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Book Events Alumni Presenters |
For those of you who wish to learn more about some of our former Book Event presenters, here is a list of the writers, illustrators and other literary illuminaries who have appeared at a Gallery Bookshop Book Event in 2008. Links to the Book Events guest speakers' websites will open in a separate window, so you may easily return to the Gallery Bookshop website. |
Molly Dwyer Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein
Sunday, July 20, 6 - 9 pm
Local author Molly Dwyer spoke about her new novel, Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, winner of the 2008 Next Generation Independent Book Award for Historical Fiction.
New York Times bestseller author John Lescroart says, "Reading this ambitious and excellent first novel is like taking an extended and enjoyable vacation in Great Britain with a really smart best friend."
Orders/Information:
Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein
Paperback, Lost Coast Press, $19.95 ISBN 9781882897933
Nesta Rovina Tree Barking
Sunday, July 13, 3 pm
Bay Area author Nesta Rovina talked about her new memoir, Tree Barking.
Tree Barking is an insightful and engaging memoir that weaves the author's personal story with her remarkable experiences as a home health care worker. It's compelling reading for anyone interested in the state of the health care industry today. Wine and nibbles were served.
Orders/Information:
Tree Barking
Paperback, Heydey Books, $14.95 ISBN 9781597140812
Meredith Norton Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting
Wednesday, July 9, 6 - 9 pm
Gallery Bookshop hosted another Women's Book Night when author Meredith Norton talked about her memoir, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting.
A portion of sales from the evening was donated to the Mendocino Cancer Resource Center.
Women's Book Night is a free after-hours series that brings reading women together in a convivial atmosphere with compelling speakers and enticing extras. The July 9th event featured free chair massage and chocolates from Papa Bear's Chocolate Haus.
Orders/Information:
Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting
Hardcover, Penguin, $24.95 ISBN 9780670019281
Bruce Patterson Walking Tractor & Other Country Tales
Wednesday, July 2, 6:30 pm
Local author and character Bruce Patterson talked about the new edition of Walking Tractor and Other Country Tales.
Set in northern California's Anderson Valley, these personal essays tell of Patterson's love of rural living and his experiences working as a logger, fleece stomper, weed whacker, and in other seasonal and physically demanding jobs. Patterson's tales of tough work and end-of-the-day carousing are insightful, honest, touching and, best of all, a hoot.
Patterson was a civil rights worker in the 1960s and, along with Ron Kovic, founded the Los Angeles chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. For twenty years he was a columnist for the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Walking Tractor was originally self published and then picked up by Heyday Books, publisher of high quality and accessible books on California history, literary anthologies, natural history, California Indians, and regional guides.
For more information about Bruce Patterson's new book, visit http://www.4mules.com/.
Orders/Information:
Walking Tractor & Other Country Tales
Paperback, Heyday Books, $14.95 ISBN 9781597140829
Andrew Todhunter Writing As Spiritual Practice Seminar
Saturday & Sunday, June 28 & 29, 10 am to 5 pm
Writing As Spiritual Practice was another weekend of creativity and meditation with local author and teacher Andrew Todhunter. Sponsored by Gallery Bookshop, the program was held Saturday June 28 and Sunday June 29 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Mendocino Village.
With an emphasis on practice over theory, this two-day, twelve-hour course combined writing instruction and written exercises with non-denominational meditation techniques, breathing, stretching and other centering exercises adapted for the process of creative writing.
Andrew Todhunter is an award-winning author and teacher with more than fifteen years of experience in western and eastern meditation techniques.
Women's Book Night with Amy Stewart
Flower Confidential
Wednesday, June 11, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Amy Stewart talked about gardening, life with chickens, and her latest book, Flower Confidential. Women's Book Night is our free after-hours series that brings reading women together in a convivial atmosphere with compelling speakers and enticing extras. The June event featured wine and nibbles, an edible-flower tasting, and (yes!) free chair massage.
Flower Confidential is a globe-trotting, behind-the-scenes look at the dazzling world of flowers. Stewart follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge, stock-exchange-like Dutch flower auction. Stewart's floral romanticism -- she admits early on that she's "always had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers" -- survives the potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz. By the end, the book is as lush as the flowers it describes.
To learn more about Amy Stewart, visit her home page at http://www.amystewart.com/index.html.
Orders/Information:
Flower Confidential
Paperback, Algonquin Books, $13.95 ISBN 9781565126039
Second Annual Mom's Night Out with Author Anne Semans
Sexy Mamas:
Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising KidsWednesday, May 7, 3:00 pm
Back by popular demand: Sexy Mamas! Gallery Bookshop once again honored our community's mothers with a women-only, after-hours special event. At 6 pm the doors closed on the regular business day and reopened for wine, snacks, chocolates by Papa Bear's Chocolate Haus, book browsing, and the company of other mamas! Local massage therapists were on hand to refresh tired moms with free shoulder massage. At 6:30 pm author Anne Semans lead a discussion based on her book, Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids.
Mothers know that our sexuality doesn't disappear when children arrive; it simply gets buried under an avalanche of diapers, carpool routes, and conflicting demands. Sexy Mamas offers advice, real world stories, and practical information from doctors, therapists, and the most knowledgeable experts -- other mothers.
From the book:
Sexuality is the source of your creativity; it infuses you with love, energy, and a sense of well-being; it improves all your relationships; and makes you more human to your own children.The author's interest in accurate sex education was sparked by the nun who taught eighth grade religion class and counseled her students to "think of a hamburger when you find your thoughts straying to the impure ... it will distract you." Suspecting that God really didn't intend for us to choose between two things as wonderful as sex and food, Anne made a point of learning as much about sex as she could. She's spent the last 20 years educating herself and others about the wonders of sex, primarily through writing and working with several women-owned sex toy stores, most recently as Marketing Director at Babeland.com.
Anne believes that all people, including children, deserve information about their sexuality in order to lead more fulfilling lives, which is what inspired her to write Sexy Mamas.
Gallery Bookshop wishes to thank Babeland.com for co-sponsoring this community event. For more information contact Gallery Bookshop at 937-2665.
For more information about Anne Semans, visit http://www.anneandcathy.com/.
Orders/Information:
Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids
Paperback, New World Library, $14.95 ISBN 9781930722279
Janine Canan Goddesses, Goddesses
Sunday, May 4, 3:00 pm
Award-winning author Janine Canan presented Goddesses, Goddesses, a memoir recounting her encounters with visionary writers and poets. Among the individual whose lives touched hers are Iris Murdoch, Else Lasker-Schuler, Marija Gimbutas, James Broughton, Diane Di Prima, Alma Villanueva, Ali Akbar Khan, and Mata Amritanandamayi. Poetic snippets written by these illuminating individuals intersperse the thoughtful discussion, fond memories, and moments of epiphany.
Canan is the author of several other books, including Walk Now In Beauty: The Legend of Changing Woman, which tells the story of the Navajo Creation Goddess in poetry, exquisitely illustrated with contemporary sand paintings by artist Ernest Posey.
For more information about Janine Canan, visit her website at http://janinecanan.com.
Orders/Information:
Goddesses, Goddesses
Paperback, Regent Press, $16.00 ISBN 9781587901294
Raj Patel Stuffed & Starved:
The Hidden Battle for the World Food SystemFriday, May 2, 3:00 pm
Author Raj Patel talked about his new book, Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Naomi Klein called Stuffed & Starved "One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice."
Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese -- both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the "green deserts" of Brazil to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking -- the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope -- in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system.
Raj Patel has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he's also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them.
For more information about Stuffed and Starved, visit http://stuffedandstarved.org. For more info about the author, visit http://www.rajpatel.com/
Orders/Information:
Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Paperback, Melville House, $19.95 ISBN 9781933633497
Maureen Eppstein Quickening
Sunday, February 24, 2008, 3 pm
Special location: Mendocino Community Library, 10591 Williams Street, Mendocino, CA.
Local poet Maureen Eppstein presented her new poetry collection at a gala reading and reception.
Originally from New Zealand, Maureen Eppstein now lives in Mendocino, where she helps run the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her widely published poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received awards in many competitions, been included in a textbook on computer graphics, and used in a university-level geology course.
Cover reviews on her new books are by internationally acclaimed poets Jane Hirshfield and Eavan Boland.
Jane Hirshfield's most recent poetry collection is After. She is also author of the influential essay collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She wrote: "With a naturalist's eye for the precise and sensuous image and a writer's care for the precise and sensuous word, Maureen Eppstein plants our human griefs into this book, roots them, and invites them to quicken into new life."
Eavan Boland, a major Irish poet, is director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University and author of many poetry and essay collections, including Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. In her comments she noted that: "These eloquent poems appear at first to record detail, the ordinary, the everyday. They celebrate a swallow's nest, sand grains, even the growth of weeds. But there is a twist: these are also dark pastorals that -- in the poet's words -- review and regret "the damaged earth". Again and again, these poems return to defenseless nature, to creatures looted and evicted and to human lives hurt and interrupted. This shadowing of the relation between the poet and every kind of nature is the real theme of these fine poems. It deepens and sharpens their music."
Orders/Information:
Quickening
Paperback, March Street Press, $9.00 ISBN 9781596610798
PO Box 270
Main & Kasten Streets, Mendocino, CA 95460
707-937-BOOK (2665)
Email: Info@gallerybookshop.com
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