Events
« February 02, 2010 - March 04, 2010 »
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02 / 2
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is delighted to welcome the venerable scholar Willis Barnstone back to the store in celebration of the publication of The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas, newly translated from the Greek and informed by Semitic sources.
Willis Barnstone is an American poet, memoirist, translator, Hispanist, and comparatist. He has translated the Ancient Greek poets and the complete fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος). He is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.
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02 / 3
Start: 5:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood hosts Diane Leslie's Book Group with Author on Wednesday, February 3 at 5pm. This month the group meets to discuss Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain.
And the best part? Garth Stein will be on hand for the discussion!
There is a $20 fee for this event.
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood is delighted to welcome Garth Stein to the store to discuss and sign The Art of Racing in the Rain, on Wednesday, February 3rd, at 7pm.
Garth Stein is the author of three novels: The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper, 2008); How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets (Soho Press, 2005), which won a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, and was a Book Sense Pick in both hardcover and paperback; and Raven Stole the Moon (Pocket, 1998). He has also written a full-length play, Brother Jones, which received its first production in Los Angeles, in February, 2005, and was described as "brimming with intensity," by the L.A. Weekly.
After receiving his B.A. from Columbia College (1987), and his M.F.A. in film from Columbia University, School of the Arts (1990), Garth worked as a documentary film maker for several years, and directed, produced or co-produced several award winning films.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Seattle, Garth's ancestry is diverse: his mother, a native of Alaska, is of Tlingit Indian and Irish descent; his father, a Brooklyn native, is the child of Jewish emigrants from Austria. After spending his childhood in Seattle and then living in New York City for 18 years, Garth returned to Seattle, where he currently lives with his family and his dog, Comet.
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02 / 4
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02 / 5
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02 / 6
Start: 3:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to welcome store favorite Amy Bloom to discuss and sign her new book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, an astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories that illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship
on Saturday, February 6th, at 3pm.
Amy Bloom is the author of Away, chosen as one of the best books of 2007 by more than ten newspapers, a #1 LA Times bestseller and a #3 New York Times bestseller, with over 300,000 copies in print. She is also author of the acclaimed story collection Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; a novel, Love Invents Us, and a nonfiction work, Normal. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom teaches creative writing at Yale University .
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02 / 7
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02 / 8
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02 / 9
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts Book Group #3 as they meet to discuss Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge on Tuesday, February 9 at 7pm.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel offers profound insights into the human condition - its conflicts, tragedies, and joys. Strout constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion.
This event is free and all are welcome and encouraged to attend!
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02 / 10
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02 / 11
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02 / 12
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02 / 13
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02 / 14
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02 / 15
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02 / 16
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to welcome co-founder of Babeland and author Rachel Venning to the store to discuss and sign her new book, Moregasm: Babeland's Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex, on Tuesday, February 16 @ 7pm.
Rachel Venning and Claire Cavanah founded Toys in Babeland in 1993 in response to the lack of women-friendly sex shops in Seattle. Committed to offering information and encouragement to women who wanted to explore their sexuality, the owners focused on selling quality sex toys in a boutique-like setting. In 2005 Toys in Babeland officially shortened its name to "Babeland" and modernized its look. Says co-founder Venning, “Toys in Babeland had become much more than just a place to buy sex toys, so we decided to present Babeland as a destination, a lifestyle, a state of mind — all celebrating the simple truth that sexually healthy people make the world a happier place.”
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02 / 17
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02 / 18
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is very excited to welcome Greil Marcus to the store on Thursday, Feb. 18 at 7pm to discuss and sign A New Literary History of America which, in more than two hundred original essays, brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means.
Also contributing to the discussion will be Gary Kamiya and Richard Candida Smith.
For more information, please check out the excellent website for the book.
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02 / 19
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02 / 20
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02 / 21
Start: 3:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood is excited to welcome James McVay to the store to discuss and sign The Right Brain Guitar Method on Sunday, February 21st, at 3pm.
James McVay is an award winning composer and songwriter who has spent the last 20 years in Los Angeles scoring movies and television shows. A guitarist and multi-instrumentalist since the age of 8, James has performed and recorded with some of the country’s top musicians including Stan Getz, Doane Perry (drummer for Jethro Tull), David Schwartz, Kate Wallace, Caren Armstrong, Sid Page, Eric Rigeler, Kate Markowitz and the list goes on.
Start: 3:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to present another installment of Poetry Flash, this time with Molly Bendall, Gail Wronsky and Karen Kevorkian, on Sunday, February 21st at 3pm.
This is a reading for the exciting new collective, What Books Press.
Molly Bendall has published four books of poems, including Ariadne's Island and, her newest, Under the Quick. She's published her translations of the French Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour in many literary journals. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes and awards from both Poetry Magazine and Denver Quarterly. She'll be reading from Bling and Fringe (The L.A. Poems), that she co-authored with Gail Wronsky; Gillian Conoley says of it, "In these intensely female, lively luscious songs it's Collette meets Beyonce meets Lil Mama meets Cixous and in comes Kristeva...and therefore streams continual surprise."
Karen Kevorkian's new book is Lizard Dream; Joshua Kryah says, "Kevorkian finds the extraordinary in patterns of everyday life. . .Intimate, loving, and spare, Lizard Dream casts the familiar in brilliant luster." Her first full-length book of poems is White Stucco Black Wing. Her fiction and poetry have been widely published in literary journals and anthologized in The Land of Wandering and Line Drives. She's received fellowships from the Djerassi, Ucross, and Wurlitzer foundations and the Millay and McDowell colonies.
Gail Wronsky has published many books of poetry, including Dying for Beauty, a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Award and her newest, Poems for Infidels. She has also authored the novel The Love-Talkers and Volando Bajito, her translation of the poet Alicia Portnoy. She and Molly Bendall have also co-authored two books of 'cowgirl' poetry, as well as Bling and Fringe.
Start: 3:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Malibu is pleased to welcome local author Ed Salven to the shop on Sunday, February 21 at 3pm to discuss and sign his new book, In Search of the Illuminati, in which a secret extraterrestrial message spurs a desperate flight to safety and a surreal quest after Ezra Pound's fabled book, The Illuminati.
Ed Salven was born in Hollywood, California. He is the author of The Soldier Factory, a moving collection of episodes and meditations on being a part of the US military machine at the height of the Vietnam War. He resides in Malibu.
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02 / 22
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02 / 23
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts Book Group #1 as they meet to discuss Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust on February 23 at 7pm.
West's Locust, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, depicts the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of individuals who exist at the fringes of the movie industry.
This event is free and everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend.
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02 / 24
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02 / 25
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to present debut fiction author Zachary Mason to the shop to discuss and sign The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a brilliant and beguiling reimagining of Homer's classic story, on Thursday, February 25 at 7pm.
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He was a finalist for the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in California.
-- Check out the review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey in the New York Times.
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02 / 26
Start: 6:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood is pleased to host a Book Party for Dani Shapiro in celebration of her new memoir, Devotion, a searching and timeless new personal account of her quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world.
Dani Shapiro's most recent book's include Black & White (Knopf, 2007), Family History (Knopf, 2003) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Bookforum, Oprah, Ploughshares, among others, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and guest editor of Best New American Voices 2010.
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02 / 27
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02 / 28
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03 / 1
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03 / 2
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03 / 3
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood is excited to welcome Elif Shafak to the store to discuss and sign her newest book The Forty Rules of Love on Wednesday, March 3rd, at 7pm.
Elif Shafak (spelled Şafak in Turkish) was born in 1971 in Strasbourg, France. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Throughout her life, Shafak has lived in cities and states all over the world including Madrid, Spain; Ankara, Turkey; Cologne, Germany; Amman, Jordan; Boston, Massachusetts; Michigan; and Arizona. Through it all she has maintained a deep attachment to the city of Istanbul, which plays an important part in her fiction. As a result, a sense of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has consistently characterized both her life and her work.
Shafak has published nine books, seven of which are novels. She writes in both Turkish and English. In Turkey, her latest novel, The Forty Rules of Love, instantly became a number one bestseller after selling more than 150,000 copies in a month. The novel is a modern love story between a Jewish-American housewife and a modern Sufi living in Amsterdam. Their unusual romance is interwoven with the remarkable spiritual bond between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Sufism has always played an important role in Shafak’s writing, but it was in this book that she dealt with the subject directly.
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03 / 4
Start: 7:00 pm
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to welcome Kathleen Norris to discuss and sign, Acedia and Me, in which she demystifies a spiritual concept, exploring acedia - or soul-weariness - through the geography of her life as a writer; her marriage and the challenges of commitment in the midst of grave illness; and her keen interest in the monastic tradition on Thursday, March 4, at 7pm.
Kathleen Norris is a best-selling poet and essayist. She became known for her writings about Christian spirituality, especially after she became a Benedictine oblate and spent two extended periods at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota. Born in Washington D.C., Norris was raised in South Dakota and Honolulu, attended Bennington College in Vermont and now divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.
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