Thursday  September 1st  7:30 pm 

Award-winning novelist and memoirist Leo Litwak reads from Nobody's Baby and Other Stories, a collection that features characters who are pushing toward the limits of tragedy, compassion, and malevolence. These are not made-up monsters, but ordinary people who have been driven to extremes and are now beginning to reach for clarity and redemption. Jerome Charyn calls these stories "expert, funny, alive, full of quiet fury."

Wednesday,  September 7th  7:30 pm 

Eminent literary critic and translator Robert Alter will read from Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, an investigation of how new technologies and new arrangements of public and private space have transformed the way people live and perceive the world. In a series of essays interpreting novels by Flaubert, Dickens, and Woolf, among others, Alter shows how these novelists of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in consciousness brought about by the rise of modern cities.

Thursday,  September 8th  7:30 pm 

San Francisco writer Daniel Duane reads from his new novel, A Mouth Like Yours, an exploration of the transformative meaning to be found in obsessive desire. Cassius Harper has a good life. He's working on a promising doctoral thesis at U. C. Berkeley, and he has a devoted lover, good friends, adoring parents, even a rent-controlled apartment by the beach where he's surfed for years. Yet he harbors an inner ache that remains nameless until he meets vulnerable, volatile, and addictive Joanie Artois.

Sunday,  September 11th  7:30 pm 

To commemorate the fourth anniversary of 9/11, Black Oak has invited journalist, lecturer, and advocate of citizen action Paul Rogat Loeb to speak about where the Bush Administration has taken the United States since the attacks of 2001. Loeb is editor of The Impossible Will Take a While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, a collection of essays that points out the great good that is still alive in our democratic system, and calls upon us to participate in it.

Monday,  September 12th  7:30 pm 

In Karl Soehnlein's new novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, Jamie Garner is living a sexy slacker's life in San Francisco when he gets the call that his father has died. Determined to unlock the mystery of his father's past, Jamie seeks out the artists and poets, the free spirits and wild men mentioned in the letters his father left behind. It's a journey that takes him deep into the subcultures of San Francisco, beginning with the bohemian heyday of the Beat Generation.

Tuesday,  September 13th  7:30 pm 

Lynn Freed reads from a new collection of essays, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home. In these pieces Freed remembers her childhood in Durban, South Africa, and reflects upon the way upbringing and books can shape our lives. In "Taming the Gorgon," this accomplished novelist relates her struggle to wrestle a difficult and unconventional mother into fiction. In "Sex with the Servants," she tells of how publishing an autobiographical story led to the blurring of private truth and public scandal. These learned, outspoken, wickedly funny essays show us the price of pulling off fictional disguises and exposing the human lineaments behind literary desires.

Wednesday,  September 14th  7:30 pm 

Jacques Leslie discusses Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, in which he argues that water will be as scarce, and its distribution as conflicted, in the coming century as oil has been for the last. The struggle over water, he suggests, will be waged across every continent and will involve all of the major political issues of our era: economic globalization, international diplomacy, global warming, the clash of cultures, immigration and agricultural policy, environmentalism, and conservation.

Thursday,  September 15th  7:30 pm 

Black Oak Books is happy to welcome back Berkeley's own beloved storyteller Joel ben Izzy with the paperback edition of The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness. Here he weaves together the stories he has gathered on his extensive travels, along with an extraordinary episode in his own life when thyroid cancer surgery rendered him speechless, supposedly for the rest of his life. After his voice miraculously returned a year and a half later, he was able to talk about the marvelous things he learned and heard while he himself was unable to speak.

Sunday,  September 18th  7:30 pm 

Dave Zirin, the regular sports commentator on Air America, will discuss his hard-hitting new book about politics and racism in sports, What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States. This often angry young writer lays out everything he hates about the politics and business of sports—corruption, racism, and skewed representation—as well as what he loves, namely the courage, talent, and creativity of the athletes, and the willingness of some to resist injustice and dishonesty. As to the book's title, it is a taunt Muhammed Ali flung repeatedly at an opponent in the ring who insisted on calling him Cassius Clay; Ali went on to knock him out.

Tuesday,  September 20th  7:30 pm 

After the November 2000 presidential election, writer and poet John Daniel set up for himself a Thoreauvian experiment in isolation and communion with nature. Leaving his wife and cat behind, Daniel got into his pickup truck and drove to his cabin in the Rogue River Gorge in Oregon, where he stayed without radio, music, clocks, news, or calendars through the following winter. He reads tonight from his thoughtful memoir, Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone.

Wednesday,  September 21st  7:30 pm 

Berkeley's own Thomas Farber will read from his new collection of epigrams and short essays on the epigram, Truth Be Told: New & Collected Pre-Mortems. Each aphoristic entry sparkles with its own specific insight; as an assemblage they form a work of witnessing that becomes an unfolding meditation by the author on his own aging and inevitable silence. "With pungent wit and cynical insight worthy of Diogenes, Farber's epigrams cast a cold eye on contemporary manners, morals and mortality."—Stephen Kessler

Thursday,  September 22nd  7:30 pm 

Sausalito author Gloria Kurian Broder will read from Their Magician and Other Stories, a collection that shows Broder to be a master of the short story form and a keen observer of family and American life. Like the writers she esteems, such as Cheever and Chekhov, Broder creates living, breathing characters within a few deftly written pages. "Her characters are wrenchingly honest, authentically grappling with fundamental human questions—and unforgettably quirky to boot."—Susan Faludi

Sunday,  September 25th  6:00 pm 

USF Professor of Politics Brian Weiner will discuss Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States. Our modern conception of national apology and reparation, Weiner believes, represents a dramatic shift of political thinking born out of two dramatic events, the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. He focuses on two case studies, the land claims of the Oneida Indians and the reparations paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, then goes on to show how these specific cases are linked to a host of other issues, such as slavery and affirmative action.

Monday,  September 26th  7:30 pm 

In The Cultural Defense, Alison Dundes Renteln, Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, argues that a just judicial system in a diverse society must include cultural background as a factor in its decisions, for instance, in the case in which Navahos are being tried for using peyote in their traditional tribal rituals. In this thoughtful and persuasive book, she discusses the means we have at our disposal to judge which claims of cultural relativism are valid, and how they should be used in court.

Tuesday,  September 27th  7:30 pm 

Rabbi, therapist, and kabbalist Abner Weiss will speak about Kabbalah and the power it offers us to transform our lives. In Connecting to God: Ancient Kabbalah and Modern Psychology, Rabbi Weiss explains that Kabbalah's ten Sefirot of the Tree of Life are transformers of divine energy in our bodies, a spiritual genome instilled in us at creation. In his clinical and therapeutic practice he has built a psychological system based on the mystical wisdom of kabbalistic texts that can be applied to improving our lives in the modern world.

Thursday,  September 29th  7:30 pm 

Wendy Lesser, essayist, memoirist, and founding editor of The Threepenny Review, reads from The Pagoda in the Garden, a three-part novel that conjures the spirit of Henry James with startling sensitivity to the nuances, values, cadences, and self-imposed limits of the master. It poses a female novelist, Charlotte, as a friend of the great man (here named Roderick) who finds herself drawn into what can only be called (because he so completely developed it) a Jamesian plot. Of the various fictional forms of homage to James to appear in the past few years, this extraordinary novel may be the best and most faithful.

Friday,  September 30th  7:30 pm 

Anthony Doerr, author of the highly acclaimed book of short stories The Shell Collector, reads from his first novel, About Grace, which tells the story of an everyman in Alaska who is haunted by premonitions that come true. When he dreams that his infant daughter, Grace, will die in a flood, he flees his family and takes refuge on a Caribbean Island. After twenty years, Odysseus-like, he returns to his family to seek reconnection and forgiveness.