Literature, the best of it, never shies from the good, the bad, or the ugly. Rather, it runs straight for it. The books from this month’s crop of authors coming to town are brave, critical, and honest. Relationship trauma, abandoned children, racial violence in America, even fashion; all represented, once again proving that in art, we just might be saved from our worst selves.
Thursday, February 25: Melissa Cistaro and Sere Prince Halverson at A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland
Mothers, it’s commonly assumed, would give up everything for the good of their chil
d. A good mother would never leave her child, not for anything, right? For Melissa Cistaro, who grew up in the Bay Area, that story got turned on its head when her own mother drove off without explanation, leaving her children behind. Newly released in paperback, Cistaro’s memoir Pieces of My Mother captures what it’s like to grapple with abandonment, what it’s like to be left behind by the person who is supposed to adore you until the bitter end. Cistaro will be in conversation with Sere Prince Halverson, whose latest novel All the Winters After comes out this month. Details here
Friday, Feb. 26: Paul Lisicky at Booksmith, San Francisco
“To think you can love someone so well that he’d forget the dead, forget his pain. To think of love as a laser beam of attention. To think you could bea
m that attention to him in such a way that he wouldn’t even know you were doing it. To learn that your attention is doomed. Unwelcome, better having been put to other uses: helping the poor, working for the environment, for animals. To learn that you are only a pale winter sun, when you once thought you could have made the hillsides green.” Passage like this are what makes Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship, one of my favorite books so far of 2016. It’s a precise, poetic, honest retelling of what it’s like to lose a best friend to unbeatable terminal disease and a partner to irreconcilable differences, but also, so much more. Read it. Details here
Cintra Wilson lives in New York now, but the pop culture pundit’s roots are in Marin and San Francisco. She started out in theater, writing plays and performing. From theater she moved into journalism, working for editor 
Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar both got attention of late for bringing sonorous meditations on race and blackness to mass audiences in 2016. Beyonce with Formation at her Super Bowl performance. Kendrick with his performance at this month’s Grammy Awards. You might think of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, her 2014 hybrid of poetry and criticism, as a precursor to their performances. Citizen was awarded the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the National Book Awards for poetry. In a recent LARB piece on Rankine, Daniel Wolden says it like this: “At a moment when we have become accustomed to hearing from figures like Jonathan Franzen that experimental or “difficult” literature is no longer relevant, and that poetry, especially, is almost doomed to reach a small, coterie audience, Citizen’s wide success is impressive.” 
