Welcome back to Same Page SF, your home for all things local and literary!
I’m Christina, your friendly, well-informed, and unabashedly nerdy bookseller. Nearly every Monday, I send you the author events, book clubs, and new releases happening across our city.
I’m taking this week (mostly) off: it’s been nonstop, and I’m exhausted! My husband was down for days with the flu, almost immediately followed by a brutal bout of COVID; the baby and I miraculously managed to stay healthy, but solo parenting is truly not for the weak. (On that note, there’s so much going around right now. Please be considerate: if you’re sick, stay home or mask up.)
Last week, I was busy for a much happier reason: the California Independent Booksellers Association (CALIBA) Fall Festival, a book-lover’s dream convening of authors, publishers, booksellers, and folks from every part of the literary ecosystem. In addition to remarkably educational sessions on bookstore KPIs, community engagement, and literary citizenry - seriously, I went to business school, and these presentations were some of the best I’ve ever seen - I got to discuss and delight in books with readers even more voracious than myself, coming away with a figuratively bursting TBR and a literally bursting tote full of galleys.
I love my job.
So, no standard newsletter this week, but I’ll quickly link the five events I’d planned to feature:
City Lights is hosting ZYZZVA for their issue 130 celebration (Monday 9/22, 7pm, free)
Borderlands is holding a midnight release party for Alchemized (Monday 9/22, 11:30pm, free with RSVP)
Profs & Pints is welcoming Dr. Summer Star for a talk on George Eliot and nineteenth-century science - specifically, how her work was influenced by theories of consciousness popular at the time (Thursday 9/25, 6-8:30pm, $15)
Self-taught naturalist Liam O’Brien is launching Butterflies of the Bay Area (and Slightly Beyond) at the Botanical Gardens in partnership with Green Apple Books on the Park (Saturday 9/27, 2pm, free with Garden admission or proof of San Francisco residency)
Litquake is holding its annual Small Press Book Fair in Yerba Buena Gardens - reliably one of my favorite events of the year (Sunday 9/28, 11am-4pm, free entry)
Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week! As always, thanks for reading -
Christina