Events
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Start: 6:00 pm
This schedule was on its way to print when word came of an opportunity to host journalist and international affairs analyst Martin Jacques as part of an area visit coordinated by Pacific Lutheran University's Chinese Studies program. Cofounder of the UK's Demos, he's been a columnist for The Times of London, a deputy editor of The Independent, editor of Marxism Today, presently is a columnist at The Guardian, and is here as author of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Penguin Press). "By far the best book on China to have been published in many years, and one of the most important inquiries into the nature of modernization ... Jacques's comprehensive and richly detailed analysis will be an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary China." - New Statesman. "The rise of China may well prove to be the defining economic and geopolitical change of our time, and few authors have given the subject deeper thought or a more illuminating analysis than Martin Jacques." - Niall Ferguson.
Start: 7:00 pm
Presented by LOS POETAS DEL MONTÓN. Esteemed poet, translator, essayist, and editor Martín Espada makes this Seattle return with the second of two reading visits. He is the author of seventeen books—his most recent The Republic of Poetry (W.W. Norton), which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a Pulitzer finalist. Likely to be heard from on this visit are poems from a forthcoming (2011) collection, The Trouble Ball. A new collection of essays, The Lover of a Subversive is also a Subversive (University of Michigan Press), is also due out later this year. He has received numerous other awards and honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premo Fronterizo, and NEA, PEN/Revson, and Guggenheim fellowships. A onetime tenant lawyer, Martín Espada now teaches creative writing and the poetry of Pablo Neruda at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Free admission. Tonight's reading at El Centro de la Raza will be preceded by a 6 p.m. reception. El Centro de la Raza is at 2524 16th Avenue South. For more information, please call (360) 478-7235.
Start: 7:30 pm
Co-presented with the TOWN HALL CENTER FOR CIVIC LIFE. Few books published last year came both out of the seeming blue and went on to find an ardent, engaged readership as Richmond, Virginia motorcycle mechanic and philosopher Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (new in paper, Penguin). "[Crawford] packs plenty of intellectual firepower into his polemic, quoting Aristotle in his own translation and sprinkling the text with erudite footnotes. Like Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Crawford's book reveals both why we do what we do and why the way we do it is important." - Time. "An unusual and compelling book that seduces us to succumb to the passions that are dormant within us, begging for release."- San Francisco Chronicle. At home, Matthew Crawford operates Shockoe Moto, a motorcycle repair shop, and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. $5 tickets are available at the door starting at 6:30 p.m. or in advance via www.brownpapertickets.com (or 1-800-838-3006). Preferred seating for Town Hall members. Town Hall Seattle is at 1119 Eighth Avenue (at Seneca). For more information on this evening, please call Elliott Bay at (206) 624-6600, Town Hall at (206) 652-4255, or see www.townhallseattle.org.
Start: 8:00 pm
Author of ten novels and writing that has appeared in publications ranging from The Paris Review to O, The Oprah Magazine, Ann Hood makes this welcome Elliott Bay return for her newest novel, The Red Thread (W.W. Norton). This poignant novel tells the story of people seeking children through adoption, with Maya Lange—its central character's stake in the tale—at its heart. "'There exists a silken red thread of destiny. It is said that this magical cord may tangle or stretch but never break.' So begins this wisely woven novel of a woman who opens an adoption agency for Chinese children after her own young daughter dies, both to help couples achieve their desire for parenthood and to mend her own frayed heart."- Elle Magazine. "The Red Thread is a work of aching beauty and indelible grace. A novel that elicits nothing less than wonder." - Dennis Lehane.
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