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Category Archives: Books
Berkeley settles contentious library lawsuit
The city of Berkeley has reached an agreement with Concerned Library Users over a lawsuit the group filed to stop the demolition and rebuilding of the South and West branches of the Berkeley Public Library.
In a closed session on Tuesday evening, the city council voted to settle the lawsuit by creating a $100,000 fund to provide grants to preserve historic buildings in the city’s south and west neighborhoods, according to Zach Cowan, the City attorney. The city also agreed … Continue reading »
Building a modern epigrammatic tradition
If you’re of a literary turn of mind, when you think of the epigram, you may think of Martial, or perhaps a more modern wit like Oscar Wilde. But the tradition of concise, meaningful verbal twists is being partly sustained by Berkeley author Thomas Farber, whose most volume of “the epigrammatic”, Forgone Conclusions: Equivoques, Aperçus, Spars & Cattarhs, has recently been published by Berkeley’s Andrea Young Arts.
“I wanted to try to write intensely in a very compressed … Continue reading »
Tagged Thomas Farber
Meet Dorothy Hearst and the wolves who inspire her
Wolves have not run wild in California for more than 75 years, but that hasn’t prevented Berkeley author Dorothy Hearst from imagining a world populated by them. In her first book, Promise of the Wolves, and in her just-released sequel, Secrets of the Wolves, both set 14,000 years ago, Hearst weaves a tale about Kaalaa, a young wolf who tries to end the divide between humans and her kind.
To celebrate the release of the second book … Continue reading »
Richard Misrach: A focus on the after-story
Richard Misrach is nothing if not patient.
When, in 1997, the renowned photographer moved into a home in the Berkeley hills and decided to capture his new view of the Golden Gate Bridge, he didn’t just take a few dozen shots and leave it at that.
Rather, over the course of three years, he shot hundreds and hundreds of photographs. The result was Golden Gate [Aperture, 2005], 85 beautiful meditations on the iconic bridge seen through the seasons from a single … Continue reading »
Book revisits childhood in post-60s, buzz-kill Berkeley
When Edie Meidav was growing up, she lived on the south side of Berkeley while most of her close friends lived on the north side. Trekking across the top of the UC Berkeley campus, whether by car, bike, or foot, was a routine occurrence.
Meidav now lives in Rhinebeck, New York and teaches writing at Bard College. But she was back in Berkeley this week, tramping over familiar ground, including that route between the south and north sides of town. Meidav was here to visit her mother and to promote her third book, Lola, California.
Heralded by a reviewer in the Daily Beast as a “gorgeous, audacious novel,” Lola, California tells the story of two Berkeley girls who are so close, and whose lives are so entangled, that they create their own kind of geography. One is Rose, a foster child adopted by a liberal, single mother, and the other is Lana, the daughter of a charismatic guru-like professor with a following, who, as the novel opens, is sitting on Death Row. … Continue reading »
Tagged California, Edie Meidav, Lola, Stan Stroh
Book details secret staircases of Berkeley and Oakland
Staircases saved Charles Fleming’s back.
In 2006, as he faced his third invasive spinal surgery, Fleming decided to walk. A longtime Los Angeles resident with a slew of best-selling books to his name, Fleming had his wife drive him down from their hilltop home in the Silver Lake district to the flats. He got out and took a few steps, which led to a few more, which led him to start walking up and down the public staircases that meander through that city’s hills. Soon the pain was gone and Fleming was a walking convert.
The excursions led to Fleming’s next bestseller, a book on the secret stairs of Los Angeles. It proved so popular that he decided to write a sequel, this time about the secret stairs of the East Bay. … Continue reading »
Berkeley poet draws on life and locale for inspiration
For a period of about three years, Lindy Hough spent an inordinate amount of time at Saul’s Restaurant on Shattuck Avenue.
On many Thursdays, she arrived around 5 pm, shortly after her duties as the co-publisher of North Atlantic Books ended for the day. She sat at a table, eating and observing, until 7:30 pm, when Play Café, a group of professional playwrights, got together.
But the time Hough spent at the deli was not idle. It was a chance for her to examine those around her and wonder about their lives. The musings ended up as “Thursday Night at Saul’s,” one of the new poems in Wild Horses, Wild Dreams, which was released this spring as part of North Atlantic Books’ Io Poetry series.
Wild Horses, Wild Dreams is a retrospective of Hough’s 40 years as a poet and draws on works from her previous four poetry books as well as introducing 28 new poems. The book showcases Hough’s evolution from a young mother in her early 20s to an accomplished figure in the publishing industry, one who has contemplated rural life, the dynamics of a college town, dreams, dance, and religion in its many forms, including Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism.
“I view the collection as very memoir-like, moving from place to place, from Vermont to California, coming of age as a writer and a thinker,” Hough said recently from her summer home on a small island in Maine. “That’s what this book is about.” … Continue reading »
Poetic inspiration in a Berkeley coffee shop
Karin Evans is a Berkeley writer and the author of The Grace to Race, the story of Sister Madonna Buder, the 80-year-old world champion triathlete, and The Lost Daughters of China.
While working towards a MFA in poetry, Evans spent a lot of time writing in different venues in Berkeley. Here are two poems she wrote while writing at The Beanery, the coffee shop on College Avenue near Ashby.
Grounds
Quiet cafe with its whispering people
… Continue reading »
Berkeley poets take to the stage Saturday at festival
This year, the Berkeley Poetry Festival, which takes place Saturday at Berkeley City College, will fuse words and art. Poets will read from their work and local artists will display their digital images around the festival.
“It’s going to be a rainbow cornucopia of images and words,” said Louis Cuneo, a haiku poet and a co-founder (with city councilmember Kriss Worthington) of the festival “This isn’t just a poetry festival. It’s a festival of the muses – the creative muse, the poetry muse.”
On Saturday, the festival will present the Lifetime Achievement Award to Adam David Miller, the 88-year old Berkeley poet who has published five books of poetry and an acclaimed memoir, Ticket to Exile.
Is the web skewing our world view? An author says yes
Eli Pariser calls himself an “online organizer and disorganizer,” and, as the former executive director of Berkeley’s MoveOn.org and founder of Avaaz.org, he’s had plenty of chances to use the web to encourage social change.
All that experience reaching out through the Internet led Pariser to start scrutinizing how we get our information.
He didn’t like what he saw.
As websites like Google and Facebook glean our personal likes and dislikes by analyzing our click-throughs, they have started to individualize search results according to our interests. That “filter bubble,” according to Pariser, means we are all getting a biased view of the world. Our attitudes are being reinforced by this “unique personalization.” … Continue reading »
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