SF’s Bookstores and Readings Reflect a Lively Literary Scene

Litquake's own Jack Boulware, as quoted in The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2010:

“There isn’t an enormous publishing and entertainment industry in San Francisco,” said Jack Boulware, a journalist and author who is one of Litquake’s founders. “If you’re a writer here, you aren’t bound by restrictions you might find in other cities; you can express yourself and innovate and experiment.”

“And,” he deadpanned, “everyone is stoned and sitting in cafes in the middle of the day.”

There's more about San Francisco and our great literary community in the story on The New York Times website, but the opening focuses on Litquake:

"ON a balmy fall evening in the Mission District of San Francisco, hundreds of people spilled onto Valencia Street, where they chatted happily for a few minutes before pouring back into bookstores, cafes and theaters. It was a giddy, animated crowd, but most of all bookish — a collection of fans and believers, here to listen to the written word.

The occasion was an event called Litquake, which, over the course of nine days, would draw some 13,000 residents and visitors to readings by scores of authors, many of them — like Maxine Hong Kingston and Daniel Handler (a k a Lemony Snicket) — local celebrities. The “Lit Crawl” finale alone featured more than 400 readings at bars, laundromats and even the police station in a single evening.

Litquake is an annual event, but on almost any day or night in San Francisco, there is likely to be something for the literary-inclined — a poetry reading at a bar, a book swap in a cafe or a reading in the book-lined lobby of the Rex Hotel. This is a place, after all, where dozens of fiercely independent bookstores not only survive but thrive, thanks to a city of readers who seem to view books not only as a pleasure, but as a cause."

read full article at The New York Times website

LitCrawl, Phase 1: Saturday, Oct. 17

Phase 1: 6-7 pm
Lit Crawl launches Phase 1 with readings from local lit orgs, reading series, and indie publishers; themes of food, transgressive lit, spirituality, and online writing; Bomb magazine’s BOMB-aoke!; and our annual Clarion Alley madness!

Access a printable Litquake 2009 Crawl Map.


Clarion Alley, Between 17th & 18th, Mission & Valencia
Dirty in the Alley: Literature from the Gutter Up
(Sign up for Phase 2 Open Mic in Phase 1!)

Amanda Coggin, Stefan De La Garza, Cynthia Gentry, D. R. Haney, Diane Karagienakos, Andre Perry, Jen Siraganian,  Tony DuShane
Four Barrel Coffee, 375 Valencia
Kearny Street Workshop: I Left My Heart In...?
Musings on east/west dichotomies, bi-coastal travels, and the meaning of place.
Samantha Chanse, Khoi Nguyen, Brynn Saito, Nina Sharma, Alice Wu
Artzone 461 Gallery, 461 Valencia
Three Rooms Press
Peter Carlaftes, Joie Cook, Kat Georges, Karen Hildebrand, Dominique Lowell, Jane Ormerod
The LAB, 2948 16th
SFist and SF Appeal Present: Collisions on the Information Superhighway
It's a two-way street. As opposed to writing for print, online writing is a medium of instant gratification- and immediate pillory. Join some of San Francisco's freshest online voices as they grapple with the joys and heartaches of being 'out there' in the interwebs without a net.

Brock Keeling, Eve Batey, Katie Ann, Matt Baume, Christine Borden, Phil Bronstein, Ramona Emerson, Tag Savage
Forest Books, 3080 16th
The Way to Happiness: Spirituality in Challenging Times
Byron Belitsos, Matthew Fox, Brenda Knight, Nina Lesowitz, Kamla K. Kapur
Ti Couz, 3108 16th
Cherry Bleeds
Cherry Bleeds Presents No F**king Regrets: A loving embrace of our DNA's inner reptile and transcendent transgression.

Melissa Hansen, Missy Church-Barrow, MK Chavez, Aimee De Long, William Taylor Jr., Daphne Gottlieb
Dalva (21+), 3121 16th
Instant City Magazine
Jamey Genna, Ana Maria Ventura, Gravity Goldberg, Sherilyn Connelly, Suzanne Kleid, Jim Nelson
Adobe Books, 3166 16th
Manic D Press
Thea Hillman, Jon Longhi, Tarin Towers, Jennifer Blowdryer, James Tracy, Eric Spitznagel, Jennifer Joseph
Double Dutch (21+), 3192 16th
Rebel Reading Series
Jason Myers, Karen Finlay, Dan Strachota, Stephanie Pullen
Elixir (21+), 3200 16th
Babylon Salon Spotlight Reading
Spotlighting readers from Babylon Salon, a quarterly reading series that brings together established authors, emerging writers, a featured literary journal and an author from its pages.

Jay C. Barmann, Kerry Donoghue, Nick Krieger, Anna Leahy, Ann K. Ryles
Creativity Explored, 3245 16th
Threepenny Review
Kathryn Crim, T. J. Clark, Louis B. Jones, Elizabeth Tallent, Tony Tulathimutte, Anne Wagner, Dean Young
Muddy Waters, 521 Valencia @ 16th
Mission Street Poets
Readings from a group of poets and performers who meet on the corner of 16th & Mission.

Charlie Getter, J. Brandon Løburg, m.g. martin, Jonathan Siegel, Amber Bouman, Guinevere Q, Peck The Town Crier (aka Chris Peck), Stellar Cassidy
Casanova (21+), 527 Valencia
San Francisco Writers' Grotto: Psycho Babble from The Grotto
Oddballs, whack jobs, and loony ideas. The San Francisco Writers' Grotto celebrates deviating from the norm.

Allison Hoover Bartlett, Elizabeth Bernstein, Po Bronson, Chris Colin, Janis Cooke Newman, Julia Scheeres, Ethan Watters
Mission Street Food, 2234 Mission St.  (Lung Shan Restaurant)
Note changed venue—no longer at Bar Tartine!
Meatpaper
Marissa Guggiana, Heather Smith, Chris Ying
Root Division, 3175 17th
Root Division: Quaking in the Roots
Root Division, an arts and arts education non-profit in the Mission that provides subsidized studio space to working artists, is proud to host a night of fiction, performance, and creative wizardry by four Bay Area writers.

Mateo Hoke, Miranda Mellis, Eric E. Olson, Christopher Lura, Christopher Cook
18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero
Edible San Francisco
Bruce Cole (emcee), Susan Coss (curator), Molly Watson, Novella Carpenter, Andy Griffin, Jeannette Ferrary
The Dark Room, 2263 Mission
Bomb Magazine Presents: BOMB-AOKE!
Re-enact BOMB's classic interviews (available at BOMBsite.com) in a karaoke-style format! Act out Jonathan Safran Foer interviewing Jeffrey Eugenides. Or pretend to be Willem Defoe interviewing Frances McDormand! Best performance wins a free vintage issue of BOMB worth lots of dough. Special surprise guests writers!

Judges: Brian McMullen, Laura Howard, Paul W. Morris
Paxton Gate Kids, 766 Valencia
Paxton Gate Kids Presents: Edward Gorey Story Hour
Surprise readers will share classic Edward Gorey stories, like The Blue Aspic or The Remembered Visit.

*Bring your kids!
on to Phase 2
skip to Phase 3

One City One Book: Doug Dorst Event October 13

In conjunction with the S.F. Public Library's One City One Book celebration, Litquake presents an evening with Alive in Necropolis author Doug Dorst and Adam Johnson at the Library's Koret Auditorium. Admission is free!

Dorst's new thriller, set in the city of San Francisco and the cemeteries of Colma, is one part crime novel, one part ghost story, tinged with humor and heart. Among many colorful characters, the book features a rookie Colma cop navigating a world of both the dead and alive, and a San Francisco teen, struggling with his own version of reality.
Like Dashiell Hammett, Dorst conveys a hard-bitten love of the physical San Francisco,
the fog-swallowed town, the sun after rain, the mineshaft drops in temperature....
The fiction seems to possess, and be possessed by, its beloved Bay.
— New York Times Book Review

SF Weekly Weighs in on Litquake 2009

Amy Tan’s characters are so formulaic, she makes Dan Brown look like William Burroughs. Pow! Tan better get used to it: She’s the guest of honor at Litquake’s Amy Tan Tribute/Roast, which means elite scribes like Andrew Sean Greer, Michael Krasny, and Ben Fong-Torres will pay homage to the beloved local author by firebombing her, her work, and hopefully her band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, which can’t keep a beat steady without a tincture of heroin and a naked rent boy intoning the Kabbalah. Double pow! The nine-day event is stocked with author readings (James Ellroy, Sarah Vowell, and Tracy Kidder, to name a paltry three out of dozens) but so is every week in the city. It’s the oddball stuff that makes Litquake so special, such as tonight’s Book Ball, which requests that attendees don masks, à la Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, and mingle semi-anonymously. On Oct. 12, Porchlight focuses on Bay Area punk history; the lineup includes Litquake co-founder Jack Boulware and SF Weekly contributor Silke Tudor, whose book on that very topic hit stores last month (see our music editor’s take here). Ending the event is the ridiculous Lit Crawl (Oct. 17), in which organizers stuff countless authors (Loren Rhoads, David Henry Sterry, Vendela Vida, and Alan Black, to name a paltry four out of many dozens) into Mission bars and venues, waves the public over, and watches everybody try to make sense of it all. Forget about finding a seat, just stand in back and eat street food — this year, more than 20 local food vendors plan to attend, making it delicious as well as thrilling, maddening, intoxicating, claustrophobic, and, for the yet-to-be-published, quietly devastating.
By Michael Leaverton
reprinted from SF Weekly

Amy Tan Tribute/Roast October 14

Litquake’s third annual Barbary Coast Award for contribution to the Bay Area literary community is presented to Amy Tan, international bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and member of the all-author band Rock Bottom Remainders. Join us for this highly entertaining tribute-roast with special guests Rabih Alameddine, Sam Barry, mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, Ben Fong-Torres, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Andrew Sean Greer, Michael Krasny, Armistead Maupin, Roger McGuinn, Elaine Petrocelli and of course, Amy Tan. Music by Los Train Wreck. Book sales and signing to follow.
Wednesday, October 14, 8 pm
Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street, San Francisco
(415) 392-4400
Admission: $25 general, $75 includes post-event reception
Tickets available at City Box Office.

Here's a quote we love from a 2005 interview with Amy in the Guardian.

"I accept that probably for the rest of my life I will be identified with The Joy Luck Club -- I will always be introduced as the author of the Joy Luck Club. On my tombstone -- if I wanted a tombstone, which I don't -- it would say 'Author of The Joy Luck Club.' That's fine. I hope that I continue to write my best book with each book that I write. I am very lucky that that happened to me."

James Ellroy, author of Blood's a Rover

Thursday, October 15
7:30 p.m.
Admission:  Free
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow—ex-cop and heroin runner—is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay “a dear and savage price to live History.”

Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it—our recent past razed and fully reconstructed—Blood’s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.
“Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995’s American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision…It’s impossible not to read Blood’s A Rover with a sense of awe…It’s a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters.”
–Publishers Weekly
Books Inc. in the Castro
2275 Market Street, San Francisco
(415) 864-6777

Subterranean SF: Hard-Boiled Writing with an Edge

An evening of readings exposing San Francisco’s sinister underbelly. Join a darkly inspired roster of literary and crime fiction masters as they delve into the shadowy realms of mayhem, murder, and much more.

Hosted by San Francisco Noir 1 & 2 editor Peter Maravelis. With Robert Mailer Anderson, Cara Black, Craig Clevenger, David Corbett, Don Herron, Peter Plate, Dominic Stansberry. Start time 7 pm.

This event is admission by invite only. Invites are free, but available only at the front counter at City Lights Bookstore. They are available on a first come, first serve basis. Limited seating.

Call in advance to check on availability before dropping in. 415-362-8193. When approaching the desk clerk, ask for the "black envelope."

Litquake Schedule: Friday, Oct. 9

Litquake and Kepler's whet your literary appetite with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, live and in person at the Kepler’s store in Menlo Park. The festival then launches with Black, White, and Read: Litquake’s Book Ball at the Herbst Theatre, our only-in-SF mashup of recession elegance, literary hijinks and smarty-pants schmooze!



6:30 pm: Berkeley Breathed, author of Flawed Dogs: The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster
8 pm: Black, White, and Read: Litquake’s Book Ball



6:30 pm
Berkeley Breathed, author of Flawed Dogs: The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster
Litquake and Kepler's co-present Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, and the release of his first illustrated novel.
Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park; (650) 324-4321 Admission: free
8 pm
Black, White, and Read: Litquake’s Book Ball
Litquake kicks off its ten-year anniversary with our first-ever opening night Book Ball, a mashup of Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White ball and a list of only-in-SF ingredients: recession elegance, literary hijinks and smarty-pants schmooze. Mingle with authors, extend your pinky with a cocktail or down our limited edition Litquake beer, all while enjoying arias from Bay Area Bach, grooving with the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars Combo and taking in a world premiere performance of an original musical tribute to Litquake. DJ dancing to follow. Note our tenth anniversary rollback ticket pricing! Attire: Fabulous and mysterious* * Optional cloaking device: party masks of famous authors will be available at the door -- or be who you want to be and concoct one of your own!
Green Room (above Herbst Theatre), 401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister Street, San Francisco; (415) 392-4400 Admission: $19.99 includes one drink & nibbles; available at brownpapertickets.com