LIVE! From City Lights

Last week, author Ali Liebegott came into City Lights to chat with City Lights Publicity Associate, Jolene Torr, about her newest books Cha-Ching! and The Beautifully Worthless (both published by City Lights/Sister Spit). Cha-Ching! is the story of Theo, our scruffy, big-hearted and quick-witted heroine, who is not so much down on her luck as delivered luckless into a culture where the winners and losers have already been decided. Her adventures in getting over take her from SF to NYC, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics. With the signature poet’s voice that has won her awards and acclaim, Liebegott investigates the conjoined hearts of hope and addiction in an unforgettable story of what it means to be young and broke in America. Andrew Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, compared Liebegott’s writing to Dostoyevsky and her main character to On the Road’s Dean Moriarty when he said, “In the game of American-life-on-the-go hopscotch, Ali Liebegott’s heroine Theo just jumped a square ahead of Dean Moriarty. . . . The author’s fine writing about gambling is as good as I ever read, including Dostoevski’s and the Barthelme Bros. In the end, love, in whatever twisted, pallid form, a love that has little to do with sexuality, is the only answer. . . .Wonderful book.” In Ali Liebegott’s award-winning road story, The Beautifully Worthless, a runaway waitress leaves her lover, grabs her dog and hits the highway. Liebegott maps her travels in a series of hilarious and heartbreaking letters to the girl she left behind, and some of the most exquisite poetry written about love, heartache and madness. The winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction, The Beautifully Worthless is back in print and now available from City Lights/Sister Spit! Join us next week as we celebrate with Ali Liebegott, the publication of Cha-Ching! and the return of The Beautifully Worthless. Wednesday, March 27th, 7pm at City Lights Bookstore.  

On January 23, 2013 at City Lights Bookstore, Trevor Aaronson in conversation with Monika Bauerlein discussed Aaronson’s new novel The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror (IG Publishing). A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror shows how the FBI has, under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of more than fifteen thousand informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the bureau can then claim victory in the War on Terror. An outgrowth of Trevor Aaronson’s work as an investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley—which culminated in an award-winning cover story in Mother Jones magazine—The Terror Factory reveals shocking information about the criminals, con men, and liars the FBI uses as paid informants, as well as documenting the extreme methods the FBI uses to ensnare Muslims in terrorist plots—which are in reality conceived and financed by the FBI. The book offers unprecedented detail into how the FBI has transformed from a reactive law enforcement agency to a proactive counterterrorism organization—including the story of an accused murderer who became one of the FBI’s most prolific terrorism informants—and how so-called terrorism consultants and experts have made fortunes by exaggerating the threat of Islamic terrorism in the United States. Trevor Aaronson is associate director and co-founder of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit journalism organization that produces reporting about Florida and Latin America. He was a 2010–11 investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where his reporting about the FBI’s informants in US Muslim communities resulted in a Mother Jones cover story that won the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim 2012 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award, the Molly National Journalism Prize and the International Data Journalism Award. Monika Bauerlein is co-editor of Mother Jones, where, together with Clara Jeffery, she spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by two National Magazine Awards for general excellence, the addition of a seven-person Washington Bureau, and an overhaul of the organization’s digital strategy that tripled MotherJones.com’s traffic. Previously she was Mother Jones’ investigative editor, focusing on long-form projects marrying in-depth reportage, document sleuthing, and narrative appeal. She has also worked as an alternative-weekly editor (at Minneapolis/St. Paul’s City Pages), a correspondent for US and European publications in Washington, D.C. and at the United Nations, an AP stringer, corporate trainer, translator, sausage slinger and fishing-line packager.  

On January 16, 2013, Susan Steinberg came to City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of her new fiction collection Spectacle: Stories (Graywolf Press). From the innovative author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love comes an inventive new collection of fiction. In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning “Cowboys.” And in “Underthings,” when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets. In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew. Susan Steinberg is the author of the short story collections, Hydroplane and The End of Free Love. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize.

City Lights Booksellers in conjunction with Tosca Cafe, The Paris Review, and Picador Books are pleased to celebrate the release of Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story (Picador Books), moderated by Lorin Stein (The Paris Review) with readings by Daniel Alarcón and Peter Orner (October 18, 2012). What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favorite stories from the pages of The Paris Review. Over the course of the last half century, the Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of our time. This anthology—the first of its kind—is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students, and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer’s point of view. “Some chose classics. Some chose stories that were new even to us. Our hope is that this collection will be useful to young writers, and to others interested in literary technique. Most of all, it is intended for readers who are not (or are no longer) in the habit of reading short stories. We hope these object lessons will remind them how varied the form can be, how vital it remains, and how much pleasure it can give.”—from the Editors’ Note with selections by Daniel Alarcón · Donald Barthelme · Ann Beattie · David Bezmozgis · Jorge Luis Borges · Jane Bowles · Ethan Canin · Raymond Carver · Evan S. Connell · Bernard Cooper · Guy Davenport · Lydia Davis · Dave Eggers · Jeffrey Eugenides · Mary Gaitskill · Thomas Glynn · Aleksandar Hemon · Amy Hempel · Mary-Beth Hughes – and more about The Paris Review: Founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.” Decade after decade, the Review has introduced the important writers of the day. Adrienne Rich was first published in its pages, as were Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick Moody. Selections from Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue, one of his first publications in English. The magazine was also among the first to recognize the work of Jack Kerouac, with the publication of his short story, “The Mexican Girl,” in 1955. Other milestones of contemporary literature, now widely anthologized, also first made their appearance in The Paris Review: Italo Calvino’s Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Donald Barthelme’s Alice, Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in conjunction with the San Francisco Art Institute and Bloomsbury Books present an evening with Cynthia Carr and Amy Scholder celebrating the release of Cythnia Carr’s new book Fire in the Belly : The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury Books), October 3, 2012. In December 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington made headlines when it responded to protests from the Catholic League by voluntarily censoring an excerpt of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from its show on American portraiture. Why a work of art could stir such emotions is at the heart of Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, the first biography of a beleaguered art-world figure who became one of the most important voices of his generation. Wojnarowicz emerged from a Dickensian childhood that included orphanages, abusive and absent parents, and a life of hustling on the street. He first found acclaim in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for its abandoned buildings, junkies, and burgeoning art scene. Along with Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz helped redefine art for the times. As uptown art collectors looked downtown for the next big thing, this community of cultural outsiders was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. The ensuing culture war, the neighborhood’s gentrification, and the AIDS crisis then devastated the East Village scene. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Carr’s brilliant biography traces the untold story of a controversial and seminal figure at a pivotal moment in American culture. Cynthia Carr is a writer and cultural critic living in New York City. She has served as staff writer for The Village Voice and has also written about performance art and culture for ArtForum, LA Weekly, Interview, and Mirabella. She is the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Amy Scholder is the editorial director of the Feminist Press. Over the past twenty-five years, she has worked with David Wojnarowicz, Sapphire, Kathy Acker, Karen Finley, Barbara Hammer, June Jordan, Joni Mitchell, Kate MIllett, Judith Butler, Mary Woronov, Kate Bornstein, Jill Johnston, Justin Vivian Bond, Laurie Weeks, and many more writers and artists. She divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles

The ZYZZYVA fall release celebration was held September 30th, 2012 at City Lights. hosted by Oscar Villalon, Laura Cogan with readings by Judy Halebsky, Jesse Nathan, Joel Streicker “The one journal I read cover to cover as soon as it arrives—ZYZZYVA is that smart, that brilliantly curated”—Junot Diaz In its Fall issue, the venerated San Francisco literary journal expands on its mission of publishing work from the West Coast’s best writers and artists and translators. An “Expats” section features poetry and nonfiction from Luis Alberto Urrea, Edie Meidav, Dagoberto Gilb and John Freeman—all writers who can claim roots on this side of the country. And the stunning photographs of rising international talent (and Bay Area resident) Lucas Foglia are featured. For its Fall release celebration at City Lights, ZYZZYVA will present readings from contributors Jesse Nathan, Joel Streicker, and Judy Halebsky. Pick up a copy, have some wine, and enjoy some wonderful writing. Hosted by ZYZZYVA Editor Laura Cogan and Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Judy Halebsky’s book of poetry “Sky=Empty” won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a California Book Award. Her most recent volume is the chapbook “Space/Gap/Interval/Distance” (Sixteen Rivers Press). Jesse Nathan is an editor at McSweeney’s and is a doctoral student in English literature at Stanford. Joel Streicker received a 2011 PEN American Center Translation Fund Grant to translate Samanta Schweblin’s story collection Pájaros en la boca. His translation of acclaimed Colombian writer Tomas Gonzalez’s story “Victor Comes Back” appears in ZYZZYVA’s Fall issue. visit: http://www.zyzzyva.org/

Laird Hunt read from his new novel, Kind One (Coffee House Press), at City Lights Bookstore on September 25th, 2012.  As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother’s second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm “ninety miles from nowhere.” In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Lancaster’s “paradise”—a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm—until Lancaster’s attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions.  The events that follow Lancaster’s death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America. Called “one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today” by Paul Auster, Laird Hunt is the author of four genre-bending novels: The Impossibly, The Exquisite, Indiana, Indiana and Ray of the Star. His books have been translated and released in France, Italy, and Japan, and The Impossibly is available as an audio book through Iambik Audio. His work has also appeared in several recent anthologies including Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, in which the Village Voice says “Laird Hunt’s ‘Kissability,’ in its distillation of inchoate teenage longing, is . . . as lovely a passage as anything in pop music.” Born in Singapore and educated at Indiana University and The Sorbonne in Paris, Hunt has also lived in Tokyo, London, The Hague, New York City, and on an Indiana farm. A former press officer at the United Nations and current faculty member at the University of Denver, he now lives in Boulder, Colorado. Visit: http://www.lairdhunt.net/

Ngugi wa’Thiong’o came to City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, November 13, 2012, to celebrate the release of In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (Pantheon). From the world-renowned Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, literary critic, and theorist of post-colonial literature, comes the second volume of his memoirs, spanning 1955-1959, the author’s high school years during the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising. In the House of the Interpreter evokes a haunting childhood at the end of British colonial rule in Africa, and the formative experiences of a political dissident. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the acclaimed author of numerous books including Wizard of the Crow, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Decolonizing the Mind. He is recipient of many honors including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature and seven honorary doctorates. Visit: www.ngugiwathiongo.com

Adam Johnson and Naomi Benaron came into City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the recent release of their current titles Running the Rift (Naomi Benaron, published by Algonquin Books) and The Orphan Master’s Son (Adam Johnson, published by Vintage) on November 7, 2012.  Running the Rift follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted Rwandan boy, from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life, a ten-year span in which his country is undone by the Hutu-Tutsi tensions. Born a Tutsi, he is thrust into a world where it’s impossible to stay apolitical—where the man who used to sell you gifts for your family now spews hatred, where the girl who flirted with you in the lunchroom refuses to look at you, where your Hutu coach is secretly training the very soldiers who will hunt down your family. Yet in an environment increasingly restrictive for the Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream of becoming Rwanda’s first Olympic medal contender in track, a feat he believes might deliver him and his people from this violence. When the killing begins, Jean Patrick is forced to flee, leaving behind the woman, the family, and the country he loves. Finding them again is the race of his life. Naomi Benaron was born and raised in Boston Massachusetts and is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Before she lost her mind and decided to devote her life to writing, she worked for many years as a geophysicist and seismologist. She has lived on a sailboat, worked on a Kibbutz, and traveled extensively. She works with Afghan Women through the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an online space where the women of Afghanistan can write in safety and freedom. An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers. Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other works includeEmporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.

Chris Kraus came to City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of Summer of Hate (Semiotext(e) Books), October 25th, 2012. Waking up from the chilling high of a dangerous sex game, art world insider Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque from her home in LA. It’s summer, 2005. While Catt’s stated goal is to reinvest some windfall real estate gains, she’s secretly seeking escape from her niche in the insular cosmopolitan bubble she’s strived so hard to attain. In Albuquerque, she meets Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Deprived on the most cellular level of knowledge and hope, Paul makes plans, with Catt’s help, to attend UCLA. But then he’s arrested in Arizona on a 10-year old bench warrant. Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of American justice, Catt and Paul’s empathic idyll of saving each other’s lives seems cursed to dissolve. Kraus’ 1997 debut novel I LOVE DICK was hailed by Rick Moody as “one of the most important literary events of the past two decades,” and has become a cult classic. New York Times critic Holland Cotter has called her “one of our smartest and most original writers on art and culture.” In SUMMER OF HATE, Kraus turns her attention to the glaring disparities in expectations and consciousness that have come to define American life. Baudrillard meets Breaking Bad in Catt’s stark and bleakly hilarious descent into an underclass world of born-again Christianity, self-help, and crack. Chris Kraus is the author of the trilogy I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia and Torpor, and two books of art criticism, most recently Where Art Belongs.  Summer of Hate is her fourth novel.  Chris teaches at European Graduate School and lives in LA, where she is a co-editor of Semiotexte.      

Robert Graysmith came into City Lights Bookstore on November 15th, 2012, to discuss his new true crime novel, Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer–and of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco (Crown Books). The first biography of the little-known real-life Tom Sawyer (a friend of Mark Twain during his brief tenure as a California newspaper reporter), told through a harrowing account of Sawyer’s involvement in the hunt for a serial arsonist who terrorized mid-nineteenth century San Francisco. When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved ninety lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope. Twain learned that a dozen years earlier the then eighteen-year-old New York-born Sawyer had been a “Torch Boy,” one of the youths who raced ahead of the volunteer firemen’s hand-drawn engines at night carrying torches to light the way, always aware that a single spark could reduce the all-wood city of San Francisco to ashes in an instant. At that time a mysterious serial arsonist known by some as “The Lightkeeper” was in the process of burning San Francisco to the ground six times in eighteen months – the most disastrous and costly series of fires ever experienced by any American metropolis. Black Fire is the most thorough and accurate account of Sawyer’s relationship with Mark Twain and of the six devastating incendiary fires that baptized one of the modern world’s favorite cities. Set amid a scorched landscape of burning roads, melting iron warehouses, exploding buildings, and deadly gangs who extorted and ruled by fear, it includes the never-before-told stories of Sawyer’s heroism during the sinking of the steamship Independence and the crucial role Sawyer and the Torch Boys played in solving the mystery of the Lightkeeper. Drawing on archival sources such as actual San Francisco newspaper interviews with Sawyer and the handwritten police depositions of the arrest of the Lightkeeper, bestselling author Robert Graysmith vividly portrays the gritty, corrupt, and violent world of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, overrun with gunfighters, hooligans, hordes of gold prospectors, crooked politicians, and vigilantes. By chronicling how Sawyer took it upon himself to investigate, expose, and stop the arsonist, Black Fire details – for the first time – Sawyer’s remarkable life and illustrates why Twain would later feel compelled to name his iconic character after his San Francisco buddy when he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Robert Graysmith is the New York Times bestselling author of Zodiac and eight other books. The major motion pictures Zodiac and Auto Focus are based on his books. A San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist and artist for fifteen years, he lives in San Francisco. This event is co-sponsored by Litquake Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival, was founded by Bay Area writers in order to put on a week-long literary spectacle for book lovers, complete with cutting-edge panels, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings. Since its founding in 1999, the festival has presented more than 3,650 author appearances for an audience of over 83,500 in its lively and inclusive celebration of San Francisco’s thriving contemporary literary scene. Litquake seeks to foster interest in literature, perpetuate a sense of literary community, and provide a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing as a complement to the city’s music, film, and cultural festivals. visit: http://litquake.org/

Presented by National Book Critics Circle and hosted at City Lights Bookstore, representatives from a variety of West Coast Presses came together as a panel to discuss West Coast presses on September 20th, 2012 (in conjunction with the NBCC West Coast Reviewing Panel, Tue. Oct. 9, 2012). Moderated by Kate Gale (Red Hen Press, LA), with Stacey Lewis (City Lights, S.F.), Ethan Nosowsky (McSweeney’s, S.F.), Heidi Broadhead (Wave Books, Seattle) and Malcolm Margolin (Heyday Books, Berkeley) What does it mean to have local book culture in the age of the Internet? What are the responsibilities, rewards and challenges of publishing small scale, locally, and outside the  hub of New York? The National Book Critics Circle gathers several key west coast publishers at City Lights Books to talk about the lively cultures of their presses. Kate Gale is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum in Los Angeles. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America. Stacey Lewis is Director of Publicity and Marketing at City Lights  Publishers where she has worked for over 17 years, collaborating with writers such as Howard Zinn, Ellen Ullman, Sesshu Foster, Bill Morgan, Hal Niedzviecki, Paul Madonna, Tim Wise, and Rebecca Brown. She lives in Berkeley, CA, with her husband and two sons. Ethan Nosowsky is Editorial Director at McSweeney's. He began his career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and was most recently Editor-at-Large at Graywolf Press. He has taught in the Creative Writing program at Columbia University and has written for Bookforum, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Threepenny Review. Heidi Broadhead is Managing Editor of Wave Books, an independent Seattle-based publisher of poetry and work by poets. She has also contributed to Edible Seattle, Omnivoracious, Publicola, the Chicago Reader, and worked for 826 Seattle, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Seattle International Film Festival, and Children's Museum, Seattle. She lives in Seattle with her husband and son. Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco – Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth-century by a western writer. He serves on the boards of two organizations he helped found, Bay Nature Institute and Alliance for California Traditional Artists.   The National Book Critics Circle honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature. The NBCC was founded in April 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, with founding members John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof intending to extend the Algonquin round table to a national conversation. The NBCC gained 501(c)(3) status in October 2006, and in 2010 received an NEA grant to support the website and its literary blog, Critical Mass. The National Book Critic Circle Awards are issued each March and honor the best literature published in the United States in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These are the only national literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Visit: bookcritics.org City Lights would like to thank Tess Taylor and Oscar Vilallon for their hard work in making this evening a reality.  

City Lights’ Jolene Torr discusses San Francisco Chinatown with the author, Philip P. Choy at City Lights Bookstore. Philip P. Choy was born 1926 in San Francisco Chinatown at a time when an invisible boundary isolated the community from mainstream San Francisco. He lived on the N.W. corner of Pacific and Grant Ave. where his father co-owned a meat market that catered not only to the Chinese in the community but to the neighboring Italian housewives in North Beach. Like all Chinese children he attended public school and after school attended Chinese school from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. He went to the University of California under the G.I. Bill and graduated with a degree in Architecture. He is a retired architect and a renowned historian on the history of Chinese America. In the midst of the civil rights movement, Philip P. Choy and his colleague Him Mark Lai co-taught the Nation’s first college level course in Chinese American history at San Francisco State University. Since then he has created and consulted on numerous T.V. documentaries, exhibits and publications, including the Gaam Saan Haak–The Chinese of America in 1974. He co-authored The Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese with Professors Marlon Hom and Lorraine Dong. His most recent book is Canton Footprints: Sacramento’s Chinese Legacy. His community services includes providing pro-bono architectural services to non-profit organizations such as the Chinese for Affirmative Action, the former Chinese YWCA, the Oroville Temple, and in 1943 produced the case report that placed the Angel Island Immigration Station on the National Registry of Historic Places. He has served on the California State Historic Resource Commission, on the San Francisco Landmark Advisory Board, five times as President of the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA), and currently an emeritus CHSA boardmember. Among his awards of recognition is the prestigious San Francisco State University President’s Medal.

New Directions Publishing and City Lights came together to celebrate the hotly anticipated release of the English translation of renowned Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai‘s Satantango at City Lights Bookstore, June 28, 2012.   László Krasznahorkai is a contemporary Hungarian author whose works have been translated into many languages. He was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He worked for some years as an editor until 1984, when he became a freelance writer. He now lives in reclusiveness in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes. In 1993, he won the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. His novels include Animalinside, Satantango, and War And War.   Much like the seven-and-a-half-hour Béla Tarr film it spawned, Satantango requires patience. Underlying this morass of atrophying humanity is a structure of subtle movements, the structure of the tango, a structure only apparent at a far remove. It is a structure I only recognized somewhere in the seventh hour of the film and which, while immersed in the novel, seems ever elusive, although there are indications. Even if you don’t have the patience for the gran mal, there are moments of Handkean brilliance in the minutiae. —Recommended by Jeff, City Lights Books At long last, twenty-five years after the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai burst onto the scene with his first novel, Satantango dances into English in a beautiful translation by George Szirtes. Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that “the devil has all the good times.” The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.” ————– New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 – 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” James Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”

Writers, organizers, and activists Stewart Acuff and Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz met at City Lights Bookstore, July 8, 2012, to celebrate the 18th annual LaborFest! Local poet, activist, and organizer Alice Rogoff hosted the event. LaborFest was established in 1994 to institutionalize the history and culture of working people in an annual labor cultural, film and arts festival. It begins every July 5th, which is the anniversary of the 1934 “Bloody Thursday” event. On that day, two workers Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise were shot and killed in San Francisco. They were supporting the longshoremen and maritime workers strike. This incident brought about the San Francisco General Strike which shut down the entire city and led to hundreds of thousands of workers joining the trade union movement. The Organizing committee of LaborFest is composed of unionists and unorganized workers, cultural workers and supporters of labor education and history. We encourage all unions not only to support us with endorsements and contributions but also to include activities about their own union members, their history and the work that they do. LaborFest San Francisco supports the establishment of LaborFests around the country and internationally. There are now LaborFests in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, every December. Laborfests have also taken place in Buenos Aires, Argentina and El Alto, Bolivia. In April of this year, the first LaborFest in Capetown, South Africa took place. In May, there were LaborFests in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. The need to build local, national and international solidarity is critical, if labor is going to face the challenges it faces on all fronts. LaborFests help bring our struggles together in art, film and music. Stewart Acuff is the Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President of the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) and has been a labor organizer for more than 30 years. He writes and speaks extensively and has written articles for the Atlanta Constitution, Labor Research Review, In These Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy and Focus Magazine, Labor Studies Journal, New Labor Forum and several Georgia newspapers. He also has written essays in Which Way for Organized Labor? (edited by Bruce Nissen) and Organizing for Justice in Our Communities (edited by Immanuel Ness and Stuart Eimer). He is the co-author with Dr. Richard Levins of Getting America Back To Work. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is an educator, feminist activist, writer, and life-long activist. She has produced many scholarly books and articles, and has published three memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (1997); Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (2002); and Blood on the Border (2005), which is about what she saw during the Nicaraguan Contra war against the Sandinistas in the 1980s. Outlaw Woman won recognition from the Organization of American Historians as a 2003 finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award in the field of American civil rights struggles. Her writing has also appeared in Monthly Review, The Nation, and on the CounterPunch website. Alice Rogoff is a local poet, activist, and organizer. She has served on the Labor-Fest organizing committee since its inception as one of its key organizers. She has been published in the literary magazines Pudding Magazine, Borderlands (Texas Poetry Review), BEAT, Poetrymagazine.com, and the North Coast Literary Review, and in the anthologies It’s All Good by Manic D Press and The View from Here by Street Sheet. Her poetry book MURAL won the 2004 Blue Light Press 2004 Book Award Contest. She is a member of the Authors Guild, Northern California Media Workers Guild (CWA), Academy of American Poets, IWW, Workmen’s Circle and Amnesty International. She co-edited two anthologies for Noe Valley Poets and This Far Together for the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, as well as being an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal since 1984.