You can't imagine the writerly crisis I experienced typing up the questions for my Etgar Keret interview. What responses could I possibly elicit from Israel's most prominent fabulist that would rival the odd, sparkling stories of his latest, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (FSG Originals, 208pp, $14)? Better just to publish one of his pieces, perhaps the titular account of a man forced at gunpoint to overcome writer's block or the story of the guy who falls (via a buried gumball machine) into a world populated by characters from the fibs he's told over the year. Read more »

Opt for a night sans sloppy drunks, covers, reality TV, or morning-after regret. Opt for a book reading -- here, we'll get you started with a list of upcoming page-turners. 

Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein

Foer investigates the inner workings of our brain by drawing on scientific research, cultural history of memory, and personal explorations of different memory techniques.  

Fri/5 7:30 p.m., free. The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. Read more »

"Joanne [Griffith]'s work is centered on one theme: not to offer information as a point of journalistic fact, but to act as a conduit for debate and conversation, especially around issues relating to the African diaspora experience." So writes Brian Shazor, director of the Pacifica Radio Archives, in the foreward to Griffith's new book Redefining Black Power: Reflections on the State of Black America (City Lights Books, 206pp, $16.95). Griffith will be presenting her work, part of an interactive project to archive the state of African Americans in the United States in the Bay Area this week -- starting tonight (Wed/8) at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Read more »

It’s difficult to find anything negatively written about Justin Torres’ debut fiction novel, We the Animals -- and that’s probably because nothing negative has yet been written. Dorothy Allison called it, “a miracle in concentrated pages,” and Michael Cunningham said it was, “a dark jewel of a book.” So Torres is a literary wunderkind of sorts, but despite the buzzy accolades, the current Stegner fellow and queer scribe is still humbly bewildered by the success of a book by a gay brown author – especially his very own.

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Poet Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio, 100 years ago on December 13, 1911. He died in Palo Alto in 1972. Due to a ruptured spinal disk that was never properly treated, Patchen produced some 30 volumes of poetry and prose largely from the confines of his bed — work, nonetheless, that fiercely engaged the modern world that raged on outside. In his words, “I speak for a generation born in one war and doomed to die in another.” For this, the Beats were deeply indebted to his work. Patchen however, who lived in Telegraph Hill in the 1950s, referred to “Ginsberg and Co.” and the media hype surrounding them as a “freak show.”

Patchen had a broad range — he could be political, tender, devotional, and surreal — and unlike the Beats, he vehemently opposed being labeled as one kind of poet or another. Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection (Kelly’s Cove Press, paperback, $25), edited by Patchen’s friend Jonathan Clark, marks the 100th birthday of the indefinable poet. Clark first met Patchen in the 1960s as a teenager living in the same Palo Alto neighborhood as him. He describes the collection as “a personal selection of some poems in which I hear most clearly the voice of the man I remember...those seeking perfection had best look elsewhere...” Fair enough. However, the collection is also a reasonable review of the poet’s scope. And, if indeed modest, it’s still the only book that has observed the centennial.

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Incredibly, considering what a visual people my lavender tribe are, there has been no major photographic survey of gay men in America until now. (Well, at least in book form. I'm not counting Manhunt, here.) Author-photographer Scott Pasfield journeyed around the country for three years, taking some wonderfully enlightening shots of gay men, couples, and more who had responded to his online ads for photographic subjects who were willing to tell their stories. The tally for his "Gay in America" book: 224 pages, 140 men, 50 states.

Scott will be narrating a slideshow presentation of the book ("Not boring like a travel slideshow!" he says) on Sat/5 at 7 p.m. at Magnet in the Castro. I chatted with him over the phone about the project, the men, and the concept of gay "normalization."  

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If you read Jon Krakauer's 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven, and followed the trial of Warren Jeffs — notorious leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints, now in jail for life for sexual assault (after a stint on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List) — you'll dig Sam Brower's Prophet's Prey (Bloomsbury, 336 pgs., $27).

Brower's book, subtitled My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, is the thrilling and disturbing tale of the private investigator's relentless crusade for justice — not just in the Jeffs case, but against high-ranking FLDS members across Texas, Utah, Arizona, and beyond. The sect, which is completely removed from mainstream Mormonism, is best-known for its polygamist beliefs, often pairing underage brides with elderly church leaders (Jeffs is estimated to have over 50 wives, including the two, ages 12 and 15, that he was convicted of assaulting). They're extremely well-funded, with leaders who live in mansions even as the rank-and-file go hungry. They also don't care much for outsiders.

In Brower's estimation, the FLDS church is "an organized crime syndicate that specializes in child abuse" — after reading his book (with a preface by Krakauer), you'll tend to agree. He'll be reading in Berkeley Tues/15; I caught up with him by phone at his home in snowy Cedar City, Utah, just over an hour's drive from FLDS stronghold Short Creek, an isolated community straddling the Utah-Arizona border.

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