All events are free and take place at Kepler's unless otherwise noted.
Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650.324.4321
Howard Norman
Wednesday, August 25, 7:00 p.m.
What Is Left the Daughter
Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and cousin Tilda.
Setting in motion the novel’s chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring. Actual historical incidents--including a German U-boat’s sinking of the Nova Scotia–Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling--lend intense narrative power to Norman’s uncannily layered story.
Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and Devotion. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.
Brad Herzog
Monday, August 30, 7:00 p.m.
Turn Left at the Trojan Horse: A Would-Be Hero's American Odyssey BUY NOW
"Herzog's third travel memoir follows the highways cross-country examining the idea of the hero along the way. He captures stunning details of the American landscape. The hero's return, is irresistible...a near-perfect ending." --Kirkus Reviews
Turn Left at the Trojan Horse has been described as On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Love because it goes well beyond a road trip. More than just a funny and profound narrative of Brad Herzog's cross-country trek toward a college reunion in Ithaca (New York) and more than another reimagining of Odysseus's ancient journey (he visits places like Troy, OR... Iliad, MT... Apollo, PA...), it is a memoir exploring the parameters of a heroic existence - by chronicling the lives of people in America's oft-ignored spaces, by examining the universal truths embedded in ancient myths, and by undertaking a fair bit of self-evaluation. It is the memoir of an Everyman searching for the hero within.
Brad Herzog has been described as a "modern-day Steinbeck" and a "Picasso of the Winnebago," and Lonely Planet has ranked his travel memoirs among eight classics of the genre, along with books like Travels with Charley and On the Road. As an award-winning freelance writer, he has chronicled some of the nation's most unusual and intriguing subcultures, from nudists to North Pole explorers and from Pez collectors to pro mini golfers. Please visit him at bradherzog.com
Discoveries: 'Turn Left at the Trojan Horse'
Discoveries: 'Turn Left at the Trojan Horse'. 54817224-12163112-187104. Turn Left at the Trojan Horse. Add your voice to the mix! ...
discussions.latimes.com/20/lanews/la-ca-discoveries11.../10
"This is how a quest should be done...Herzog's stitching is so good, so seamless — he follows Odysseus' story until it becomes his own." -- Los Angeles Times
September Events
Rick Moody
Thursday, September 2, 7:00 p.m.
The Four Fingers of Death
Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, "The Crawling Hand." Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.
THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH is Rick Moody's ninth book. He has received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Deborah Willis
Thursday, September 9, 7:00 p.m.
Vanishing
This debut short story collection explores emotional and physical absences, the ways in which people leave and are left, and whether it’s ever possible to move on. With a remarkable economy of words, moments of dark humor, and wisdom and dexterity far beyond her years, Willis captures an incredible array of characters that will linger in the imagination, proving that nothing is ever truly forgotten. In these fourteen stories, secrets are both kept and unearthed, and lives are shaped by missing lovers, parents, and children.
“The emotional range and depth of these stories, their clarity and deftness, is astonishing.” --Alice Munro“Short-listed for a Governor-General’s Award, the stories in Vanishing show the magic of fiction at its best: fully realized worlds inseparable from the uncanny fact that they exist as mere words, magnificently strung together. Willis’s creative sleight-of-hand illuminates human intricacies as if tapping directly into your own.” --The Globe and Mail, one of Jim Bartley's Top Five Books of the Year
Deborah Willis, 28, was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. Her work has appeared in various journals and publications, and she was a winner of PRISM International’s annual fiction prize. She graduated from the University of Victoria, and has worked as a horseback riding instructor, a waitress, a short-order cook, a tour-guide in a French castle, a house-cleaner, and a newspaper reporter. She is fluent in French, and currently works as a bookseller at Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia. Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Vanishing and Other Stories is her first book of fiction.
William Gibson
Friday, September 10, 7:00 p.m.
Zero History
The iconic visionary returns with his first new novel since the New York Times bestseller Spook Country.
Hollis Henry worked for the global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend once before. She never meant to repeat the experience. But she's broke, and Bigend never feels it's beneath him to use whatever power comes his way -- in this case, the power of money to bring Hollis onto his team again. Not that she knows what the "team" is up to, not at first.
Milgrim is even more thoroughly owned by Bigend. He's worth owning for his useful gift of seeming to disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic - so much so that he spoke Russian with his therapist, in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of the addiction that would have killed him.
Garreth has a passion for extreme sports. Most recently he jumped off the highest building in the world, opening his chute at the last moment, and he has a new thighbone made of rattan baked into bone, entirely experimental, to show for it. Garreth isn't owned by Bigend at all. Garreth has friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors that a man like Bigend will find he needs, when things go unexpectedly sideways, in a world a man like Bigend is accustomed to controlling.
As when a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy that even Bigend, whose subtlety and power in the private sector would be hard to overstate, finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift in a seriously dangerous world.
Mr. Gibson will sign copies of his older titles if you purchase a copy of Zero History from Kepler's. Please have your receipt with you.
Monique Truong
Monday, September 27, 7:00 p.m.
Bitter in the Mouth
From Monique Truong, the bestselling and award-winning author of The Book of Salt, comes a brilliant, mesmerizing, beautifully written novel about a young woman’s search for identity and family, as she uncovers the secrets of her past and of history.
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. Now in her thirties, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters.
For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. She falls for names and what they evoke. As with all bodies, Linda’s is a mystery to her, in this and in other ways. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past. Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family.
This astonishing novel questions many assumptions—about what it means to be a family and to be a friend, to be foreign and to be familiar, to be connected and to be disconnected—from others and from the past, our bodies, our histories, and ourselves.
John Vaillant
Tuesday, September 28, 7:00 p.m.
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.
Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.
John Vaillant is also the author of The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal, among others. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
October Events
Stina Katchadourian
Wednesday, October 6, 7:00 p.m.
The Lapp King's Daughter: A Family's Journey Through Finland's Wars BUY NOW
From 1939 to 1945, Finland fought three wars: the Winter War of 1939, when the Soviet Union attacked the country; the Continuation War, when Finland fought the Soviet Union alongside Germany; and the Lapland War of 1944-45 against Germany.
Stina Katchadourian's memoir tells the story of how these three wars uprooted the lives of one Finnish family. The book draws on the author's childhood memories and also on the correspondence between her parents, who were separated during most of World War II, with the father on the front, fighting the Soviets.
Very little has previously been written about Finland's dramatic political history during World War II. How this small country retained its independence despite facing occupation by the Soviet Union or domination by Nazi Germany is told in riveting detail in this eyewitness account, which also includes family photos, maps, historical photos and other unique material from Swedish and Finnish archives.
Katchadourian grew up in Finland as part of its Swedish-speaking minority and moved to the United States in 1966. She is the author of two nonfiction books, Efronia, An Armenian Love Story and Great Need Over the Water, and has published book-length translations of poetry by Märta Tikkanen, Edith Södergran, and Tua Forsström.
Stina Katchadourian also works as a journalist for Scandinavian media. She regularly contributes to a Helsinki newspaper and has made numerous programs for Finnish radio and television.
She holds an M.A. from Stanford University and has been an Affiliated Scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She has held residencies at the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, and the MacDowell Foundation in New Hampshire. She has served on the Board of the Global Fund for Women and currently serves on the Board of the Bay Area Chapter of the Finlandia Foundation, and is an honorary member of the Finland-Swedish Literature Society. Her prizes include the Leif and Inger Sjögren Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavia Society and the Södergran Prize.
Lan Samantha Chang
Thursday, October 7, 7:00 p.m.
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
At the renowned writing school in Bonneville, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic and mysterious poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred.
All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost offers a starkly honest portrait of people caught up in the drive to write and of the personal bargains and self-deceptions that such an ambition can entail. Lan Samantha Chang was brave to write this book, to turn her novelist's eye onto a world she knows intimately, and her bravery pays off in the unflinching final scenes. (Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic )
What a lovely, fierce book about love, betrayal, loss, and time’s dominion over us all. Fleet, preternaturally attuned to the ebb and flow of personal history, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is, well, unforgettable. Lan Samantha Chang sees deeply into her characters, right down to their souls, but she wields her intelligence with the compassion of a master. (Scott Spencer, author of A Ship Made of Paper )
Lucy, Roman, Bernard, and Miranda are characters you won’t soon forget. In their passionate, demanding, wrecked, and joyous literary lives, they thrive on their belief in language’s absolute authority. This deeply affecting--and elegant--novel by Lan Samantha Chang definitely offers what Leonard Cohen calls his whole career in song: All day and night, versions of the erotic. I wish I could live long enough to discover this novel in an attic trunk a hundred years in the future, and exclaim, so this is what ‘poetic education’ really meant. (Howard Norman, author of What Is Left the Daughter )
Lan Samantha Chang's fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Story and The Best American Short Stories 1994 and 1996. Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritance. She is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships at Stanford University. She also received, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Teaching-Writing fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus fellowship. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she directs the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Giovanni Tempesta
Monday, October 11, 7:00 p.m.
Acque, Lutulente E Chiare: Waters, Muddy and Clear
The 30 poems collected in Waters, muddy and clear, will let the reader penetrate Tempesta's nostalgic Italian heart. His verses, some in rhymes, are about love, desire, passion and compassion, fear and rejection, and the irony of life in all its aspects.
Translating poetry is an arduous task but he succeeded in recreating in English, the emotional impact of his original poems in Italian. At the end, he even invites the readers to give their own interpretation of the final poem, My Lady. Giovanni is a firm believer that we are all poets in one way or another, and that poetry lives inside of us. Poetry is part of each and every one of us, without exception. It is like a remote and hidden prisoner. He feels that man, like Michelangelo and his David, must do nothing but give it freedom from its imprisonment. Once sent forth, however, poetry belongs to us no longer, thus we often do not feel worthy of it. We hold the doubt that it was really our delivery, that it was hidden inside us for so long.
Giovanni Tempesta has been a Professor of Italian Language and Culture at Stanford University since 1983. Over the years, he has also taught Latin, Greek and French in Northern California and Italy. He was born and raised in Italy and moved to California in 1972.
Meet-and-Greet Signing: Alex Ross
Friday, October 15, 2:30 p.m.
Listen to This
The Rest Is Noise
Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross described his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of Ross’s writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.
Ross has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.
NOTE: This is a meet-and-greet booksigning. The author will not give a formal presentation.
Jimmy Carter
Tuesday, October 26, 7:00 p.m.
White House Diary
The edited, annotated diary of President Jimmy Carter--filled with insights into his presidency, his relationships with friends and foes, and his lasting impact on issues that still preoccupy America and the world
Each day during his presidency, Jimmy Carter made several entries in a private diary, recording his thoughts, impressions, delights, and frustrations. He offered unvarnished assessments of cabinet members, congressmen, and foreign leaders; he narrated the progress of secret negotiations such as those that led to the Camp David Accords. When his four-year term came to an end in early 1981, the diary amounted to more than five thousand pages. But this extraordinary document has never been made public—until now.
Jimmy Carter, our thirty-ninth president, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. The author of numerous bestsellers—including An Hour Before Daylight and Palestine Peace Not Apartheid—he and his wife, Rosalynn, live in Plains, Georgia, but continue to travel around the world in support of numerous philanthropic efforts.
NOTE: This is a meet-and-greet book-signing. President Carter will not be giving a formal presentation.
TICKETED EVENT. Please check keplers.com often for details and updates.
Bo Caldwell
Wednesday, October 27, 7:00 p.m.
City of Tranquil Light
Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng— City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them?
Told through Will and Katherine's alternating viewpoints—and inspired by the lives of the author's maternal grandparents—City of Tranquil Light is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book, it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn.
Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller The Distant Land of My Father. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Story, Epoch, and other literary journals. A former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University, she lives in Northern California with her husband, novelist Ron Hansen.
November Events
Thomas McGuane
Tuesday, November 2, 7:00 p.m.
Driving on the Rim
From one of America’s most acclaimed literary figures (“an important as well as brilliant novelist”—The New York Times Book Review) a major new novel that hilariously takes the pulse of our times.
The unforgettable voyager of this dark comic journey is I. B. “Berl” Pickett, M.D., the die of whose uncharmed life was probably cast as soon as his mother got the bright idea to name him after Irving Berlin. The boyhood insults to any chance of normalcy piled on apace thereafter. What would have become of this soul had he not gone to medical school, thanks to the surrogate parenting of a local physician and solitary bird hunter?
But there is meaning to life beyond professional accreditation, even in the noblest of callings. Berl’s been on a mission to find it these past few years, though with scant equipment or basis for hope. Hard to say (for the moment anyway) whether his mission has been aided or set back by his having fallen under suspicion of negligent homicide in the death of his former lover.
Fortunately, he will find his deliverance in continuing to practice medicine one way or another, as well as in the few human connections he has made, wittingly or not, over the years. The landscape, too, will furnish a hint in what might yet prove, if not a certifiable epiphany, a semi-spiritual awakening in I. B. Pickett, M.D., the inglorious but sole hero of Thomas McGuane’s uproarious and profound exploration of the threads by which we all are hanging.
Geoffrey Wolff
Thursday, November 4, 7:00 p.m.
The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum
Introduction by Geoffrey's brother, Tobias Wolff
Joshua Slocum escaped a Dickensian childhood in Nova Scotia in 1860, at the age of sixteen, as an ordinary seaman. Despite his third-grade education, Slocum’s rise through the ranks was mercurial: just a decade later he was commander of his own ship, the first of many. His journey had already taken him nearly everywhere—but his crowning glory was yet to come.
In 1895 he set sail—by himself—in the small sloop Spray. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated for another quarter century. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, soon made him famous. A decade later, he set off alone once more—and was lost at sea.
An acclaimed novelist, essayist, biographer, and critic, Geoffrey Wolff is a prominent voice in contemporary American literature. Educated at Cambridge and at Princeton, from which he graduated summa cum laude, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, where he was the Director of the Graduate Fiction Program from 1995 to 2006. Previously, he served on the faculties of Istanbul University and Princeton University and has been a book editor at the Washington Post and Newsweek. He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and his honors also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. During 2007, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
Betty Auchard
Sunday, November 7, 2:00 p.m.
The Home for the Friendless: Finding Hope, Love, and Family
Life for Betty and her family is so rich with turmoil that it rivals any present-day reality television. Her parents marry young, but don't know how to stay together. In between their separations and reunions, constant housing changes and job layoffs, Betty, her brother, and her sister are shuffled off to live with a variety of relatives, and eventually, a children's shelter called the Home for the Friendless. Yet despite her circumstances, Betty's irreverent nature allows her to see humor and opportunity. With both candor and charm, Betty narrates this poignant but hilarious story of an uncommon childhood that is filled with resourcefulness, remarkable escapades, and an abundance of love.
Betty Auchard was a retired art teacher when her husband of 49 years died. For her, writing became a way to heal, eventually taking on a life of its own. Her first book was Dancing in My Nightgown, These short, upbeat, inspiring stories tell us how this spunky septuagenarian survives—she decides to dance instead of sitting on the sidelines. Her stories have been published in the Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul series and the San Jose Mercury News and other periodicals.
In addition to writing full time, Betty presents the stories from her life to audiences in California’s Bay Area and beyond. She still lives happily within driving distance of her four children and ten grandchildren.
Pam Grange
Kepler's Author Events Manager
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Direct: 650.856.0978
Store: 650.324.4321
pam@keplers.com
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