David Calonne came into City Lights Bookstore to discuss his new book Charles Bukowski (Critical Lives Series) (Reaktion Books) on December 4, 2012. 

Charles Bukowski (Critical Lives Series)

Poet, short-story writer, and novelist Charles Bukowski (1920–94) was once called by Time a “laureate of American lowlife.” In this new interpretation of his life and work, David Stephen Calonne examines the creation and originality of Bukowski’s writings through the lens of his colorful life, the literary traditions that influenced him, and his unique place in world literature.

Calonne describes how Bukowski, who was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States at the age of three, was influenced by German literary and intellectual traditions. He shows how the writer’s traumatic childhood—his abusive father, social withdrawal, and early introduction to alcohol—influenced the themes and content of his work. Calonne also explores several unknown pieces of fiction and poetry from the early years of Bukowski’s career, as well as his major works—including Post Office and the poetry volumes published by Black Sparrow Press—and biographical films such as Barfly. Comprehensive but concise, Charles Bukowski will find a wide audience in fans of this prolific, influential figure and provide a valuable introduction to his new admirers.

David Stephen Calonne is the author of William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being and Bebop Buddhist Ecstasy: Saroyan’s Influence on Kerouac and the Beats, and he has edited several Bukowski titles, including Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Vol. 2: 1946-1992, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and  Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990.

On December 5, 2012, Arthur Kroker came to City Lights Bookstore to discuss his new book, Body Drift: Butler Hayles Haraway (University of Minnesota Press).

Philosopher, cultural critic, educator, and researcher of political science, technology and culture, Arthur Kroker makes a special visit to City Lights to discuss the subject of his new book.

Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway

published by University of Minnesota Press

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture through their writings. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species.
According to Arthur Kroker, the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented.
Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, Kroker reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.

A special presentation will be given about Drone technologies, in addition to the discussion about the new book.

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory and professor of political science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx. With Marilouise Kroker, he edits the acclaimed online scholarly review CTheory.net.

Daniel Grandbois came into City Lights Bookstore on Wednesday, November 14, 2012, to read from his new collection Unlucky Lucky Tales, illustrated by Fidel Scalvo and foreward by Ed Ochester (Texas Tech University Press).

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, Daniel Grandbois's present-day fables call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales, and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, flash-fictionists, absurdists, surrealists, and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham.

Like Zen koans, these stories playfully short-circuit the brain to bypass normal thought and open the mind to undiscovered worlds of perception. As the human organism responds inexplicably to music, to particular combination of notes of varying pitches and durations and the intervals of silence between them, so too it responds in profound yet ultimately incomprehensible ways to the absurd, twisted language of Grandbois' poetic prose.

Daniel Grandbois is a writer and musician. His books include Unlucky Lucky Days and The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, illustrated by Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya. His writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Fiction, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Web Conjunctions. He plays the bass for the rocking Denver bands Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Munly, and Tarantella.

what has been said about Daniel Grandbois work:

"Daniel Grandbois is the love child of Rod Serling, HP Lovecraft, and Russell Edson... Kiss conventional reality goodbye and prepare to have your brain rearranged, to enter a realm in which scintillating, nonstop invention is god."
-- Amy Gerstler

"One is tempted to look for precedents to his odd surrealism and verbal pranks, but it's clear Grandbois has staked out his own territory, one peopled with offbeat characters and varied discourses... The wise fool, an old conceit of literature, resurfaces, and he is of course Grandbois himself."
-- Peter Johnson

On December 11, 2012, at City Lights Bookstore, City Lights Publishers and Eleven Eleven:  Journal of Literature and Art at California College of the Arts warmly welcomed Aron Aji, who discussed his latest work of translation, A Long Day’s Evening (City Lights Books) by the great Turkish experimental modernist Bilge Karasu. 

When Leo III, Emperor of Byzantium outlaws all religious paintings and icons, Constantinople is thrown into crisis. A palace official overseeing the destruction of an image of Christ is murdered by a band of irate women, and an atmosphere of danger grips the city’s monasteries, strongholds of icon veneration. Living amidst unacknowledged stirrings of resistance, watching for cues from the other monks, Andronikos is deeply confused about his own beliefs, and fears the consequences of exposing himself. One night he decides to escape, leaving behind his beloved Ioakim, who must confront his own crisis of faith and choose where to place his allegiance. Against a backdrop of religious and political upheaval, the two experience their love as the absence that each becomes for the other. In language that builds to an operatic intensity, the dualities of dogma and faith, custom and law, truth and lies, individual and society, East and West, Byzantium and Rome, are embodied in a story of prohibited love and devotion to the Unseen.

“From 8th century Constantinople to Istanbul in 1960, Karasu’s words travel the temporal distance like a flock of storks, flying to a horizon where history intersects with faith, religious and political, and where memory looks and finds meaning. Only a master can choreograph such a difficult journey . . . and Karasu is one. This is a fascinating novel and a pleasure to read.” — Sinan Antoon, author of I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

“It might seem odd to find such crafted postmodernist writing coming out of Turkey. [Karasu] is a rare find indeed. Fascinating … an illuminating transitional work between the work of Turkey’s romantic realist Yashar Kemal and contemporary postmodernist Orhan Pamuk. More please.” — Kirkus Reviews

“One of Turkey’s most interesting modern writers.” — Booklist

Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) was born in Istanbul. Often referred to as “the sage of Turkish literature,” during his lifetime he published collections of stories, novels, and two books of essays.

A History of the Present Illness takes readers into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today. An elderly Chinese immigrant sacrifices his demented wife’s well-being to his son’s authority. A busy Latina physician’s eldest daughter’s need for more attention has disastrous consequences. A young veteran’s injuries become a metaphor for the rest of his life. A gay doctor learns very different lessons about family from his life and his work, and a psychiatrist who advocates for the underserved may herself be crazy. Together, these honest and compassionate stories introduce a striking new literary voice and provide a view of what it means to be a doctor and a patient unlike anything we’ve read before.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson’s writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

Louise Aronson has an MFA in fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and an MD from Harvard Medical School. She has won the Sonora Review prize, the New Millennium short fiction award and has received three Pushcart nominations. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California where she cares for diverse, frail older patients and directs the Pathways to Discovery Program, the Northern California Geriatrics Education Center and UCSF Medical Humanities. She lives in San Francisco.

Tony Serra came to City Lights Bookstore the evening of September 26th, 2012, and spoke of his new book, Walking the Circle: Prison Chronicles (Grizzly Peak Press).

Walking the Circle: Prison Chronicles

from Grizzly Peak Press

Tony Serra is the epitome of counter-cultural hero. He has spent his life defending society’s marginalized citizens in the courtroom. His role in the Chol Soo Lee case was depicted in the film True Believer and he has gained national prominence for his closing argument techniques. Mr. Serra has consulted with hundreds of professional organizations on various legal issues in multiple forums in 14 different states. He is a life-long tax resister who has spent time in federal prison in protest of what he perceives to be an unjust political and legal system. His recent stay in Lompoc Federal Prison Camp yielded the release of this new book that sheds light on the conditions prevalent in the prison system. Not one to be content with fighting for a more civil and just society only in the court-room, Tony Serra has taken the fight to the front-lines. His examination and criticism of the prison system complex adds to the ongoing dialog for prison reform.

J. Tony Serra has been a practsing criminal defense attorney for over 45 years. He has represented: Heuy Newton and the Black Panthers, The White Panthers, The Hell’s Angels, Chol Soo Lee, Hooty Croy, Brownie Mary, Bear Lincoln, and many others. He is the reciepient of numerous award that include: ACLU Benjamin Dreyfus Civil Liberties Award, Gideon Equal Justice Award from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, Lawyer of the Year from the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, as well as numerous others.

What has been said about Walking the Circle: Prison Chronicles:

“A life filled with passion, trouble, and general shit-kicking may be the best life to have, but probably only if you are Tony Serra, wily defense lawyer, generous supporter of perilous causes, devoted custodian of just about everyone except himself. Recently, he continued his mission of disruptive merry-making while ioncarcerated fora little matter of federal taxes he decided not to offer a federal government he considers hostile to the poor, immigrants, Native Americans, and folks who enjoy a bit of inner transportaion by means of forbidden substances. In the matter of Tony Serra vs. the System, the conflict has gone on for more than forty years.” -Herb Gold

“Tony Serra’s Walking the Circle: Prison Chronicles, is a wonder, as is the author. Not since Clarence Darrow has a trial lawyer attracted such envious attention in court, Nt since Byron has there been a more poetic, passionate defender of liberty. Tony’s book almost akes you want to spend time in jail.” -John Keker, Esq.

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan: a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam.

Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style, and focusing on key events and personalities, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.

Tamim Ansary is the author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes and West of Kabul, East of New York, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco, where he is director of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.