and lives in northern Virginia.
"... an intriguing and provocative new take on one of the giants of modern American letters." -- Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion
“Certainly the most remarkable and insightful book on Vladimir Nabokov in many years. It is by taking big history with its small devastating details into account that Pitzer brilliantly manages to unlock a secret door in the oeuvre of the often misunderstood Mandarin. A must for even non-Nabokovians.” -- Michael Maar, author of Speak, Nabokov and The Two Lolitas
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
