Wednesday 11/14: Celebrate the release of not one, but two books by the late Lucia Berlin: Welcome Home: A Memoir With Selected Photographs and Letters and Evening in Paradise: More Stories. Join Emily Bell, Jeff Berlin, Lydia Kiesling, Rachel Khong, Jim Nisbet, and Robin Sloan as they celebrate the life and work of this treasured author. City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco at 7 p.m.
Join Alison Hart as she reads from Mostly White, a story of four generations of intergenerational trauma and resilience. Books Inc. in Palo Alto at 7 p.m.
Thursday 11/15: Nathan Englander will be reading from Dinner at the Center of the Earth. Book Passage Ferry Building in San Francisco at 6 p.m.
Don’t miss this week’s Local Book Pick event! Walnut Creek-based writer Christine S. O’Brien will be reading from Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing. Hear about the family turmoil and incessant hunger that can hide behind luxurious facades. Rakestraw Books in Danville at 7 p.m.
Friday 11/16: Join Kristen Tracy as she launches Half-Hazard, her first book of poems and winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation! Tracy will be in conversation with Daniel Handler. The Bindery in San Francisco at 7:30 p.m.
Join Marin County Poet Laureate Rebecca Foust (Paradise Drive) and poet Peter LaBerge (Makeshift Cathedral) for a night of reading sponsored by the Marin Poetry Center. Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday 11/17: Seventy years before the Golden Gate International Exposition, the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute displayed and promoted various local inventions. Learn about how these expositions in shaped California’s early economy. Treasure Island Museum in San Francisco at 10:30 a.m.
Join Marion Nestle, author of Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat for a talk at the farmers’ market! She will be joined in conversation with Tiffani Patton. CUESA at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market in San Francisco at 10:30 a.m.
Sunday 11/18: Congresswoman Jackie Speier was only twenty-eight when she shot five times as a part of Congressman Leo Ryan’s effort to rescue defectors from Jim Jones’s cult in Jonestown, Guyana. Learn more of her story as she reads from Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back. Book Passage in Corte Madera at 12 p.m.
Join Chaya Bhuvaneswar, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, as she reads from her debut short story collection, White Dancing Elephants. The Bindery in San Francisco at 4 p.m.
Monday 11/19: Join Robert Reich for this year’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, will be discussing “Free Speech in Angry Times.” Pauley Ballroom (Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union) at UC Berkeley in Berkeley at 8 p.m.
Tuesday 11/20: The activism of 1968 changed both our politics and our cinematic aesthetics. Learn more from Christina Gerhardt, visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Professor of Film at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, as she discusses 1968 and Global Cinema. Moe’s Books in Berkeley at 7 p.m.
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LOCAL BOOK PICK: This week’s Local Book Pick is Cristine S. O’Brien’s Crave: A Memoir of Food and Longing (Macmillan, November 13, 2018)! Don’t miss her reading at Rakestraw Books on 11/15 at 7 p.m.
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Logo art by Max Winter.
