As the publishing industry picks up the pace after the summer doldrums, the NBCC will be continuing its conversation about criticism and books this fall in three cities. Mark your calendars for four NBCC-sponsored events coming in September and October.
Breaking Into Book Reviews and Features
Park Slope Barnes & Noble, 267 7th Avenue (at 6th Street)
Wednesday, September 19, 7 p.m.
In conjunction with the Brooklyn Book Festival. Panelists include NBCC board member Michael Miller (Bookforum), David Propson (Wall Street Journal), NBCC board member John Reed (Brooklyn Rail), Parul Sehgal, (New York Times Book Review), Rob Spillman (Tin House), and Monica de la Torre (Bomb). Moderated by author and NBCC board member Susan Shapiro. Ten percent of book sales go to PEN's Emergency Writer's Fund.
West Coast Publishing: A Panel and Discussion with West Coast Presses
City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
Thursday, September 20, 7:00 p.m.
Moderated by Kate Gale (Red Hen Press, LA), with Stacey Lewis (City Lights, San Francisco), Ethan Nosowsky (McSweeney's, San Francisco), 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 more than 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 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.
City Lights would like to thank Tess Taylor and Oscar Vilallon for their hard work in making this evening a reality.
On Literary and Genre Fiction
Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Sunday, September 30, 1:30-3 p.m.
The National Book Critics Circle hosts a discussion of literary fiction and genre fiction. What’s the difference? What’s the divide? Where’s the overlap? Weighing in on these topics are critically acclaimed novelist Julianna Baggott, whose latest novel, Pure, ventures into the realm of post-apocalyptic horror; Louis Bayard, whose literary mysteries include, most recently, The School of Night; Alma Katsu, author of The Taker and The Reckoning; and journalist and critic Laura Miller, author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. Visit the Fall for the Book website for more information about the festival.
West Coast Reviewing: A Panel and Discussion With West Coast Reviewers
City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
Tuesday, October 9th, 7:00 p.m.
Sponsored by the NBCC in conjunction with City Lights and Litquake. Moderated by John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle, with Julie Cline of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Isaac Fitzgerald of the Rumpus, Dean Rader, columnist for San Francisco Magazine and Huffington Post, and Daniel Levin Becker of the Believer.
Three decades ago, most book reviewing was done by local reviewers writing for local papers who picked books of national interest, but also books that spoke to the places they lived. As newspapers have shrunk or collapsed and online reviews have grown, how has book reviewing changed? Four west coast reviewers from both print and online venues discuss their experiences supporting literary culture today.
John McMurtrie is book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Hiswriting has appeared in the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Boston Globe.
Julie Cline is Senior Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. A California native, she lives in LA's Echo Park.
Isaac Fitzgerald has written for The Bold Italic, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the managing editor of the Rumpus.
Dean Rader's Works & Days won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, and he appears in the 2012 Best American Poetry. He writes and reviews regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Huffington Post.
Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor of the Believer. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, was published by Harvard University Press in April 2012.