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In the tradition of magic realism, Lawrence R. Smith brings us a wickedly funny, highly original novel about a group of soup kitchen regulars who take on corporate forces and the federal government. The "shadow plague" is striking young and old throughout the world with severe amnesia, dementia, and eventual death, and no one knows the cause or the cure. Annie O'Rourke, a ninety-five-year-old retired nurse who runs a soup kitchen for the homeless in Lemon City, California, believes environmental degradation is the culprit. Development and pollution have devastated the Santa Ana River watershed, and Annie is convinced that if she purifies the river, she will cure Southern California's plague victims and stimulate worldwide healing. Of Smith's magical ride, William Kittredge says, "A wickedly funny and unholy evocation of disenfranchised people who refuse to understand themselves as victims and a terrifically American book."

Ana Menendez's In Cuba I was a German Shepherd was hailed by The New York Times' book critics as "powerful" and "achingly wise". Now, in Loving Che, she delivers an astonishing, intimate portrait of revolutionary Cuba as witnessed by an elderly woman recalling her secret love affair with the world's most dashing, charismatic rebel, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Come celebrate a remarkable new talent whose chilling meditation on memory, history and storytelling will leave you breathless.

It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier--the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska--in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one's head. Rich, allusive, and unsentimental, T.C. Boyle's ninth novel is a tour de force infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which he is justly famous. The New York Times Book Review calls Drop City "one of the funniest, and at the same time most subtle, novels we've had about the hippie era's slow fade to black."

The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff gives his incomparable take on New York City and its denizens--the bars, the workingmen, the gamblers, the eccentrics, the lonesome, and the wise. We meet a Long Island used-car salesman; a professional Santa; the men who change the light bulbs atop the Empire State Building; a Sinatra imitator; a retired Harlem chorus-line girl; a lighthouse keeper; a saloon priest; Latin lovers; a host of barroom regulars; and myriad others--all of whom present their take on working, drinking, gambling, dying, and countless other facts of life. Charlie LeDuff takes us to the watering holes, prisons, veterans' hospitals, firehouses, apartment buildings, baseball fields, and graveyards that make up the landscape of modern life. Also included is LeDuff's acclaimed series of articles on Squad One, the Brooklyn firehouse that suffered devastating losses on September 11, as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on workers in a North Carolina slaughterhouse.

The Book Cafe first fell in love with Andrew Sean Greer's deft prose when he read here from The Path of Minor Planets. Now we are treated to a heartbreaking love story told in three acts set against the backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the century. A young Max falls in love with a neighbor girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us do. Max, who suffers from an odd condition, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. "Andrew Sean Greer is one of the most talented writers around, feeling and funny, with a genuinely fine prose style and a sensibility to match." Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Lynne Cox has done it all -- without a wetsuit. At 15, she broke the men and women's world records for swimming the English Channel and then swam the Strait of Magellan, Cook's Strait, and the Gulf of Aqaba. She opened the US-Soviet border for the first time in 48 years by swimming the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia in 38-degree water. And in 2002, she swam through 32-degree water to the shores of Antarctica, where she was greeted by a flock of penguins. The world's most extraordinary open-water, long-distance swimmer, Lynne Cox has pursued her remarkable feats for not only personal accomplishment but also to foster international diplomacy. Her unequalled career has attracted the notice of devoted swimmers, awed medical doctors, and impressed world leaders; while pushing human endurance, she inspires citizens all over the world. Oliver Sacks writes, "Lynne Cox writes about swimming the way Saint-Exupery wrote about flying, and one sees how swimming, like flying, can stretch the wings of the spirit."

Scott Phillips first appeared at the Book Cafe for the critically acclaimed novel The Ice Harvest. Now he broadens his canvas, writing his most accomplished work yet. In 1872, Cottonwood, Kansas is a one-horse speck on the map: a community of run-down farms, dusty roads, and two-bit crooks. Self-educated saloon owner and photographer Bill Ogden looks on his adopted town with an eye to making a profit. His brains and ambition bring him to the attention of Marc Leval, a wealthy Chicago developer with big plans for the small town. The advent of the railroad and rumors of a cattle trail turn Cottonwood into a wild and wooly boomtown---and with Leval as a partner, Ogden dreams of bringing civilization to the prairie. But civilizing the Great Plains was never simple. Mob violence threatens to derail the town's dreams of greatness and Ogden finds himself dangerously obsessed with Leval's stunningly beautiful wife. Meanwhile, plying its sinister trade unnoticed, an apparently ordinary local farm family quietly butchers traveling salesmen, weary travelers, and other unsuspecting wanderers. Hijinks and murder on the American frontier have never been more captivating. Michael Connelly says, "Scott Phillips is dark, dangerous, and important. Cottonwood is crime fiction at its best."

Steve Yarbrough's father told him of German POWs quartered in his fields in Mississippi and sent to work as day laborers during WWII. One of them pulled Yarbrough's father aside and confessed that he was not a German but a Pole forced to fight for the Nazi army. From this twisted fact in history comes the accomplished, unsentimental novel, Prisoners of War, a story of a small farming town where war's devastating effects change the future of the town's residents and expose an American landscape where racial tensions reveal a nation very much at war with itself. Youths eager to be drafted, veterans returning damaged and volatile, blacks attacked for the color of their skin, and whites watching over and working along side men they were trained to kill - complicated histories and relationships spark wars both global and local. Writer Tom Franklin writes, "With a group of characters vivid, tainted, and shell-shocked but still by god breathing, Steve Yarbrough has delivered the best book of his impressive career."

Wednesday, February 25th at 6:30 p.m.
Book Club
Undue Influence by Anita Brookner

In Undue Influence, acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner proves once again that even in the most closely circumscribed of lives, hearts can venture into unknown -- and potentially explosive -- territory. Claire Pitt is nothing if not a practical young woman, living a life in contemporary London that is to all appearances placid, orderly and consciously lacking in surprise. And yet Claire's tangled interior life gives the lie to that illusion. She is prone to vivid speculation about the lives of others, and to fantasies about her own fate that lead her into a courtship so strange that even she wonders at its power to compel her. Martin Gibson and his chronically ill wife Cynthia come to depend on Claire to an extent that is nothing short of baffling, and yet Claire becomes ever bolder in her pursuit of their acquaintance -- and, ultimately, of Martin's elusive affections. The result, a potent tale of urban loneliness and the chance intersections that assuage it, constitutes one of Brookner's finest and most psychologically acute achievements.

This group meets every month to discuss a book relevant to current events around the world. To date, we have examined books focusing on a variety of events in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe. This month's selection is A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis by David Rieff. Of Rieff's latest work, Publisher's Weekly says, "Noted journalist Rieff presents a painful, urgent and penetrating discussion of a crisis most of us didn't even know existed and yet which cuts to the heart of the West's role in some of the most violent world events of the past decade. He will shake readers' complacency about the relief work done by organizations like Oxfam, CARE and Doctors without Borders, crushing the belief that humanitarian aid is a panacea for all the world's ills." As always, we welcome people from all backgrounds and affiliations to participate. For more information you may email Graham Parsons at parsons402@yahoo.com or call the store at 462-4415.

Sent to live on a Communist labor farm at age 17 and encouraged to act in Madame Mao's propaganda films, Anchee Min was denounced with the rise of the Cultural Revolution and then forced back to the labor farm. After coming to America in 1987, Min became an internationally renowned author; her best-selling works include her memoir Red Azalea, and the novels Becoming Madame Mao, and Wild Ginger. Min now offers a correction to the traditional portrait of China's longest reigning empress in this wrenching story of power and alienation during China's tumultuous, forced opening to the West. With details drawn from painstaking research, including smuggling documents from the Forbidden City, Min weaves a tale of one woman - concubine, mother, and empress - who is as vibrant and conflicted as China itself.

For ten years Hugo, upper class scion and former gigolo, has been living a hermit's life in his family's crumbling mansion, passing the dreaded days smoking, cooking, sexually scheming and poking his nose in other peoples marriages. The sudden return of not only Hugo's broken-hearted brother but also his ex-wife and their "alleged" daughter gives this peculiarly charming man three more reasons to light up and seek a certain, early death. As Hugo records these events with his mordant, funny, and gorgeously articulated personal history, the worldview of our dislikable hero slowly seduces us, and we are pulled under his witty, if snobbish, spell. A "loser lit" classic, The Epicure's Lament is perversely compelling and thoroughly unforgettable.

February 2004 Author Events