Join us for the final Epicenter event of 2011, when GuyWriters community teams up with Litquake for this one-time event, Writing Down the Past: Gay Men Reveal Their Histories.

The night of poetry and prose features six authors who examine the path each gay man is on and take a look at their own private histories. Readers include poets James J. Siegel (Ghosts of Ohio, GuyWriters Director), Baruch Porras-Hernandez (co-host Queer Open Mic), and Jim Roderick; and authors Mark Abramson (Russian River Rat, Beach Reading), Vincent Meis (Eddie’s Desert Rose), and Gabriel Lampert.

This Epicenter runs 6-8pm at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St. in the Castro. Donation is suggested $5 but no one turned away for lack of funds.

GuyWriters is a community network for gay writers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and provides opportunities for members to develop new writing, access publishing resources, and meet other people in the literary world.

Litquake’s Epicenter Series pairs the folks behind San Francisco’s Literary Festival with literary journals, reading series, publishers, schools, and more at free monthly gatherings for the literary-minded. Come to drink, eat, think, and listen.

Join Litquake favorite Neal Pollack for a special evening at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as this bestselling author presents his new novel Jewball, a funny, gritty historical noir about a tough Jew on the brink, as a great American game comes into its own.

Local sports journalist and author Dan Fost will chat with Neal about Jewish culture, basketball, and why Neal decided to publish this book himself.

1937. The gears of world war have begun to grind, but Inky Lautman, star point guard for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, America’s greatest basketball team, is dealing with his own problems. His coach has unwittingly incurred a massive gambling debt to the German-American Bund. His main basketball rival is self-righteously leading public protests against the rise of homegrown American fascism. And his girlfriend wants him to join a Jewish student organization that’s all talk and no action. It’s more than Inky can deliver. He just wants to play ball and occasionally beat people up for money. The tides of history are flowing against a guy like Inky. Can he make his free throws and still make it through the season alive? This…is Jewball.

The JCCSF is located at 3200 California St., event begins at 7 pm. Tickets are $12 general public, $10 for members and students.

Neal Pollack is author of several acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling memoirs Alternadad and Stretch, the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, and the rock novel Never Mind the Pollacks. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. And he is the only author to have appeared at Litquake in San Francisco, the Lit Crawls in both New York and Austin, and our event in Los Angeles with PEN USA. We’re not sure how it happened either. Go see this show!

Joining the Lit Crawl this year is the inaugural “Book Bar”—a mobile, interactive installation on a trailer that aims to entertain and engage San Franciscans by conducting live interviews with authors, artists, and musicians in parking spots around the city. The live interviews will explore the artists’ process and ideas while simultaneously giving them a platform to share their art practice with spectators.

In collaboration with Litquake, the Book Bar will be making three stops in the streets of Mission during Lit Crawl 2011. Come hear live interviews and readings from selected Crawl authors, starting at Clarion Alley before Phase I.

Lit Lounge is the collaborative effort of artists Michael Crane, James Gregg, and Christopher Treggiari.

Book Bar Schedule:

Phase 1: Clarion Alley (Valencia Street between 17^th and 18th)

• 5:20 pm: Francisco  X. Alarcon
• 5:30 pm: Skip Horack
• 5:40 pm: Tissa Hami

Phase 2: 20th and Valencia (outside Dog Eared Books)

• 6:35 pm: Julia Scheeres
• 6:45 pm: Oscar Villalon

Phase 3: Blue Macaw (Mission Street between 21^st and 22^nd)

• 7:45 pm: Justin Chin
• 7:55 pm: Colby Buzzell

From seedy carnivals to weekly cable TV blowouts, professional wrestling’s spectacle of musclemen locking up with hairy brutes has long occupied the twilight zone between sports and entertainment, creating a form of acrobatic theater that is both dangerous and surreal. During the last decade, the sport’s most beloved baby faces and despised heels such as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, and “Mankind” Mick Foley have put pen to paper and produced a steady and unexpected supply of bestselling memoirs.

And now Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival is finally giving the pro wrestling memoir the respect that it deserves with Figure Four Caps Lock, a night of readings from the greatest published accounts of life inside the squared circle on Friday October 14th at the Hemlock Tavern.

Hosted by Bob Calhoun (author of the bestselling punk-wrestling memoir “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling”) and All Pro Wrestling announcer Allan Bolte, Figure Four Caps Lock will assemble a stable of San Francisco Bay Area authors, comedians, librarians, rock musicians, burlesque dancers and yes, pro wrestlers to read the most violent, hilarious and just plain wrong moments from the works of the Fabulous Moolah, Classy Freddie Blassie, Chris Jericho, Goldust, Flair, Piper, and Foley. There will also be a recitation of pro wrestling poetry, some choice cuts from the Iron Sheik’s Twitter feed, tender tales of first time romance with Hulk Hogan, plus chair shots—somebody has to get hit with a folding chair.

Figure Four Caps Lock will feature the dramatic oratory of Alan Black (author of “Kick the Balls”), local indie wrestling legend Shane Dynasty, cartoonist and comedian Greg Franklin, Matt Holdaway (“Radio Voices”), Suzanne Kleid of the San Francisco Public Library, Michael Lucas of the Phantom Surfers, Rik Luxury (Pro Wrestling Peronified), Lady Monster (Naked Girls Reading Series), Alia Volz (Literary Death Match), and luchador-turned-educator Norman Zelaya.

Litquake’s 2011 Barbary Coast Award

His novelistic career spans more than half a century, from his first novel The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) to his latest, Juice! (2011).  Through poetry, plays, essays, and anthologies, the iconoclastic trailblazer has pointedly highlighted our nation’s political and cultural repression.

Reed has also been instrumental in exposing the work of new authors through his online literary magazine Konch and the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company.

As a  jazz pianist and lyricist, Reed has worked with such talented musicians as Taj Mahal, Allen Toussaint, Ravi Coltrane, Cassandra Wilson, Jack Bruce, Mary Wilson of the Supremes, and David Murray.

Join us for an evening of music, poetry, tributes, and drama in honor of Reed and his long-standing contributions to the Bay Area literary scene. Featuring emcee W. Kamau Bell, music from Broun Fellinis, and live dramatic performances directed by Carla Blank.

October 12, 2011, 7:30 pm
Z Space, 450 Florida St.
$12 advance; $15 at the door
Brown Paper Tickets

October 13, 2011, 7:00 pm

If you like NPR’s “Selected Shorts,” you’ll love Litquake’s version of the staged story. Directed by Campo Santo’s Sean San José, five actors channel the rich voices of the characters in short fiction on the topic of family by celebrated authors Ann Packer, Melanie Rae Thon, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan.

An outlaw mother takes on children abandoned by others; a teen finds a family of sorts in San Francisco; a husband copes with the death of his wife’s first child. Packer’s “Her Firstborn,” Thon’s “Heavenly Creatures,” and Egan’s “Sisters of the Moon” are brought to vivid life on stage. Book sales and signings by Thon and Packer to follow.

Until then:

…watch Egan talk about craft and voice at the Center for Fiction

…listen to Ann Packer talk about her collection, Swim Back to Me

…read Litquake’s interview with Melanie Rae Thon

…read an interview with actor and director Sean San Jose on adapting Denis Johnson’s work to the stage.

The Authors: Jennifer Egan, Ann Packer, Melanie Rae Thon

The Actors: Britney Frazier, Delia MacDougall, Tina Marie Murray, Brian Rivera, Sean San José

Melanie Rae Thon, “Heavenly Creatures,” from IN THIS LIGHT, originally published in The Paris Review. Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Rae Thon. Performed with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org and the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency.

Novels have captured readers’ imaginations for hundreds of years. What is it about this literary form that keeps people coming back for more? Scholars from UC Berkeley and Stanford come together to discuss the evolution of the novel, and uncover some novelistic gems overlooked by the reading public.

Kent Puckett teaches courses at UC Berkeley on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. One reviewer calls Puckett’s Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel “a fascinating theory of authority, representation, and embarrassment that could interest readers far and wide.”

Read more about Puckett and his academic attitude online.

Puckett skillfully demonstrates the existence of a species of bad form that held particular significance for the omnisciently narrated nineteenth-century novel and the world it figured. Ken Puckett’s concluding analysis of Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game as an instance of “bad form’s late style” is a winning stroke.

—Times Literary Supplement.

English professor Nancy Ruttenburg, current director of Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel, is writing a book about the history and meanings of conscience in life and in literature.

—Lesley Chamberlain, Times Literary Supplement

Read what her undergrads have to say about her in The Cellar Door.

Her earlier book, Dostoevsky’s Democracy, offers a major reinterpretation of the life and work of the great Russian writer by closely reexamining the crucial transitional period between the early works of the 1840s and the important novels of the 1860s.

Dostoevsky’s Democracy will be read both by literary scholars, and those interested in the history of ideas.

Ramón Saldívar is a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University, whose research interests include 19th- and 20th-century comparative literary studies, theory of the novel, and transnational American studies.

His most recent book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary, is a study of the modern American borderlands, transnationalism and globalism and their role in creating and delimiting agents of history.

His earlier work, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, has been called “A monumental work on the scene of Chicano/a literary criticism.”

Read more about Saldivar at The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University

Fiction writer Namwali Serpell is an assistant professor of English at UC Berkeley whose research surrounds issues of ethics and literature, aesthetics, and theories of reading. She recently won the 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, which is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.

Watch Serpell read a poem by Elizabeth Bishop in the Lunch Poems series.

“Smart fun for anyone fascinated by the play of language. . . . Geary traces the history of [metaphor] from Aristotle to Elvis.”

—The Washington Post on James Geary’s I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.

October 9, 2011, 4:00 pm
Z Space, 450 Florida St.
$5 in advance at Brown Paper Tickets; $7 at door

We utter about one metaphor for every ten to 25 words, or about six metaphors a minute. In this lively and informative talk (which includes live juggling of balls as well as words) James Geary shows how metaphor influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.

While you’re waiting for Geary,

…read the New York Times’ David Brooks on Geary and use of metaphors

…see Geary speak at TED

…peruse Geary’s blog: All Aphorisms All The Time