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Jamil Ragland
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Apr 26, 2024 11:39 am
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Erika Slocumb recalls her time as a teacher
Salons at Stowe: Literary Criticism Locked Up Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Hartford April 24, 2014
I went to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center for a discussion titled “Literary Criticism Locked Up.” The discussion was supposed to focus on the restrictions on literacy for incarcerated people, and the limits placed on telling their stories. As both a writer and former educator, I was greatly anticipating the program.
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Kate Sadoff
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Apr 25, 2024 4:18 pm
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WILLCOCKRELL’S LAUNCHOFEVEREST, INC., DIESEL A Bookstore Los Angeles April 16, 2024
I avoid the Brentwood Country Mart at most costs; it’s a danger zone for running into people from my high school. Last Tuesday night, however, I sucked it up and went on a whim to hear Will Cockrell launch his new book, Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World, with climbing legend John Long at DIESEL, A Bookstore.
Carlo Rotella at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities
“Knockout Punches and Barroom Weepers: Writing About Sports and Music“ 101 Archer April 18, 2024
What do music and sports have in common? They defy words, for starters — an irony not lost on Carlo Rotella, a New York Times Magazine writer, Boston College professor, and award-winning author of books about cities, boxing, and blues.
Last Thursday was a windy night downtown. As Nicole Bauer, associate director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, introduced Rotella, a gust hit the courtyard of 101 Archer, coming in just powerful enough to rustle even the most stalwart, perfectly manicured hedge. That strong current of air seemed like an appropriate welcome into his talk: this year’s theme at the OCH, after all, is “movement.”
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Kate Sadoff
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Apr 25, 2024 11:39 am
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JENNIFERCROFT’S DISCUSSIONOFTHEEXTINCTIONOFIRENAREY, DIESEL A Bookstore Los Angeles April 18, 2024
The Białowieża Forest is the last remaining old-growth forest in Europe and has recently been subjected to logging by the Polish government. There is a horse hoof – shaped fungus, Fomes fomentarius, that both devours trees and improves forest health. The first person to study and talk about underground mycelium networks was a woman named Suzanne Simard. Mycelium offers an apt metaphor for translators’ work, in which sentences are layered on top of sentences, creating a broader network of literature. It isn’t possible to translate a 1,000-page book in seven weeks. It also isn’t mandated that translators’ names appear on the covers of books they’ve translated. Jennifer Croft — who, over the course of an hour-and-a-half-long talk, not only mentioned all of the above but also candidly admitted to never having done shrooms — is campaigning to change that final fact.
I went to hear the award-winning translator and author discuss her new book, The Extinction of Irena Rey, with the librettist and writer Sarah LaBrie at DIESEL, A Bookstore last Thursday. Croft and LaBrie sat on chairs in front of the barbershop. I sat behind a man wearing a T‑shirt featuring an image of Laika, the sacrificial Soviet space dog.
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A.J. Brown
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Mar 24, 2024 10:34 am
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PARASOCIALITEBOOKLAUNCHWITHBRITTANYMENJIVAR Stories Books & Café Los Angeles March 15, 2024
Last year, Brittany Menjivar co-founded the late-night reading series Car Crash Collective.This year, the Best of the Net finalist released her debut anthology Parasocialite via Dream Boy Book Club, which launched at Stories Books & Café on the Ides of March 2024. There, the group that surrounded Menjivar and crowded the Stories patio bore flowers, buzzing anticipation, and well-wishes.
As a writer with an unceasing streak of curiosity about other people and their stories, I have a knack for getting strangers to open up to me. I’ve found myself in bars or outside of bars on different Election Days — spontaneously hugging a stranger at the exact moment that Obama was first elected, and being comforted outside a different bar by a couple of young women when Trump was elected. (They assured me that, if all else failed, we could move overseas; they knew people who’d done this.) I’ve gotten into enlightening casual conversations with strangers at airports, the bank, on the bus, while attending concerts in London. The art of randomly connecting with others charms me, and keeps me believing that there are people or things in the world worth living for, or worth trying to understand better. I do believe that one of the main reasons we’re on this earth, if any, is just to connect with others.
That’s what compelled me to attend a library talk in Rockridge by Dr. Irene Sardanis, whose latest book is titled Connections: The Power of Connecting with Strangers. She sounded like a kindred spirit who also loved the strange magic of platonic meet-cutes. Even walking into the meeting room a few minutes late, she elegantly paused to say hello to me: “I welcome you. Thank you for coming.”
Some of my fondest memories with my father involved watching sports, since that’s what he watched on the sole family TV when I was a kid. And in the Bay Area, the Golden State Warriors used to be a long-suffering NBA team with star players like Chris Mullin, Tim Hardway, and — my favorite in the late ‘80s — Manute Bol. But a player who predates my childhood was another Warrior who was famous for something else … saving a dolphin.
That player is former Golden State Warrior and NBA champ Clifford Ray. In 1978, Ray famously used his long arms to carefully reach into the stomach of a dolphin at the Marine World/Africa USA theme park (which was in Redwood City at that time) and retrieved a metal bolt that the animal had accidentally swallowed. Surgery would have been too risky for the dolphin, and someone who worked with animals at the park also happened to personally know Ray, whose skills and wingspan were well-known.
Ray recounted this story in his new children’s book, Big Clifford Ray Saves the Day, and on Sunday afternoon in person at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, near Preservation Park.
by
Drew Bunting
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Feb 28, 2024 5:25 pm
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Tanner.
Con Nooga Chattanooga Convention Center 2/24/24
I didn’t expect to meet an exorcist at Con Nooga. But there she was: Jeni Tanner, in a homemade priest’s collar, sitting at a booth labeled “Demon Exorcisms.”
“I wanted to give people a place to write down what’s haunting them, and offer them a space to get it off of their chest,” she told me. And people were jumping right in, writing down their demons and posting them on a trifold board straight out of a middle-school science fair. A few were benign (“bad bosses”), but most went straight for the throat: “dysmorphia,” “PTSD,” “The entire B***** family,” and, of course, “Republicans.”
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Brittany Menjivar
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Feb 9, 2024 3:15 pm
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RAREBOOKSLA Pasadena Convention Center Pasadena Feb. 4, 2024
If you’ve ever told someone it was your New Year’s resolution to read more books, know that I have already lit a candle for you. Setting a goal and stacking your shelves with new titles can feel exhilarating — until you realize that even if you plowed through 10 pages per minute, you wouldn’t finish your list by December. With bloodshot eyes, you ruminate: should you work your way through the greats, formulating a syllabus that allows three days tops for War and Peace, or keep abreast of the latest releases from hot indie presses, even requesting an ARC here and there to stay ahead of the calendar? Rare Books LA suggests an alternative approach: reject both the canon and Publishers Weekly to embrace the deep cuts.
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Robin Lapid
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Jan 25, 2024 4:44 pm
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Sistah SciFi presents "The Science Behind Science Fiction with the Gibbs Sisters" at Chapter 510.
The Science Behind Science Fiction with the Gibbs Sisters Chapter 510 Oakland Jan. 20, 2024
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, and Shawnee Gibbs is telling me a real-life ghost story.
Years ago, she said, she visited her aunt’s grave with her cousin. Sitting in the cemetery, she suddenly felt an invisible hand gently caressing hers — an intuitive kindness that she believed to be her aunt. She shared this memory with her cousin years later, only to find out that her cousin had the same experience that day.
I’m rapt listening to Shawnee’s stories, warming up with hot tea in the colorfully inviting environment at Chapter 510, the youth writing, publishing, and bookmaking center in downtown Oakland.
I love a good ghost story, and Gibbs has quite a few. These experiences helped inspire her and her sister Shawnelle’s new young adult graphic novel, Ghost Roast, about a New Orleans teen named Chelsea who finds herself graced with the ability to speak to the dead. With equal parts humor and ghostly intrigue, Chelsea navigates the mysteries of young adulthood while dealing with her special gift, and the complication that her father is a scientist who studies ghosts.
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Karen Ponzio
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Jan 19, 2024 11:12 am
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The vibe at Possible Futures was lit Thursday night — more specifically Kulturally Lit, as the literary-focused arts organization’s 100 Years of Baldwin Book Club had its inaugural meeting exploring the works of author, playwright, thinker, and civil rights icon James Baldwin.
Celebrated in his lifetime and only revered more with each passing year, James Baldwin has emerged as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century and one of the most incisive, excoriating, and illuminating thinkers about race in America. His novels — among them Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk — are already American classics, exploring the Black experience at home and abroad from multifacted, complex angles. He was also a prolific essayist, publishing steadily from 1949 until his death in 1987. His longform piece The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, remains one of the most powerful accounts around about racial tension and the possibility for violence and revolution in the United States.
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K Hank Jost
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Jan 15, 2024 1:20 pm
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James Baldwin Centennial Programing Film Forum Manhattan, NYC Through Jan. 25,2024
A hundred years of James Baldwin and, if we’re lucky, a hundred years more.
I went to Film Forum, the best theater in NYC (if you don’t know, now you know; you’re welcome)„ to watch Baldwin Abroad, a wonderful program of three interview-style short films, each with its own angle of approach. Afterwards I was filled with a feeling not unakin to the sensation of leaving off a very good, old friend after a long chat over coffee.
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Jack Skelley
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Dec 1, 2023 9:00 am
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Jackie Wang and Natasha Stagg Book launch reading Poetic Research Bureau Los Angeles Nov. 28, 2023
Poetic Research Bureau (PRB), in the multi-venue 2220 Arts + Archives, stretched its winning streak with a double book launch from Semiotext(e). Jackie Wang and Natasha Stagg pair well. Their new nonfiction texts defy type, swerving through diaries, reviews, blog blurts, Tumblr rumblings, essays, marketing copy, even poems (which, allegedly, Semiotext(e) does not publish! Good job sneaking yours in there, Jackie!). Both read a bit, then fielded keen questions from publisher Chris Kraus.
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Cassidy McCants
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Oct 5, 2023 3:42 pm
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Carver with Karl Jones at Magic City event.
Quinn Carver Johnson in Conversation with Karl Jones Magic City Books’ Algonquin Room Sept. 28, 2023
Slipping into Magic City Books on a quiet night for the launch of Quinn Carver Johnson’s The Perfect Bastard, I joined a small but enthused audience already talking with Johnson and Tulsa Artist Fellow Karl Jones, the event’s interviewer. Jones suggested we all grab one of the Algonquin Room’s comfy chairs and cozy up closer to the night’s talent. Between Jones and Johnson sat a sequined pink cowboy hat. The bejeweled spectacle is an emblem of Johnson’s explorations in their new poetry collection, which follows the “Perfect Bastard,” a nonbinary, queer pro wrestler, across four states in the mid-South.
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Z.B. Reeves
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Sep 28, 2023 2:08 pm
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Magic City Books’ Adult Book Fair NEFF Brewing Sept. 21, 2023
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived at Magic City’s Adult Book Fair. Like many Americans who attained consciousness in the early ’90s, I have strong sense memories tied to the idea of the “book fair”: towering shelves, snap bracelets that could be “bought” with points I had earned for being a good little schoolchild, the drooling sensation of capitalism unbuckled from its usual necessity of cash. Sadly, we are adults now, and must do things in an adult way. (Usually that means: with money, but also: with beer!)
The event was, essentially, “Magic City Books if Magic City Books existed in a smaller form on a few tables in NEFF Brewing’s parking lot,” which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to sell a ton of books (and support MCB’s nonprofit mission, my thoughtful editor reminds me).
