Back to newsletter listDate:
Fri, February 08, 2008 02:03:13 PMFrom:
City Lights Books
Subject:
City Lights Events | Samantha Hunt and Donna Haraway
@
City Lights Bookstore
All events are free and open to the public.
Unless otherwise noted, all events take place at
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133
415-362-8193
Map & Directions
Wednesday, February 13, 2008, 7 p.m.
reading from
The Invention of Everything Else
published by Houghton Mifflin
The Invention of Everything Else is at once a father/daughter story, a love story, and a fantastical and seductive New York story. History and imagination unite to explore the intersection of love and science and to investigate a friendship between the fictional Louisa, a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker, and real-life legendary Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. Reminiscent of work by Steven Millhauser and Michael Chabon, the story brings to life a vibrant and exciting portrait of early-twentieth-century Manhattan.
Samantha Hunt is the author of the acclaimed first novel The Seas, for which she recently received the first-ever “5 under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. Her fiction has been featured in The New Yorker and on “This American Life.” Time Out New York called her “a writer to watch,” and Dave Eggers described her as having “one of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years.”
Thursday, February 14, 2008, 7 pm
discussing
When Species Meet
published by University of Minnesota Press
Whom do we touch when we touch a dog? How does this touch shape our multispecies world?
In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending more than 38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.”
In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal–human encounters.
Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal–human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism.
One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.
This email was sent to clifordharry@gmail.com, by City Lights Books.
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