All Week: Litquake! This week is the San Francisco Bay Area’s literary “week of weeks.” It’s time for “Litquake,” the largest festival of its kind west of the Mississippi. The event features readings by hundreds of authors and is attended by upwards of 15,000 audience members. It’s mind-boggling. View and/or download the full schedule here.
Wednesday 10/12: South African novelist Masande Ntshanga (The Reactive) reads at City Lights. Free, 6 p.m., City Lights.
Nell Zink (Nicotine) reads from her newest novel in Oakland. Free, 7 p.m., Diesel, A Bookstore.
Thursday 10/13: Cantíl, an Oakland-based reading series featuring poets of color (also a venomous snake) presents Trisha Low and Andra Abi-Karam. Free, 7 p.m., Qilombo.
Friday 10/14: Poetry Flash presents Therése Halsheid (Frozen Latitudes) and Lenore Weiss (Mortal). Free, 7:30 p.m., Moe’s Books.
Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout (Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015) in conversation with local poet and Mills College professor Stephanie Young. Free, 7 p.m., Diesel, A Bookstore
Saturday 10/15: Raconteur Ray Hanna draws on his one man show 50 Songs and other material to present North Beach Stories at—where else?—the Beat Museum in North Beach. Free, 7 p.m., The Beat Museum.
Lit Crawl, the culminating event for the Litquake Festival, transforms San Francisco’s Mission District into a somewhat tipsy literary wonderland. Join your friends (and meet new ones) on this reknowned literary pub crawl. 6 p.m.–9:30 p.m., various venues.
The Rumpus will be at The Make-Out Room, featuring readings from Lydia Kiesling of The Millions, Monique Morris of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, Na’amen Tilahun (author of The Root), and Michael David Lukas (author of The Oracle of Stamboul). With comedy by Nato Green, and hosted by Rumpus Books Editor Brian Hurley, who will be giving away some of his favorite recent books. Free, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.
Monday 10/17: Booksmith presents David Szalay (All That Man Is) in conversation with Ethan Nosowsky (Editorial Director for Graywolf Press). Free, 7:30 p.m., Second Act.
Tuesday 10/18: Mrs. Dalloway’s presents popular novelist Margaret Livesey reading from her latest, Mercury. Free, 7:30 p.m., Mrs. Dalloway’s.
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This week’s theatre recommendation is Avant GardARAMA! at Cutting Ball Theater. Cutting Ball Theater is a nationally known company that makes its home iin San Francisco’s tenderloin, where it has put down roots in the community. This highly trained company focuses on the work of the avant garde, both historical and contemporary. They do new plays and old, including the “avant garde” of earlier decades. Often, they go so far as to write and publish original translations as well, when drawing on non-English repertoire. Their work is often influenced by the “poor theatre” approach of the late Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish director and theorist who came into prominence in the late ‘60s and ‘70s and is still considered an avant garde leader. The current production consists of “a sampler of short experimental works” which beggar description, highlighted by a strikingly unconventional modern pas de deux performed to recorded speeches of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. For further information, click here.
For extensive coverage of the Bay Area theatre scene, visit TheatreStorm.
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Evan Karp presents video of this week’s featured local author, Lindsey Boldt. Read an interview here.
And here’s some video of one of last week’s SF notables, Brandon Brown.
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If you have a Bay Area event listing you’d like us to consider for Notable SF, please contact [email protected] as far in advance as possible, and include the date of the event in the subject line.
