Live From City Lights
By City Lights Books
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Podcast Description
Live From City Lights broadcasts readings, interviews, and events from City Lights Bookstore and Publishers in San Francisco.
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D.A. Powell reads from Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys | Celebrating the release of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press), D.A. Powell read his poetry at City Lights on Thursday, March 15. In D. A. Powell’s fifth book of poetry, the rollicking line he has made his signature becomes the taut, more discursive means to describing beauty, singing a dirge, directing an ironic smile, or questioning who in any given setting is the instructor and who is the pupil. This is a book that explores the darker side of divisions and developments, which shows how the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, or bar are locations of desire. With Powell’s witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates his exhilarating range. D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He teaches at the University of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area. | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Esi Edugyan reads from Half Blood Blues | On Wednesday, March 21, 2012, Esi Edugyan came to the City Lights Bookstore to read from Half Blood Blues (Picador Press). Berlin, 1939. A young, brilliant trumpet-player, Hieronymus, is arrested in a Paris cafe. The star musician was never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.Fifty years later, Sidney Griffiths, the only witness that day, still refuses to speak of what he saw. When Chip Jones, his friend and fellow band member, comes to visit, recounting the discovery of a strange letter, Sid begins a slow journey towards redemption. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world, and into the heart of his own guilty conscience. Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and Finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, as well as the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Half-Blood Blues is an electric, heart-breaking story about music, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.Esi Edugyan has a Masters in Writing from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2003, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, and Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (2006). Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published internationally. It was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a More Book Lust selection, and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of 2004′s Books to Remember. Edugyan has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain and Belgium. She has taught creative writing at both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, and has sat on many international panels, including the LesART Literary Festival in Esslingen, Germany, the Budapest Book Fair in Hungary, and Barnard College in New York City. | 5/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hari Kunzru reading from Gods Without Men | On Monday, March 12, 2012, Hari Kunzru read from his new novel, Gods without Men (Knopf), at City Lights. “In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing . . . It is God without men.” —Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830 Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed—but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them. Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shape-shifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe. Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, and My Revolutions, and is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize from the Society of Authors, a British Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Granta has named him one of its twenty best young British novelists, and he was a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Wired, and the New Statesman. He lives in New York City. www.harikunzru.com | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gayle Rubin reads from Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader | Gayle Rubin celebrated the release of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press) on Thursday, February 23, 2012, 7:00 P.M. at the City Lights Bookstore. Deviations is the definitive collection of writing by Gayle S. Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture. Gayle S. Rubin is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is a cultural anthropologist and activist whose work has been influential in the areas of sex and gender studies. Rubin was a “pro-sex” activist during the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80′s and she co-founded the first known lesbian SM group, Samois. | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Trinie Dalton Reads from Baby Geisha | Trinie Dalton came to City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, to read from her new short story collection, Baby Geisha (2 Dollar Radio). Baby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel to the Greek Isles. True to Dalton’s form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a more grounded approach in the author’s style. There’s the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of ‘Pura Vida,’ struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. ‘Millennium Chill’ is about a woman who discovers that her body heat is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar. Baby Geisha serves to underline Dalton’s reputation as a remarkable stylist and original artist. Trinie Dalton has authored and/or edited five books. Wide Eyed, Sweet Tomb, and A Unicorn Is Born are works of fiction. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is and Mythtym are art compilations. She writes articles and reviews about books, art, and music, somewhat collected on www.sweettomb.com. | 4/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ellen Ullman Reads from By Blood: A Novel | On Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at the Tosca Cafe in San Francisco, Ellen Ullman read from By Blood: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter. San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient’s recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient’s questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program. With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer. Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her years as a rare female computer programmer in the early years of the personal computer era. She lives in San Francisco. | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ZYZZYVA & GRANTA | On Tuesday, February 7th, ZYZZYVA and GRANTA hosted a reading at City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of the ZYZZYVA Winter Issue. Contributors Dean Rader and Herbert Gold read from their work, along with Daniel Alarcon, contributor to Granta 118: Exit Strategies. ZYZZYVA publishes the best prose, poetry, and visual art produced by West Coast writers and artists—along with the occasional piece from east of California. Since 1985, they’ve published such writers as Sherman Alexie, Raymond Carver, Aimee Bender, Po Bronson, F.X. Toole, Haruki Murakami, Richard Rodriguez, and Daniel Handler; poets such as Kay Ryan, Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, Czeslaw Milosz, W.S. Di Piero, and Francisco X. Alarcon, and they’ve featured work from such artists as Ed Ruscha, Sandow Birk, Laurie Anderson, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud. Granta magazine was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, student badinage and student literary enterprise, named after the river that runs through the town. In this original incarnation it had a long and distinguished history, publishing the early work of many writers who later became well known, including A. A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. During the 1970s, it ran into trouble – dwindling money, mounting apathy – from which it was rescued by a small group of postgraduates who successfully and surprisingly relaunched it as a magazine of new writing, with both writers and their audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge. Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real. As the Observer wrote of Granta: ‘In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world.’ | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reading from Why Are F****ts So Afraid of F****ts? | On February 15, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read from Why Are F****ts So Afraid of F****ts? (AKPress), joined by several of the book’s contributors: Debanuj DasGupta, Harris Kornstein, Booh Edouardo and Gina de Vries! Gay culture has become the ultimate nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle? Why Are F****ts So Afraid of F****ts? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! This anthology reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. “These essays—alternately moving and sprightly, contemplative and outraged—display the power of presenting an alternative to the mainstream: a world of greater tolerance, acceptance, support, and creativity.” —Publishers Weekly “Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s coruscating eye and clear head is what queers need if we are to survive as anything other than a tamed branch of consumer society, based on assimilation, repression, and despair. These essays come like a plunge into a forest pool of revitalizing joy, honesty, and common sense. Read them. Now. No—not tomorrow. Now!” —Samuel R. Delany, author of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue “You may have thought you understood human nature before you read this book; after reading it you will be humbled by all you failed to grasp until now. America invented identity politics but here those identities have been multiplied and articulated as never before.” —Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story “Why Are F****ts So Afraid of F****ts is a collection of essays that not only examine the intricacies of the current socio-political climate within the realm of the gay/queer/trans world, but also show how important it is for us to interface and aggressively seek to inform the world view of the culture at large… Thanks, Mattilda, for the insights, intellectual rigor and the glittering ammunition with which to destroy and rebuild.” —Mx Justin Vivian Bond, singer/songwriter and author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels “This book plumbs the most important question facing queers in the 21st century: how the hell did we go from forming a crucial part of the ’60s ‘lib’ rainbow, and from mastering, refining, and successfully deploying nonviolent resistance with ACT UP, only to end up creating for ourselves a world of martial and marital law every bit as sterile, constricting, and amoral as the world we once fled like the plague?” —Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men “These essays excavate masculinity, unearthing the complex and pervasive structures that police and construct it and exposing the beautiful resilience of its self-avowed refusers and failures. These pieces telescope between analysis of the structures of gendered racialization that produce body norms and the daily physical and emotional traumas and toils of surviving and resisting, providing complex and badly needed ways to imagine and reimagine faggotry.” —Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel, Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for [...] | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Lyn Hejinian reads from The Book of a Thousand Eyes | Poet Lyn Hejinian stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, February 9, 2012, to read from her new book of poems The Book Of A Thousand Eyes (Omindawn Press). Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian’s book is a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life. Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. She is the author of several books of poetry including Saga/ Circus, A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001),Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. Hejinian is also actively involved in collaboratively created works, the most recent examples of which include a major collection of poems by Hejinian and Jack Collom titled Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008). Other collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996; a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian; two mixed media books (The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill and The Lake) created with the painter Emilie Clark; the award-winning experimental documentary filmLetters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs; and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, co-written with nine other poets. Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, Holland, China, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment for the Arts; she received an Award for Independent Literature from the Soviet literary organization “Poetic Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has traveled and lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description (1990) and Xenia (1994), two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co- editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. She is currently serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Chair of the UC-Berkeley Solidarity Alliance, an activist coalition of union representatives, workers, staff, students, and faculty fighting to maintain the accessibility and affordability of public higher education in California. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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John Nichols reads from UPRISING: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street | John Nichols took City Lights Bookstore by storm on Wednesday, February 22, 2012, discussing his new book UPRISING: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street (Nation Books). Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s move to strip collective-bargaining rights from public-sector workers last year caused the biggest labor rallies since the 1930s. In UPRISING: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, John Nichols describes how conservatives across the nation are attempting to revoke the rights of public-sector employees to unionize—and how ordinary people are fighting back. This nationwide assault is a coordinated attack by privatizers and billionaire political donors like the Koch brothers (who poured thousands of dollars into Governor Walker’s campaign war chest and exercise enormous influence on his policymaking). In the tradition of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Nichols argues in this powerfully evocative book that these unprecedented efforts, and the shadowy interests behind them, are resulting in a broader national challenge—to the Tea Party and to the Far Right. With the effort to recall Governor Walker already underway, UPRISING is an incredibly timely and important book from John Nichols. John Nichols is The Nation’s Washington correspondent and the associate editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He has authored or coauthored eight books on media and politics. He lives in Madison and Washington, DC. | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 10 Episodes |
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