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Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story
writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his death, this
definitive biography tells the story of Carver's uncanny ambition, legendary
life, and enduring work.

When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a
distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the Times of London said, "the
Chekhov of middle America." His influence
on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted.
Not so generally known are how Carver became a writer, how he suffered to
achieve his art, and how his troubled and remarkable personality affected those
around him.

Carol Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography
re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima,
Washington, where he was the
nervous, overweight son of a kindly, alcohol-dependent lumbermill worker. By
the time he was nineteen, Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Maryann
Burk. From a basement apartment where they were raising their first child and
expecting their second, they determined that Ray would become a writer. Despite
the handicaps of an erratic education and utter lack of financial resources, he
succeeded.

Maryann's belief in Carver's talent was unshakable, as was
her willingness to support the family and see her experiences transformed in
his fiction. Sklenicka reveals the entwined histories of this passionate,
volatile marriage and Carver's career. She describes his entry into the
literary world via "little magazines" and the Iowa Writers' Workshop;
his publication by Esquire editor Gordon Lish and their ensuing relationship;
his near-fatal alcoholism, which worsened even as he produced many of the
unforgettable stories collected in Will
You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Sklenicka examines Carver's
warmhearted friendships with scores of writers, including Richard Ford, Tobias
Wolff, John Gardner, Joy Williams, Al Young, William Kittredge, Leonard
Michaels, Chuck Kinder, and Hayden Carruth; she shows how his stories about
unemployment, drinking, marital trauma, divorce, troubled children, and
suburban malaise, dubbed "minimalist" by critics, won readers with
their precise and humane portrayal of ordinary lives. She examines the
dissolution of his first marriage and his partnership with poet Tess Gallagher,
who helped him enjoy the full measure of his success. Ever grateful that he'd
been able to renounce alcohol, Carver shunned pity and considered himself a
"lucky man" as he faced death from lung cancer in 1988.

Carol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people
who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and
all of Carver's poems and stories for Raymond
Carver, which took ten years to write. Her portrait is generous and wise and
shows how Carver's quintessentially American life fostered the stories that
knowing readers have cherished from their first publication until the present
day.

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Poet Jim Powell’s first collection in twenty years examines
the indigenous habitat of Northern California,
treating history as a kind of sediment. Powell, fascinated by the first person,
turns to eyewitness historical accounts and primary witnesses to create a
portrait assembled of samples from twenty-five ‘strata’ in the ‘substrate’ of
the region.

Largely narrative, Powell’s poems embrace the tradition,
borrowing tools from prose and contemporary oral narration. His title poem
summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history, ethnology,
archeology, ethnobotany and linguistics, all providing a composite cultural
history of California.  Substrate
is a vivid, multifaceted volume dazzling in its lush imagery and its linguistic
richness.

Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made the
World and the translator of The Poetry of Sappho and Catullan Revenants.
He received a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship
(1993-1198), and was the Sherry Poet and Lecturer at the University of Chicago
in 2005. He is a fourth generation California
native and lifelong resident of the Bay Area.

See
David Ulin’s Los Angeles Times’ review.

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“This is THE
parenting book.  This is the one to read
over and over.  So much wisdom and
empathy, all based in real science.  My
children owe Christine Carter big time.” -- Kelly Corrigan, author of The Middle Place

“The learning curve
for all parents is in failure analysis—where and how we went off course—and how
we can do better the next go round. Enter Raising Happiness, a compendium of
ideas and suggestions on how to do better and how to increase happiness and joy
in all families. Read it, enjoy, and most importantly, put it into practice.” --
Mike Riera, Ph.D., author Field Guide to
the American Teenager and Right From
Wrong

“Raising Happiness is
an elegant, funny, and rigorous handbook for the humbling task of raising
joyful children. Brimming with brilliantly distilled science, poignant stories
from her family, and what parents so urgently seek – clear, practical, and
informed guidance – it is an encyclopedia of wisdom for raising children in
today’s multitasking, multimedia world.” -- Dacher Keltner, author Born To Be Good: The Science of A Meaningful
Life, Professor of Psychology, University
of California, Berkeley

Christine Carter Ph.D., a sociologist, Executive Director of
the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and mother of two young
children herself, reveals ten simple principles, distilled from years of
fascinating research, to help parents foster the skills, habits, and mindsets
that will set the stage for positive emotions now and into their adolescence
and beyond.

Psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists
study happiness through single focus lenses, but when you put together their
disparate research -- as Carter does at the Greater Good Science Center -- you
see proof that happiness is a skill; it is a muscle any parent can help their
child build and maintain. In her new book, Carter
covers the day-to-day pressure points of

Parenting -- how best to discipline, get kids to school and
activities on time, and get dinner on the table -- as well as the more elusive
issues of helping children build healthy friendships and develop emotional
intelligence.

Bring your questions and observations and join the
discussion this evening!

Christine Carter is
a regular on ABC's “View from the Bay” talk show, has been profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle and quoted in
dozens of national publications including The
New York Times, the Boston Globe,
American Baby, and Parenting.

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A Finalist in Fiction for the National Jewish Book Awards!

Set in a Paris
darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling's sweeping and sensuous debut novel
(just now in paperback) tells the story of a son's quest to recover his
family's lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.

Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is
forbidden from entering the family business for reasons he cannot understand.
He reluctantly attends medical school, reserving his true passion for his
father's beautiful and brilliant gallery assistant, Rose Clement. When Paris falls to the Nazis,
the Berenzons survive in hiding. They return in 1944 to find that their
priceless collection has vanished: gone are the Matisses, the Picassos, and a
singular Manet of mysterious importance. Madly driven to recover his father's
paintings, Max navigates a torn city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers,
Resistants, and collaborators. His quest will reveal the tragic disappearance
of his closest friend, the heroism of his lost love, and the truth behind a
devastating family secret.

Written with tense drama and a historian's eye for detail,
Houghteling's novel draws on the real-life stories of France's
preeminent art-dealing families and the forgotten biography of the only French
woman to work as a double agent inside the Nazis' looted art stronghold. Pictures at an Exhibition conjures the
vanished collections, the lives of the artists and their dealers, the exquisite
romance, and the shattering loss of a singular era. It is a work of astonishing
ambition and beauty from an immensely gifted new novelist.

"In times like this, one turns to books like
"Pictures at an Exhibition" for their exhilarating sense of wonder
and ambition. No other book I have read in a long time has such depth of
history and intelligence, setting art as antidote for suffering, and love as
both a cause and remedy for pain." -- Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli

""Pictures at an Exhibition" is remarkably
self-assured, astute, worldly, and well-informed; in fact, it does not look
like a first novel at all. Its subject-matter-stolen paintings, and Nazis, and
the insatiable hunger for beauty-requires both erudition and brilliance, and
Sara Houghteling has plenty of both, along with a sense of humor and a warm
heart." -- Charles Baxter, author of The
Soul Thief

Sara Houghteling graduated from Harvard
College in 1999 and received her
master's in fine arts from the University
of Michigan. She is the
recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to Paris,
first prize in the Avery and Jules Hopwood Awards, and a John Steinbeck
Fellowship. She currently lives in California,
where she teaches high school English.