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Reading and book signing for Haunting Bombay
Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m.
Haunting Bombay is a literary ghost story set in 1960's India that tells the tale of three generations of the wealthy Mittal family who have buried a tragic history and the ghosts of the past who rise up to haunt them. In her award-winning novel Agarwal weaves together mysticism, mystery, and haunting supernatural spirits in a luminous story of power and powerlessness, voice and silence in post-colonial India. Agarwal's "stunning debut" has been reviewed as a compelling snapshot of 1960's Bombay and a ghost story that evokes both the hauntings of Poe and the hot pulse of today's vampire narratives."
Shilpa Agarwal is a Los Angeles-based writer and academic. Born in Mumbai to a family uprooted by India's Independence movement and subsequent Partition in 1947, Shilpa's early writings explored how colonialism and the chaos of dislocation shaped human interaction. As an undergraduate at Duke University, Shilpa specialized in Asian and African literatures and Women's Studies. She pursued her interest in post-colonial literatures as a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She taught at both UCLA and UCSB, including a course on South Asian diaspora, and spoke regularly on the politics and poetics of community.
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Reading and book signing for In Praise of Indecency
Tuesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Paul Krassner's style of personal journalism constantly blurs the line between observer and participant. Nowhere is this more apparent than in In Praise of Indecency, a collection of essays and interviews culled from his columns at AVN Online. Whether being interviewed by Susie Bright, or imagining a conversation between Pee-Wee Herman and Pete Townshend about their busts by overzealous cops, or reminiscing about his friend Lenny Bruce, Krassner shines his keen satirical mind on the so-called taboos of todays society and breaks them down to show the hypocrisy of the worlds "culture warriors." With a biting wit and tongue firmly planted in cheek, Mr. Krassner reveals the absurdity of our oppressive social mores in this stark, funny, and ultimately thought-provoking collection.
Paul Krassner is the founder, editor and frequent contributor to the free-thought magazine The Realist. A key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s, he edited Lenny Bruce's autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People. He currently writes columns for AVN Online and High Times Magazine and publishes the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster at paulkrassner.com. In 2004 he received an ACLU Upton Sinclair Award for dedication to freedom of expression. His books include Pot Stories for the Soul, Tales of Tongue Fu, One Hand Jerking, and Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut. He continues to perform and lecture at college campuses, theaters and art galleries across the country.
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Reading and book signing for Beyond Isadora
Monday, July 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Beyond Isadora: Bay Area Dancing The Early Years, 1915-1965 documents the fascinating and little-known history of early 20th century dance in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a history of performers, choreographers and teachers, pioneers of today's dance community. It is also women's history, since the prime movers were almost all women. This history, offered here as short biographical and chronological sketches, seeks to detail the regional development of ballet and of modern, ethnic and folk dance, from the era of Isadora Duncan, San Francisco's dance legend, who is regarded as the pioneer revolutionary and the mother of modern dance, to the mid 1960s. After Isadora, decades of dancers, dance groups and organizations carried on and refined a new American dance.
After many years of dance training in NY with the Duncan Dance Guild, the New Dance Group, Graham, Limón and Cunningham, Joanna G. Harris came to the Bay Area to study at Mills College with Marian Van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer. As a graduate student she worked on IMPULSE, the annual magazine of dance, and upon graduation taught at UC Berkeley where she choreographed and performed for the Department of Drama and Music, 1959-69. Joanna formed her own company, the Monday Night Group, toured California, and founded the Dance/Drama Department at UC Santa Cruz and the Creative Arts Therapy program at Lone Mountain College. She is on the faculty of OLLI Institute, Berkeley and an instructor at the Modern Dance Center, Berkeley. She also writes reviews and essays about dance for websites and print publications.
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Reading group for Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator at the Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, translated from the Italian by Ana Goldstein
Thursday, July 23 at 6:30 p.m.
Found in Translation, the Booksmith’s reading group, continues with a roster of exciting award-winning titles. Each one a contemporary work of translated fiction, the books discussed by the group will be available at a 15% discount. The group is led by The Booksmith's own Julie Boyer.
Clash of Civilization Over an Elevator at the Piazza Vittorio, Amara Lakhous's prize-winning novel, is a social satire and murder mystery. A small culturally-mixed community living an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned and the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome.
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Reading and book signing for The Southern Cross
Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m.
The Southern Cross features a teenager who makes a grisly discovery while woodcock hunting; an exonerated ex-con who may not be entirely innocent; a rabbit farmer in mourning; and an earnest young mariner trying to start a new life with his wife. It features proudly Southern characters not often seen in fiction – birdwatchers, recreational hunters, beekeepers, and even marine biologists. “A knockout winner” according to author Antonya Nelson, The Southern Cross marks the arrival of a standout new voice in fiction.
Skip Horack was born and raised in Louisiana, attended Florida State University, and practiced law for five years in Baton Rouge. His work has appeared in Epoch, the Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and other journals. Horack currently teaches at Stanford University, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in San Francisco.
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Reading and book signing for LESS: Accomplishing More by Doing Less
Wednesday, July 29 at 7:30 p.m.
A certain kind of busyness is crucial to life, allowing us to earn a living, create art, and achieve success. But too often it consumes us and we become crazy busy, nonstop busy, and we expend extraneous effort that gets us nowhere. Marc Lesser's new book LESS shows us the benefits of doing less in a world that has increasingly embraced more - more desire, more activity, more things, more exhaustion. Less is about stopping, about the possibility of finding composure in the midst of activity. The ideas and practices that Lesser outlines offer a radical yet simple approach to transforming a lifestyle based on endless to-do lists into a more meaningful approach that is truly more productive in every sense.
Marc Lesser has been practicing and studying Zen for thirty years and is a Zen priest in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Marc was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for ten years and in 1983 served as director of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the West. He was founder and CEO of Brush Dance, a publishing company that creates greeting cards, journals, and calendars, for fifteen years and currently teaches and lectures in both the Zen and business environments. He holds an MBA from New York University’s Graduate School of Business and is the president of ZBA Associates, a company offering coaching and consulting services in the business and not-for-profit communities. He lives in northern California with his wife and two children.
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Please join us for one or more of these upcoming events. Booksmith author events are free and located at our San Francisco store (1644 Haight Street in San Francisco, between Clayton & Cole), unless otherwise noted. Seating is offered on a first-come, first-served basis, approximately 45 minutes in advance. For further information, call 415-863-8688 or visit www.booksmith.com |
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