Tuesday, August 9: Kaui Hart Hemmings at The Booksmith, SF
In her latest novel, How to Party with an Infant, Kaui Hart Hemmings takes on the big bad Paige jeans-clad world of wealthy San Francisco moms. It’s a brutal, superficial place filled with classist and racial micro-aggression, day-drinking, affairs, sexless marriages, surly toddlers and judgmental babysitters. The plot is thin, but it still works.
Mele Bart is a single mom living in San Francisco, thanks to family money. She’s got some kind of background in food though it’s not quite clear what. Something about being a former menu writer? When Mele meets Bobby, a chef at “one of those old, manly steak houses in Union Square,” she thinks she’s found the man of her dreams. Pregnant and ready to settle down in Sonoma, Mele is blindsided by Bobby’s revelation that he already has a fiance: a Paltrow-esque artisan cheese maker from a Petaluma wine-making family (ha ha!) Luckily, Mele’s sanity is saved by a group of honest, flawed moms (and one hot dad) from her San Francisco Mommy Club play-date group. BTW, you might already recognize Hemmings as the author of The Descendents, which was made into a darkly funny Oscar-winning George Clooney vehicle.
Thursday, August 11: Why There Are Words at Studio 333, Sausalito
issions from published and unpublished writers, and previously unpublished manuscripts of both fiction are nonfiction are welcome. No poetry, yet. The current submission period is open through September 15, 2016. 
Lone Glen quarterly reading series is curated by Alexandra Mattraw with the goal of “rendering a space in which diverse artists and genre-bending creators can mingle, share and inspire.” Held in a performance space in Oakland, it’s a place for art that defies categorization. Prime example, Turk & Divis, an exploration of tone, sound and words from brothers Evan and Miles Karp. They describes themselves thus:
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t listened to more than two episodes of the Peabody award-winning podcast Serial. But, I’m definitely in the minority. With that, I’m sure most KQED readers already know who Rabia Chaudry is. If you don’t, here’s a quick rundown. Chaudry is an attorney and family friend of Adnan Syed, the imprisoned young man’s whose story made up the core of Serial’s first incredibly popular season. In fact, it was Chaudry’s investigation and conviction that Syed was innocent, despite his conviction by a jury for the murder of former girlfriend Hae Min Lee. In Chaudry’s book Adnan’s Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial, she revisits the case, making a case for her friend’s innocence through new evidence and commentary from legal and investigative sources. She’ll discuss this, along with the recent decision to hold a new trial, with Press Democrat columnist Chris Smith in Petaluma. 
