Litquake's Lit Cast

Towards the end of 2019, we attended one of the many incredible readings held at Oakland-based Wolfman Books. To celebrate  Trebor Healey’s new collection, Falling, we packed in to Wolfman’s 40th street storefront to hear stories that confronted populism, immigration, and queer identity. Supported by intimate tales from Alvin Orloff’s memoir, Disasterama: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977-1997, and new work from Oakland-based choreographer and poet Brontez Purnell, the night was filled with touching memories, bold questions, and a lot of laughs.

Who doesn't love a glimpse behind the facades of troubled Silicon Valley giants? In the tradition of Brad Stone’s Everything Store and John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber delivers a gripping account of Uber’s rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. Roger McNamee's Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe is the story of a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who woke up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society and set out to try to stop it. Moderated by The New Yorker's Anna Wiener. 

Eureka! We did it! From this year’s 20th Litquake festival, we present some of our favorite Bay Area authors reading from THEIR favorite Californian wordsmiths live at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Listen to this festival kick off with a raucous night of readings by Charlie Jane Anders, Natalie Baszile, Elaine Castillo, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Handler, Adam Johnson, Chang-rae Lee, Beth Lisick, Ishmael Reed, and Tobias Wolff, presenting from the works of writers who inspired them -- from Dashiell Hammett to Daniel Alarcón. Hosted by Isaac Fitzgerald, with live music from the Patrick Wolff Quartet and a special appearance by Karl the Fog. It’s a literary overload you don’t want to skip.

In this very special episode of Lit Cast, we're proud to feature the only recording Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his original work "Lit.quake?" - plus a few more - at Litquake 2002.     Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

From the Litquake archives! During our 2018 festival, National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner joined Litquake for an evening on her New York Times bestselling novel The Mars Room. This novel tells the story of Romy Hall, who’s at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, Kushner’s fiction “succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.” This event features Kushner in conversation with San Francisco Chronicle culture columnist Caille Millner, complemented by appearances from the Voice of Witness collection Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary editor Mateo Hoke and contributor Mohammed Ali. Recorded live at the Make Out Room on Thursday, October 18, 2018. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

Litquake’s proud to present a special episode of Lit Cast Live featuring one of our own, Julia Flynn Siler, in conversation on her newest book The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In a narrative hailed as “eye-opening” by Kirkus Reviews, Siler tells the story of both the abolitionists who challenged the corrosive anti-Chinese prejudices of the time and the young women who dared to flee their fate. She relates how the women who ran the Cameron House defied contemporary convention by physically rescuing children from the brothels where they worked or by snatching them off ships as they were being smuggled in–and how they helped bring the exploiters to justice. This event was recorded live at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 12.  Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

One of Esquire, The Rumpus, The Millions, Literary Hub and Electric Literature's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel The Unpassing explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. Lit Cast is proud to feature Chia-Chia as she reads an excerpt from her novel and goes deep into her writing process, influences, and more with her former Iowa MFA classmate Jamel Brinkley. This episode was recorded live at Green Apple Books on the Park on May 30, 2019. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

Following the success of his T.S. Elliot-prizewinning poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was heralded as one of the most hotly anticipated books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, the LA Times, The Guardian, and many more. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, written as a letter from a son to his mother, is both a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity and a testament to the power of agency over one’s own story. This episode of Lit Cast features Vuong in conversation with San Francisco literary legend Rebecca Solnit, recorded live at Green Apple Books on the Park on June 18, 2019.  Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

From the Litquake archive! In this recording from our 2018 festival, the Bay Area’s long-running Porchlight storytelling series returns with "advice"-themed tales from Steve Almond, Dickson Lam, Sands Hall, Sisonke Msimang, Maggie Rowe, and Betty Charbonnet Reid Soskin, the nation's oldest park ranger. This event was co-hosted by Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick, and recorded live at the Swedish American Hall on October 15, 2018. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!  

MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow Karen Russell’s new short story collection, Orange World, was declared “hilarious, exquisite, first-rate” by The New York Times Book Review and “one of the most innovative, inspired short-story collections of the past decade” by NPR. Lit Cast Live proudly features Russell in conversation with Zoetrope editor Michael Ray at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco on May 21, 2019. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!    

Back in April, Litquake celebrated National Poetry Month by hosting a group of esteemed poets at one of San Francisco’s famous landmarks. This event was hosted by D.A. Powell, whose honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and featured incredible poets like Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States and winner of a Pulitzer prize; Brenda Hillman, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; Henri Cole, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Barbara Jane Reyes; Paola Capo-Garcia; and Marcello Hernandez Castillo. Our newest Lit Cast Episode features readings from these fantastic poets on a very special occasion that brought the power of poetry into the historic walls of Grace Cathedral. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter! This event was recorded live at Grace Cathedral on April 13th, 2019.

Award-winning poet Franny Choi recently passed through San Francisco on tour for her second collection, Soft Science, which uses the myth of the cyborg to explore queer, Asian American femininity through a series of Turing test-inspired poems. Our newest Lit Cast episode features Choi joining local poet (and frequent Litquake collaborator!) sam sax for an electrifying evening of readings from Soft Science and sax’s recent collection Bury It - plus a few brand-new, heretofore unpublished gems.   This episode was recorded live at The Bindery on April 25, 2019.

Litquake and The Bindery present Evan James reading from his debut novel, Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe. In a return of a not-so-prodigal son, author Evan James comes to San Francisco on book tour for his comedy of manners debut novel that tells the story of a family summer on Puget Sound. Conjuring a Wes Anderson-meets-John Updike vibe, it tells a tale filled with tennis, a personal assistant in search of romance, a preppy screenwriter with a penchant for pills, a landscape gardener named Marvelous Matthews, and a bewitching self-help author, all attempting to find that elusive something that will, as Marie Kondo says, “spark their joy.” Recorded live at The Bindery.  Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

Back in March, Mitchell S. Jackson came to San Francisco on tour for his latest book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. With a poet’s gifted ear, a novelist’s sense of narrative, and a journalist’s unsentimental eye, Mitchell S. Jackson candidly explores his tumultuous youth in the other America. Survival Math takes its name from the calculations Mitchell and his family made to keep safe—to stay alive—in their community, a small black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon blighted by drugs, violence, poverty, and governmental neglect. This event was recorded live at The Bindery on March 12, 2019. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

To celebrate our 100th(!) episode, we've got an extra-special recording from Litquake’s 2018 festival: an evening of freewheeling conversation between San Francisco literary legends Amy Tan and Armistead Maupin. Bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, Amy Tan’s most recent novel is Where the Past Begins; Armistead Maupin, whose series Tales of the City helped change our cultural conversation about being gay in America, has just released the paperback edition of Logical Family. This event was recorded live at the Swedish American Hall on October 19, 2018. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!    

Fantasy and science fiction stories have long embraced the darker themes of a dystopian future. Do these narratives speak to our fears of what the future will bring, or do they reflect the current reality in which the authors live and write? Is futuristic fiction pure escapism, or can it alter our destiny? In this episode of Lit Cast Live, Bay Area authors Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky; The City in the Middle of the Night), and Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife) explore these questions and more in a discussion moderated by Nilgun Bayraktar, a writer and professor at California College of the Arts. This Litquake event was recorded live at the San Francisco Public Library during their Night of Ideas on February 2, 2019. Note - due to technical issues at the time of recording, the audio for some parts of this this episode may appear slightly distorted. Lit Cast greatly appreciates our listeners understanding. 

A rising star in today’s Nigerian novel boom, the trans and non-binary Akwaeke Emezi has brought us Freshwater, an autobiographical debut written with stylistic brilliance, exploring the metaphysics of identity and being, plunging the reader into the mysteries of self. Emezi was named one of the National Book Foundation's '5 under 35' for 2018 and Freshwater was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. In convo with Whiting Award-winning novelist Esmé Weijun Wang. Recorded live at the Museum of African Diaspora during Litquake Festival 2018. Sponsored by California College of the Arts.

Back in the summer, author Melissa Broder dropped into The Bindery to read and discuss her hilarious debut novel, The Pisces, and we were there to capture it. “A modern-day mythology for women on the verge,” according to the New York Times, The Pisces is the absrud and erotic recounting of one woman’s star-crossed relationship with a folkloric beau. Broder is the author of the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She writes the "So Sad Today" column at Vice, the astrology column for Lenny Letter, and the "Beauty and Death" column on Elle.com. In conversation with The Millions editor and The Golden State novelist, Lydia Kiesling. Recorded live at The Bindery.

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Elaine Castillo and her debut novel, "America Is Not The Heart". In illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States, Castillo delivers an incisive and powerful story about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past. This appearance was recorded live at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco. Sponsored by California College of the Arts. ww.facebook.com/litquake  https://twitter.com/Litquake

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Sloane Crosley, New York Times–bestselling author of "Look Alive Out There"―a brand-new collection of essays filled with her trademark hilarity, wit, and charm. The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. In conversation with Daniel Mallory Ortberg. This appearance was recorded live at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco.  ww.facebook.com/litquake  https://twitter.com/Litquake