Events

Celebrate the all-new Winnie-the-Pooh tale for kids of all ages (and adults, too!) with Brazos Bookstore. Join us and the original Alley Theatre cast of their Winnie-the-Pooh production and

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood! 

REFRESHMENTS * COSTUME CONTEST * GIFT EDITIONS OF POOH CLASSICS

ACTIVITIES * GAMES * POSTER GIVEAWAY * AND MORE!

The anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations Charter
on 24 October 1945 has been celebrated as United Nations Day since
1948. It has traditionally been marked throughout the world by
meetings, discussions and exhibits on the achievements and goals of the
Organization. In 1971, the General Assembly recommended that Member
States observe it as a public holiday. In celebration of UN Day, the United Nations Association of Houston presents David L. Bosco, former senior editor at Foreign Policy. Bosco is Assistant Professor in the School of International
Service, American University. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he has been a political analyst
and journalist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and deputy director of a
joint United Nations-NATO project in Sarajevo. His writings have
appeared in a variety of publications, including the Washington Post,
Slate, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall
Street Journal-Europe, The American Prospect, and the American Scholar.
He has provided commentary and analysis for CNN, National Public Radio,
Voice of America, and other outlets.

Bosco's book, Five to Rule Them All,
tells the inside story of the UN Security Council, from the Berlin Airlift to the Iraq War. Part public theater, part
smoke-filled backroom, the Council has enjoyed notable successes and
suffered ignominious failures, but it has always provided a space for
the five great powers to sit down together. Drawing
on extensive research, including dozens of interviews with serving and
former ambassadors on the Council, the book chronicles political
battles and personality clashes as it opens the closed doors of its
meeting room. What emerges here is a revealing portrait of the most
powerful diplomatic body in the world.

When the five permanent members
are united, David Bosco points out, the Council can wage war, impose
blockades, redraw borders, unseat governments, and levy sanctions.
There are almost no limits to its authority. Yet the Council exists in
a world of realpolitik. Its members are, above all, powerful states
with their own diverging interests. Time and again, the Council's
performance has dashed the hope that its members would somehow work
together to establish a more peaceful world. But if these lofty hopes
have been unfulfilled, the Council has still served an invaluable
purpose: to prevent conflict between the Great Powers. In this role,
the Council has been an unheralded success. As Bosco reminds us,
massacres in the Balkans and chaos in Iraq are human tragedies, but
conflicts between the world's great powers in the nuclear age would be
catastrophic.

In this lively, fast-moving, and often humorous
narrative, Bosco illuminates the role of the Security Council in the
postwar world, making a compelling case for the enduring importance of
the five who rule them all.

Click here for details and registration.

In association with the World Affairs Council of Houston, Asia Society, and Friends of Women's Studies at the University of Houston, Brazos Bookstore presents Nicholas Kristof for a talk and signing of his new book, Half the Sky. Directions to the Jones School at Rice can be found here.

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms
against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression
of women and girls in the developing world.

With Pulitzer Prize
winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we
undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary
women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex
slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in
childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting
experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness,
clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

They show how a little help can
transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl
eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid
group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The
Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon.
A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her
doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.

Through these stories,
Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies
in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people
have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part.
Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic
resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China
have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought
them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not
only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting
poverty.

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are the first married couple to
win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism; they won for their coverage of
China as New York Times correspondents. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer for his op-ed columns in the Times. He has also served as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, and as associate managing editor. At the Times, Ms. WuDunn worked as a business editor and as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo and Beijing.

“Women facing poverty, oppression, and violence are usually viewed as victims. Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky
shows that unimaginable challenges are often met with breathtaking
bravery. These stories show us the power and resilience of women who
would have every reason to give up but never do. They will be an
inspiration for anyone who reads this book, and a model for those
fighting for justice around the world. You will not want to put this
book down.”
-Angelina Jolie

“I read Half the Sky in
one sitting, staying up until 3 a.m. to do so. It is brilliant and
inspirational, and I want to shout about it from the rooftops and
mountains. It vividly illustrates how women have turned despair into
prosperity and bravely nurtured hope to cultivate a bright future. The
book ends with an especially compelling ‘What you can do’ to exhort us
all to action.”
-Greg Mortenson, author, Three Cups of Tea

“If
you have always wondered whether you can change the world, read this
book. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have written a brilliant call
to arms that describes one of the transcendent injustices in the world
today–the brutal treatment of women. They take you to many countries,
introduce you to extraordinary women, and tell you their moving tales.
Throughout, the tone is practical not preachy and the book’s
suggestions as to how you can make a difference are simple, sensible,
and yet powerful. The authors vividly describe a terrible reality about
the world we live in but they also provide light and hope that we can,
in fact, change it.”
-Fareed Zakaria, author, The Post-American World

“It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book about one of
the most serious problems of our time: the worldwide abuse and
exploitation of women.  In addition to describing the injustices,
Kristof and WuDunn show how concerned individuals everywhere are
working effectively to empower women and help them overcome adversity. 
Wonderfully written and vividly descriptive, Half the Sky can and should galvanize support for reform on all levels.  Inspiring as it is shocking, this book demands to be read.” 
-Anne Rice

“Half the Sky
is a passionate and persuasive plea to all of us to rise up and say ‘No
more!’ to the 17th-century abuses to girls and women in the
21st-century world. This is a book that will pierce your heart and
arouse your conscience. It is a powerful piece of journalism by two
masters of the craft who are tireless in their pursuit of one of the
most shameful conditions of our time.”
-Tom Brokaw

“The
stories that Kristof and WuDunn share are as powerful as they are
heartbreaking. Their insight into gender issues and the role of women
in development inspires hope, optimism, and most importantly, the will
to change. Both a brutal awakening and an unmistakable call to action,
this book should be read by all.”
-Melinda Gates

“An
unblinking look at one of the seminal moral challenges of our time.
This stirring book is at once a savage indictment of gender inequality
in the developing world and an inspiring testament to these women’s
courage, resilience, and their struggle for hope and recovery. An
unexpectedly uplifting read.”
-Khaled Hosseini, author, The Kite Runner

Carolina De Robertis was raised in England, Switzerland, and California by Uruguayan parents. Her fiction and literary translations have appeared in ColorLines, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among others. She is the recipient of a 2008 Hedgebrook Residency for Women Authoring Change and the translator of the Chilean novella Bonsaí by Alejandro Zambra.

The starred review of her novel The Invisible Mountain in Publishers Weekly says:

The history of Uruguay through the 20th century sparks personal tragedies amid political intrigues and cultural upheavals in this enchanting, funny and heartbreaking debut novel. Three generations of women populate this sweeping saga: Pajarita, the miracle child who at the dawn of the new century disappears and then reappears in a tree...Eva, Pajarita's daughter, who suffers a cruel childhood and learns to spin her painful experiences into a new life of art and adventure as a poet; and Salomé, seduced by communism and nearly losing everything fighting for the cause she believes will save her country. This novel is beautifully written yet deliberate in its storytelling. It gains momentum as the women's lives spin increasingly out of control while Uruguay sinks into war, economic instability and revolution. An extraordinary first effort whose epic scope and deft handling reverberate with the deep pull of ancestry, the powerful influence of one's country and the sacrifices of reinvention.

We are thrilled to host Carolina De Robertis for a reading and signing.

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In Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, writer and journalist Peter Maass brings us a stunning and revealing examination of oil's indelible impact on the countries that produce it and the people who possess it.

He takes us to Saudi Arabia, where officials deflect inquiries about
the amount of petroleum remaining in the country’s largest reservoir;
to Equatorial Guinea, where two tennis courts grace an oil-rich
dictator’s estate but bandages and aspirin are a hospital’s only
supplies; and to Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez’s campaign to
redistribute oil wealth creates new economic and political crises.

Maass also introduces us to Iraqi oilmen trying to rebuild their
industry after the invasion of 2003, an American lawyer leading
Ecuadorians in an unprecedented lawsuit against Chevron, a Russian oil
billionaire imprisoned for his defiance of Vladimir Putin’s leadership,
and Nigerian villagers whose livelihoods are destroyed by the discovery
of oil. Rebels, royalty, middlemen, environmentalists, indigenous
activists, CEOs—their stories, deftly and sensitively presented, tell
the larger story of oil in our time.

Brazos Bookstore and Brazos owner Matt Simmons introduce Peter Maass for a reading and signing of this startling and essential account of the consequences of our addiction to oil. 

Peter Maass is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has reported from the Middle East, Asia, South America and Africa. He has written as well for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post and Slate. Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, which chronicled the Bosnian war and won prizes from the Overseas Press Club and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in New York City.

Spend All Hallows' Eve Eve Eve at your favorite bar for your favorite reading series. This month's readers are Rich Levy, author of the collection of poems Why Me?; Emily Fox Gordon, auhor of the novel It Will Come to Me; and Rauan Klassnik, author of the explosive book of poems, Holy Land. Check out the new Poison Pen Reading Series website at http://www.poisonpenreadingseries.com

Brazos Bookstore is proud to present Bruce Smith and Jules Gibbs, a power poetry couple visiting Houston from the fine city of Syracuse, New York.

Bruce Smith is a visiting professor at the University of Houston, and a full-time professor at the creative writing program at Syracuse University. He's the author of five books of poetry: The Common Wages, Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth), Mercy Seat, The Other Lover, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, Songs for Two Voices. His sixth book of poems, Devotions, will be published this spring. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and many other publications. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and was a winner of the Discovery/The Nation Prize. In 2000 he was a Guggenheim fellow and has twice been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts. 

Jules Gibbs is visiting from Syracuse, NY, teaching poetry at Inprint and Black Middle School, through the auspices of Writers In The Schools. She's been a fellow at the Ucross Foundation, and her commissioned poem was part of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver this summer. Her poems currently appear or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, MARGIE, Salt Hill Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, The New Anonymous, Stone Canoe, and Born Magazine, among other journals. Her work was recently selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2009, an anthology due out later this month from University of Virginia Press. 

Please join us for an evening with Bruce Smith and Jules Gibbs, and help us welcome them to Houston for the semester.

The closing event of the 8th Annual Books on the Bayou features a visit from author and Zora Neale Hurston scholar Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, to discuss and sign her book. Valerie Boyd is the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia. This event is free and open to the public, as are all Books on the Bayou events.

Visit www.houstonlibrary.org for more information.

Join the Houston Chronicle for our gala 30th anniversary celebrating three decades of bringing noteworthy authors to Houston!

Business Attire

Autographing Reception & Book Sales
5:00 p.m.

Dinner
7 p.m.

Program
8 p.m.

The exciting program includes Oscar Casares, Lee Child, David Cross, Julie Powell, and Charlaine Harris.

    Tables of 10 may be reserved as follows:

Limited Edition table(s) for 12 at $25,000
First Edition table(s) for 10 at $10,000
Best Seller table(s) for 10 at $5,000

Paperback table(s) for 10 at $2,500

 Individual tickets may be reserved as follows:

First Edition ticket(s) at $1,000 each
Best Seller ticket(s) at $500 each each
Paperback ticket(s) at $250 each

Purchase your tickets or make a contribution click here, or
contact Susan Bischoff, president of the Houston Public Library Foundation,
at 832-393-1450, or fax to 832-393-1383 or SBischoff@houstonlibraryfoundation.org

Event proceeds benefit the literacy programs of the Houston Public Library and the Houston Chronicle.

An Evening of Memory, Story, and Power

In celebration of their 25th anniversary, WITS invite
you to join them for a special event on November 5, 2009 at 7:00 PM at
the Junior League of Houston.
Li Cunxin will return to Houston where he made history as the former
principal dancer at the Houston Ballet. The fascinating story of his
life is recorded in his memoir, Mao's Last Dancer, and has recently
been brought to life on the big screen in a new major motion picture of
the same title.

In many ways Li Cunxin is the perfect person to speak on behalf of
WITS.  Just as Li told his powerful life story in his memoir, WITS
encourages and teaches thousands of children every year to tell their
own stories in their own voices.  WITS empowers Houston children so
that many more powerful stories can be told.

For a list of table and ticket prices and to purchase online via PayPal click here.

Details and more info at www.witshouston.org.

Mark your calendars and rustle up friends, family and loved ones for the Houston Peace & Justice Center's 2009 National Peacemaker Awards Dinner.

This year's national Peacemaker award recipient and keynote speaker is
the venerable Helen Thomas, doyenne of the White House Press Corps.
Thomas has covered the administrations of ten presidents in a career
spanning nearly sixty years. Other awardees will be recognized for their leadership and dedication
to peace and justice work, including the esteemed Ann Wright, retired
United States Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State
Department, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She is
most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to
publicly resign in direct protest of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The awards dinner is the annual fund raiser for the Houston Peace and
Justice Center. It provides a large percentage of the funds needed to
carry on HPJC's important work and helps keep HPJC financially secure.

Brazos Bookstore will handle book sales at the event, but you can pick up a copy now at 2421 Bissonnet St., Houston, TX 77005 or call 713.523.0701. 10% of book sales will go to HPJC.

Tickets are $75.

As always, subsidized seats will be available, so don't feel priced out.

Reserve your tickets now...
ONLINE: Make your reservations through paypal by clicking the yellow
"DONATE" button on the HPJC website. Specify in the "Purpose" box, the number
of tickets purchasing, names of attendees (for name badge purposes at
event) and whether a vegan meal is desired for any or all.

SNAIL
MAIL: Send check payable to HPJC, PO Box 66234, Houston, TX 77726, with
names of attendees and choice between vegan or nonvegan meal.

For questions, call HPJC at 832.288.4099 or email
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Please join us for an evening with former Houstonian S. L. (Sandi) Wisenberg, author of The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. Check out her award-winning blog at http://cancerbitch.blogspot.com.

Cancer is S. L. Wisenberg’s muse, and Cancer Bitch is her blog.
Drawing on a wealth of personal, literary, and historical sources—from
Jewish liturgy to the first crude mastectomies, from Anne Frank to Emma
Goldman—The Adventures of Cancer Bitch creates an indelible
image of a politically engaged, self-aware (sometimes neurotic) woman
facing a daunting disease with equal measures of humor, well-founded
fear, and keen intelligence.

Wisenberg may have lost a
breast, but she retained her humor, outrage, and skepticism toward
common wisdom and most institutions. While following the prescribed
protocols at the place she called Fancy Hospital, Wisenberg is
unsparing in her descriptions of the fumblings of new doctors, her own
awkward announcement to her students, and the mounds of unrecyclable
plastic left at a survivors’ walk. Combining the personal with the
political, she shares her research on the money spent on pink ribbons
instead of preventing pollution and the disparity in medical care
between the insured and the uninsured. When chemotherapy made her bald,
she decorated her head with henna swirls in front and an antiwar
protest in back. During treatment, she also recorded the dailiness of
life in Chicago as she rode the El, taught while one-breasted, and
attended High Holiday services and a Passover seder.

Wisenberg’s
writing has been compared to a mix of Leon Wieseltier and Fran
Lebowitz, and in this book she has Wieseltier’s erudition and
Lebowitz’s self-deprecating cleverness: “If anybody ever offers you the
choice between suffering and depression, take the suffering. And I
don't mean physical suffering. I mean emotional suffering. I am hereby
endorsing psychic suffering over depression.”

From The Adventures of Cancer Bitch:

I
found that when you invite people to a pre-mastectomy party, they show
up. Even those with small children. The kids were so young that they
didn't notice that most of the food had nipples. . . . I talked to
everyone—about what I'm not sure. Probably about my surgery. Everyone
told me how well I looked. I felt giddy. I was going to go under, but
not yet; I was going to be cut, but not yet; I was going to be bald,
but not yet. As my friend who had bladder cancer says: The thing about
cancer is you feel great until they start treating you for it.

"The Adventures of Cancer Bitch is witty and relentless,
surprising and honest...this is a cornucopia of breast
cancer information as well as a very smart, funny read from an
excellent writer."—Audrey Niffenegger, author, The Time Traveler’s Wife

S. L. Wisenberg grew up in Houston and helped edit the Three Penny Press at Bellaire High School. She is the author of a short story collection, The Sweetheart Is In; a personal essay collection about Jewish identity, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions; and The Adventures of Cancer Bitch,
based on her award-winning blog. She has received grants and
fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the
Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her work is widely published and anthologized, most recently in Creating Nonfiction: a Guide and AnthologyCrafting the Very Short Story: an Anthology of 100 Masterpieces. She
has degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the co-director of
the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program at Northwestern.

Join Brazos and Houston's own Classical Theatre Company in their third year of partnership. As part of their free Douglas Earle Johnston Reading Series, CTC will do a live reading of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Aeschylus’s tragedy is based on the myth of Prometheus, a Titan who was punished by the god Zeus for giving fire to mankind and for thwarting his plan to destroy the world. Join us!

More info at www.classicaltheatre.org or 713-963-9665.

Gulf Coast Magazine,
in collaboration with Brazos Bookstore,
hosts its annual reading series for MFA and PhD students of Creative
Writing at the University of Houston. Three writers will read from
original works of poetry, fiction, and/or non-fiction. November readers
to be announced.

Please join Brazos Bookstore and Voices Breaking Boundaries at the Rothko Chapel for a lecture about Pakistan with British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali.

Born in Lehore in 1943, Tariq Ali was educated at Oxford University, where he became involved in student politics, particularly with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programs for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers. He is editorial director of London publisher Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor.

His fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000), and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005). His books of essays include The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002) and The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009).

As a sacred space dedicated to broadening interfaith understanding, the Rothko Chapel is committed to bringing together people of all faiths to experience the tranquil meditative environment inspired by the murals of the American painter Mark Rothko. The Rothko Chapel presents a full series of programs exploring human rights, culture, and spirituality.

For information about programs or the Rothko Chapel, call 713-524-9839 or visit www.rothkochapel.org.

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Since we had to cancel his reading last year due to Hurricane Ike, we
have anxiously been awaiting A.J. Jacobs's next appearance in Houston.
Brazos and the Jewish Community Center are thrilled to host him for a
reading of The Guinea Pig Diaries (released Sept. 8, 2009), a
book of essays on all of A.J.'s hilarious adventures as a human guinea
pig, including "My Outsourced Life" and "My Life as a Hot Woman."

A.J. Jacobs is the editor of What It Feels Like and the author of The Two Kings: Jesus and Elvis, The Year of Living Biblically, The Know-It-All, and America Off-Line. He is the senior editor of Esquire and has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, New York magazine, New York Observer, and other publications.

Please help us welcome him to Houston at JCC's 37th Annual Jewish Book & Arts Fair. Buy tickets here.

The online box office is now closed. Tickets will be available at the door.

Tickets to this event are $30 and include a signed first edition of The Museum of Innocence.

This is event is presented in association with Inprint.

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” So
begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the
universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red. It
is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the
city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel,
daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a
beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins
violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and
the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he
lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip,
restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused
with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement
to Sibel.

But his resolve comes too late. For eight years Kemal will
find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished
backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her
parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class
life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love
will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he
promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap
hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his
feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that
chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions:
anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of
recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of
signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only
meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy
corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an
awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess,
certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his
collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s
broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also
plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its
emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s
greatest achievement.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

Join us for an evening with former Houstonian and two-time Pulitzer winner Jesse Katz, whose new book, The Opposite Field, is dropping jaws everywhere. Learn more at byjessekatz.com.

“You need two things to make a fine, fine book: a story and a teller. The Opposite Field
brings them together, like young love. It's a story about fathers and
sons, and good love and failed love, and baseball. If that isn't by God
a book I don't know what is....But the best thing about this book is
the teller. This guy can flat-out write.”
—Rick Bragg, author the New York Times bestseller All Over but the Shoutin’

"A love letter from a father to his son, The Opposite Field is
also a hymn to baseball, the new Los Angeles, the joy and pain of
modern parenting as well as one man's journey into wisdom and clarity,
and Jesse Katz shapes this material in such a way that he makes it as
dramatic as a movie. I never would have thought a book about a Little
League team could be this compelling, or that so much could be at
stake, or that La Loma could become--and it does in Katz's buoyant
prose--the stuff of legend."
—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park

Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original
memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self,
of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and
failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and
Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a
culture, or a community, or a home.

Faced with the collapse of
his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the
largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds
himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park.
Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant
community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and
night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his
capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home.

While
Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches
and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms
unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift
of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated
personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for
trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s
stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding
on to–the love of a good woman.

Through it all, Jesse’s
emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his
father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La
Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a
son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man.

This is an epic
book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly
poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a
way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means
to be alive.
 

Jesse Katz is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former staffer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine. From 1994 to 1998, he was the Houston bureau chief for the LA Times and wrote dozens of stories about Texas arts and politics and vices, including the murder of Tejano star Selena, the controversy over novelist Sandra Cisneros's purple house, and the record number of executions on death row. He has also written for Texas Monthly and lived in Houston's Willowbend neighborhood. He now lives with his son, Max, in Monterey Park, California.