Wednesday 4/12: Douglas Kearney reads for for UC Berkeley’s Holloway Series in Poetry. Free, 6:30 p.m., UC Berkeley, Hearst Field Annex.
Joyce Carol Oates presents A Book of American Martyrs at Moe’s in Berkeley. It’s always a treat to encounter this author! Free, 7:30 p.m., Moe’s Books.
Thursday 4/13: Shanthi Sekaran (Lucky Boy) reads at the Morrison Library at UC Berkeley. Free, 5 p.m., Morrison Library UCB.
Clark Coolidge will be reading to celebrate the release Selected Poems: 1962-1985 from Station Hill Press. Free, 7 p.m., City Lights Bookstore.
Friday 4/14: The Last World Reading Series presents Bob Booker, Sharon Coleman, Kim Suck, and Jose Luis Gutierrez, celebrating the latest issue of Ambush Review. An open mic will follow. Free, 7 p.m., Nefeli Caffé.
Saturday 4/15: Sponge! Celebrates one year with readers Cheena Marie Lo, Angela Hume, and Jacob Kahn. Free, 7 p.m., 976 21st Street, Oakland.
Monday 4/17: Edie Miedav (Kingdom of the Young) in conversation with Oscar Villalon. Free, 7:30 p.m., The Booksmith.
Tuesday 4/18: Litquake presents “Not Funny! Sad!—Cartoonists Respond to Trump.” Featuring Tom Toro, Khalil Bendib, Lalo Alcarez, and Don Asmussen. Free, 6 p.m., SF Public Library Main Branch.
Queer Words presents gay icon Daniel Curzon (author of the first gay protest novel, Something You Do in the Dark, as well as Revolt of the Perverts, How to Cyberbully Your Teacher, and many more works) interviewed by Wayne Goodman. Free, 7 p.m., Folio Books.
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This week’s theatre recommendation is Needles and Opium at A.C.T. Canadian artist Robert Lepage is certainly one of the world’s leading theatre practitioners, known for his astonishing visual sensibility. The setting is a hotel room represented by a revolving cube suspended over the stage, with actors who appear to be floating, climbing walls, passing through hidden doors, and traveling to other locations including a recording studio and the streets of New York through the use of ingenious projections. The actors (who are accomplished circus artists) are sometimes sliding down the walls of the cube, sometimes suspended on cables, sometimes performing acrobatic flips in the air to move from scene to scene, and occasionally stepping out of the cube onto the stage floor. The characters include a fictional version of Lepage himself, Miles Davis, and Jean Cocteau and the script explores themes of love, art, and addiction, touching on historical details, offering poetic riffs on Cocteau’s Orpheus films, Davis’s love affair with Juliette Gréco, and Robert’s reflections on his own artistic and romantic struggles. It is amazing. Read a review here. Find further information here.
For coverage of the Bay Area theatre scene, visit TheatreStorm.
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Litseen is on a spring break and offers no new video of a local author this week. So, we dialed up the way back machine and offer you some older video of (formerly) local author CR Stapor, recorded March of 2013. Read an interview here.
And here’s video of one of last week’s SF Notables, Diane Di Prima.
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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.
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Logo art by Max Winter.
