Nam, Tammy

Tammy Nam heads content and marketing at Scribd, where she observes reading behavior trends. She believes that social publishing presents a huge opportunity for authors.

Kinsella, Bridget

Bridget Kinsella is marketing and publicity manager at Cleis Press and Viva Editions. She has reported for Publishers Weekly and Shelf Awareness, and is the author of Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside.

James, Scott

Scott James is a columnist for The New York Times and The Bay Citizen. He writes fiction under the pen name Kemble Scott and is the author of two bestselling novels, SoMa and The Sower.

Eberhardt, April

April Eberhardt is a literary agent with Reece Halsey North, specializing in adult literary and commercial fiction, particularly ironic family dramas and realistic midlife tales. For five years she worked at literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story.

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."

Chin, Justin

Justin Chin is the author of three books of poetry and three books of essays. His most recent poetry collection, Gutted (Manic D Press), received the Publishing Triangle's 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry.

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