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!

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to present local authors Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson as they discuss and sign How to Defeat Your Own Clone on Sunday, March 7 at 3pm.

CAN IT READ MY MIND? WILL IT BE EVIL? HOW DO I STOP IT?

Find out the answers to these and other burning questions in this funny, informative, and ingenious book from two bioengineering experts who show you how to survive—and thrive—in a new age of truly weird science.

Kyle Kurpinski received a Master's degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in bioengineering in the joint graduate group between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. He is the lead product development engineer at Nanonerve, Inc.

Terry D. Johnson received his Master's in Chemical Engineering from MIT and is currently a lecturer in the Bioengineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts Book Group #3 as they meet to discuss Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family, on Tuesday, March 9 at 7pm.

This event is free and all are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland is pleased to welcome Mary Gaitskill to discuss and sign her new collection of stories, Don't Cry, her first in more than ten years, on Wednesday, March 10th, at 7pm.

In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier’s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls.

Mary Gaitskill's stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York.