Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, September 17, 2022
in The Sycamore's outdoor patio
2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]
Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm
featuring
Charlie Jane Anders
(The Unstoppable Trilogy; The City in the Middle of the Night)
“I'm astounded by Charlie Jane Anders' imaginative powers and the scope of her storytelling. Again and again, I was struck by the richness of this world and the people in it. A stunning novel.” — Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
“One of America’s most inventive writers has done it again: City In the Middle of the Night is a breathtaking work of imagination and storytelling, set in a world of originality, intelligence and empathy. Each page holds wonders, making the case for Anders as this generation’s Le Guin.” — Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, the first two books in The Unstoppable Trilogy, soon to be a TV series from Amazon Prime Video and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, "Go Ahead, Dream About the Future" got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
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Vanessa Hua
(Forbidden City; A River of Stars)
Gripping and vital, Forbidden City charts the sensual, intellectual, and moral awakening of a young woman who forges her own identity from beneath the shadow of Mao Zedong. Mei Xiang is a heroine you will not soon forget, and her story a form of redemption for those pushed to the margins of history.” —C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold
Vanessa Hua is an award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books of 2018 lists, and has been called a "marvel" by O, The Oprah Magazine, and "delightful" by The Economist. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors' Choice, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award, and a New American Voices Award. Her novel, Forbidden City—called “magnificent” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “new classic” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “masterful” by the Washington Post— is a national bestseller. For more than two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, Panama, South Korea, and Ecuador. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times before heading east to the Hartford Courant. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among other publications.
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(The Man Who Could Move Clouds; Fruit of the Drunken Tree)
“The Man Who Could Move Clouds is the work of a genius, a wildly moving, profound, groundbreaking, often hilarious book that I’ll reread until I die. . . Without knowing it, I’ve wanted this book my whole life.” — R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Hailed as “original, politically daring, and passionately written” by Vogue, her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree earned the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next Pick, and a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Her debut memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was named a TIME “Best Book of Summer.” Rojas Contreras brings readers into her childhood, where her grandfather, Nono, was a renowned community healer gifted with “the secrets”: powers that included talking to the dead, fortunetelling, treating the sick, and moving the clouds. The Man Who Could Move Clouds interweaves enchanting family lore, Colombian history, and a reckoning with the bounds of reality. Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. She has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, the Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. Rojas Contreras is a Visiting Writer at the University of San Francisco.
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Jonathan Escoffery
(If I Survive You)
“Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory and like nothing you’ve read before. These are the stories that we never believed could be told, until Jonathan Escoffery told them.” —Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, forthcoming Sept. 6th, 2022 from MCDxFSG. Jonathan is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Pleiades, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, and elsewhere. Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, Writers in Progress, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
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Zoe Olivia Young
(McSweeney's; Berkeley Rep)
Zoe Olivia Young holds an MFA in Fiction from California College of the Arts. You can find her work in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Bold Italic, The Oakland Tribune, Downbeat Magazine, and on multiple bathroom walls. Her dramatic works have been produced at Berkeley Rep and at venues throughout San Francisco. She currently works a 9-to-5 writing for the Nature Conservancy in California and teaches playwriting at Berkeley City College.
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in partnership with our friends
The Booksmith
in their new location at 1727 Haight Street, San Francisco
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Free Admission!