Litquake's Lit Cast

Anna Wiener discusses her new memoir, Uncanny Valley, with author Mike Isaac.  This podcast was recorded at Green Apple Books on January 27, 2020

Towards the end of 2019, we attended one of the many incredible readings held at Oakland-based Wolfman Books. To celebrate  Trebor Healey's new collection, Falling, we packed in to Wolfman's 40th street storefront to hear stories that confronted populism, immigration, and queer identity. Supported by intimate tales from Alvin Orloff's memoir, Disasterama: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977-1...

Who doesn't love a glimpse behind the facades of troubled Silicon Valley giants? In the tradition of Brad Stone's  Everything Store  and John Carreyrou's  Bad Blood , award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's  Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber  delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture, and the b...

Eureka! We did it! From this year's 20th Litquake festival, we present some of our favorite Bay Area authors reading from THEIR favorite Californian wordsmiths live at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. Listen to this festival kick off with a raucous night of readings by Charlie Jane Anders, Natalie Baszile, Elaine Castillo, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Handler, Adam Johnson, Chang-rae...

In this very special episode of Lit Cast, we're proud to feature the only recording Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his original work "Lit.quake?" - plus a few more - at Litquake 2002.     Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!

From the Litquake archives! During our 2018 festival, National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner joined Litquake for an evening on her New York Times bestselling novel The Mars Room . This novel tells the story of Romy Hall, who's at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. As James Wood said in The New Yorker ,...

Litquake's proud to present a special episode of Lit Cast Live featuring one of our own, Julia Flynn Siler, in conversation on her newest book The White Devil's Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown. In a narrative hailed as "eye-opening" by Kirkus Reviews, Siler tells the story of both the abolitionists who challenged the corrosive anti-Chinese prejudices of the tim...

One of Esquire , The Rumpus, The Millions, Literary Hub and Electric Literature 's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, Chia-Chia Lin's debut novel The Unpassing explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. Lit Cast is proud to feature Chia-Chia as she reads an excerpt fro...

Following the success of his T.S. Elliot-prizewinning poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds , Ocean Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was heralded as one of the most hotly anticipated books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, the LA Times, The Guardian, and many more. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous , written as a letter from a son to his mother, is both a brutally honest explor...

From the Litquake archive! In this recording from our 2018 festival, the Bay Area's long-running Porchlight storytelling series returns with "advice"-themed tales from Steve Almond, Dickson Lam, Sands Hall, Sisonke Msimang, Maggie Rowe, and Betty Charbonnet Reid Soskin, the nation's oldest park ranger. This event was co-hosted by Arline Klatte and Beth Lisick, and recorded live at the Swedish Amer...

MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow Karen Russell's new short story collection, Orange World , was declared "hilarious, exquisite, first-rate" by The New York Times Book Review and "one of the most innovative, inspired short-story collections of the past decade" by NPR. Lit Cast Live proudly features Russell in conversation with Zoetrope editor Michael Ray at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Franc...

Back in April, Litquake celebrated National Poetry Month by hosting a group of esteemed poets at one of San Francisco's famous landmarks. This event was hosted by D.A. Powell, whose honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and featured incredible poets like Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States and winner of a Pulitzer priz...

Award-winning poet Franny Choi recently passed through San Francisco on tour for her second collection, Soft Science , which uses the myth of the cyborg to explore queer, Asian American femininity through a series of Turing test-inspired poems. Our newest Lit Cast episode features Choi joining local poet (and frequent Litquake collaborator!) sam sax for an electrifying evening of readings from Sof...

Litquake and The Bindery present Evan James reading from his debut novel, Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe . In a return of a not-so-prodigal son, author Evan James comes to San Francisco on book tour for his comedy of manners debut novel that tells the story of a family summer on Puget Sound. Conjuring a Wes Anderson-meets-John Updike vibe, it tells a tale filled with tennis, a personal assistant in sear...

Back in March, Mitchell S. Jackson came to San Francisco on tour for his latest book, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family . With a poet's gifted ear, a novelist's sense of narrative, and a journalist's unsentimental eye, Mitchell S. Jackson candidly explores his tumultuous youth in the other America. Survival Math takes its name from the calculations Mitchell and his family made to keep...

To celebrate our 100th(!) episode, we've got an extra-special recording from Litquake's 2018 festival: an evening of freewheeling conversation between San Francisco literary legends Amy Tan and Armistead Maupin. Bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement , Amy Tan's most recent novel is Where the Past Begins ; Armistead Maupin, whose series Tales of the City helped change...

Fantasy and science fiction stories have long embraced the darker themes of a dystopian future. Do these narratives speak to our fears of what the future will bring, or do they reflect the current reality in which the authors live and write? Is futuristic fiction pure escapism, or can it alter our destiny? In this episode of Lit Cast Live, Bay Area authors Charlie Jane Anders ( All the Birds in th...

A rising star in today's Nigerian novel boom, the trans and non-binary Akwaeke Emezi has brought us  Freshwater,  an autobiographical debut written with stylistic brilliance, exploring the metaphysics of identity and being, plunging the reader into the mysteries of self. Emezi was named one of the National Book Foundation's '5 under 35' for 2018 and Freshwater was long-listed for the Center for Fi...

Back in the summer, author Melissa Broder dropped into The Bindery to read and discuss her hilarious debut novel, The Pisces , and we were there to capture it. " A modern-day mythology for women on the verge," according to the New York Times, The Pisces is the absrud and erotic recounting of one woman's star-crossed relationship with a folkloric beau. Broder is the author of the essay collection S...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Elaine Castillo and her debut novel, "America Is Not The Heart". In illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States, Castillo delivers an incisive and powerful story about the promise of the America...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Sloane Crosley, New York Times–bestselling author of "Look Alive Out There"―a brand-new collection of essays filled with her trademark hilarity, wit, and charm. The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. In conversatio...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with the charming, witty, and always-incisive Meg Wolitzer and her new novel  The Female Persuasion , which chronicles the highs and lows of power, loyalty, hero worship, womanhood and ambition.  At its heart,  The Female Persuasion  is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fann...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with the daring and wise, hilarious and tender, Cheston Knapp and his exhilarating collection of seven linked essays, Up Up, Down Down, which tackles the Big Questions through seemingly unlikely avenues. Taken together, the essays in Up Up, Down Down amount to a chronicle of Knapp's coming-of-age, a young man's journey in...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Samantha Irby on tour for her second essay collection, MEATY. After attracting thousands of loyal readers to her notoriously hilarious blog, bitchesgottaeat.com, Samantha Irby first exploded onto the printed page with WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE, her debut collection of essays about trying to laugh her way thro...

Litquake's "Lit Cast Live" series of events at Bay Area bookstores continues with Leslie Jamison, on tour for her new book THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and its Aftermath. Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of add...