Join us around UPB’s great table, where we will eat and talk about reading in the slow lane. We will enjoy wine and edibles prepared by the Musical Offering’s genius chef Erick Balbuena, featuring many ingredients gathered from the Berkeley Hills. We ask everyone to bring a paragraph or a few words you love that must be read carefully, and savored slowly.  Martin Holden and Bill McClung, hosts

6 to 8 on March 22 and April 26

$40 per person, wine, tax, and gratuity included

($15 for students and starving artists)

Reservations please at outreach@universitypressbooks.com

Or at the UPB Front Counter, or reply to this posting.

UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS/BERKELEY

2430 BANCROFT WAY 548-0585

Juan Garcia reading from "Soil and Civilization, January 2010

That’s Emerson on Goethe in Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write (Iowa, 2009), which I am nominating for UPB’s Best Gift Book of the Year.

From Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson’s Creative Process, page 25,  “Practical Hints”   (University of Iowa Press, 2009)

What’s a day without a bookstore? We cherish you all as wonderful retreats, browsing heavens, the perfect place to meet, the perfect date, the perfect outing with children, a wonderful daily oasis, a welcoming place of solitude, a magic theater of words, a generous place of discussion and shared passions, a constantly surprising calendar of authors and ideas, a communitarian center, a place of democracy in action.

The Guardian UK has been posting favorite bookstores for years, may I echo the sentiments of the Guardian’s  Jeremy Mercer saying:

“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers.”

Kaja Silverman reads Flesh of My Flesh, in conversation with Judith Butler and Anne Wagner.

From the description of Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press):

What is a woman?  What is a man?  How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for “wholeness” refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh.

From the book:

“All of our stories really are part of the same great volume: the Book of Life. And unlike the logos, the words in this book do not have to become flesh in order to save us. They are flesh.”  Introduction, page 14.

Some 125 people crowded into the Musical Offering Cafe on October 29 to hear a riveting  discussion of this new book.

From the discussion:

“I never write about books I don’t love.”  Kaja Silverman