Babylon Salon
presents a special performance
Saturday, December 11, 2021
resuming free, in-person shows!
at The Sycamore: 2140 Mission, San Francisco
Come for drinks at 5pm PST // Show starts at 5.30pm
Bring ID, proof of vaccination and mask
featuring
In Revival Season, her atmospheric, layered debut, Monica West probes that annual rite, when evangelicals are called to go forth and preach to all nations. West steeps her tale in a rich broth of religious ardor and personal betrayal… West creates a vivid, intimate world on the page, dramatizing the compromises evangelical women must make.—New York Times
Tender and wise, Revival Season explores a girl’s faith in both her family and in God. Monica West’s formidable talent is matched by her generosity of spirit, making the most winning combination a reader could wish for. — Ann Patchett
Monica West is the author of the debut novel Revival Season (Simon & Schuster, '21), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she received her BA from Duke University, her MA from New York University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She has also received a fellowship from Kimbilio Fiction and a residency from Hedgebrook. She currently lives in Oakland, California where she is reading everything that she can get her hands on, teaching fiction writing at the University of San Francisco, and writing another novel.
Matthew Clark Davison(Doubting Thomas)
Sharply probing . . . Thanks to the care Davison pays to his characters―each one a fully realized, thinking human in Thomas’s orbit―what could be an over-serving of tragedy is instead delivered with clarity and nuance. The result is a novel that manages to take on a number of the world’s traumas . . . using the personal travails of a gay man at the dusk of Obama’s America to probe at the nature of what it truly means to know oneself. ―San Francisco Chronicle
Doubting Thomas moves compellingly and compassionately among races, genders, sexual identities, and other human conditions. A novel of this depth and vigor, this liveliness, would be notable coming from any writer; the fact that it’s Matthew Clark Davison’s first is a clear indication of marvels yet to come. —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
Matthew Clark Davison is the author of Doubting Thomas (Amble Press '21). He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend's living room. The textbook version of The Lab, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2022. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews (Epiphany Publishing) and 580-Split; and published in or on LitHub, Lambda Literary, The Advocate, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, The Rumpus, Foglifter, Exquisite Pandemic, and others. Matthew earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time.
Mother Tongue Apologize is a collection of poems studying desire and guilt, pleasure and grief, and optimism and dread, all as dualities, and Vangani’s examination of the interplay between these phenomena is skillful, brutally honest, or both -- The Adroit JournalWhat use is poetry to those who grieve, and to those we have lost? Preeti Vangani's Mother Tongue Apologize is just that; poetry as the toughest vessel for memory -- every beautiful and not so beautiful detail of a human life, every fragrance of almond, henna and baby oil, every ailment, every outrage, every firecracker, every love song. This is a gorgeous, finely rendered first poetry collection of mother's absence, of hard love for self, of strong young woman mourning and persisting. -- Barbara Jane Reyes
Preeti Vangani is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize, winner of the RL India Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Cortland Review, Hobart among other places. A graduate of University of San Francisco's MFA Program, Preeti has received fellowships and support from UCross, Tin House, Napa Valley Writers' Conference, Pen America and the California Center for Cultural Innovation. She currently teaches in the MFA (Writing) program at University of San Francisco.
(The Best American Sci-Fi and Fantasy 2021; Paris Review)
Yohanca Delgado is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has recently appeared in New York Times Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the Clarion and VONA workshops. She is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, a 2021 Emerging Critic at the National Book Critics Circle, and a member of the inaugural Periplus Collective mentorship program.
with music from
(Bestiary; The Dancing Plague)
The Forgetmenauts brew up an intoxicating mixture of melodic folk harmonies, driving rock beats, and raucous punk energy. The songs twist and turn, inviting you on a journey of tall tales about vampires, werewolves, sirens, and other creatures from the darkest faery stories. The band has strong roots in the East Bay beer making, activism, and queer communities. Their first album, Bestiary, was released in 2019. A new album is on the way!
--
in partnership with our friends at
currently offering curbside pickup and in-person browsing
in their new location at
1727 Haight Street, San Francisco
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Free Admission!