Upcoming Events

Presented in partnership with John Kochman Join celebrated author Sam Wasson in this live 90-minute class and discover the five things he’s learned about Hollywood’s second golden age, and the ways that those few gorgeous years in the late sixties and early seventies illuminate the challenges shaping the film industry today.. Online Event Details Single ticket for session - $40.00

City Lights celebrates POOR PRESS! Hosted by Lisa Gray Gracia and Tongo Eisen Martin with Audrey CandyCorn, Ingrid DeLeon, Lisa Ganser, Angel Heart, Muteado Silencio. and Val Vera POOR PRESS/Prensa Pobre is a poor people-led/indigenous people-led, grassroots non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing revolutionary media access, art, education and advocacy to silenced youth, adults and elders in poverty across the globe. All of POOR’s programs are focused on providing non-colonizing, community-based and community-led media, art and education with the goals of creating…

Presented in partnership with Book Passage Join award-winning author and professor Nicholas Buccola in this two-hour class and discover the five things he’s learned about the meaning of love from the life and thought of James Baldwin. Online Event Details Single ticket - $40.00

Nancy Perloff celebrates the launch of her new anthology Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology published by Reaktion Books Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works. Nancy Perloff, curator of an important Concrete Poetry exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, includes examples from the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe—groups that, together with the Brazilian poet…

Christopher W Shaw discusses his new book First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat published by City Lights Books The fight over the future of the U.S. Postal Service is on. Political ideologues and corporate interests have long sought to remake the USPS from a public institution into a private business, and in 2020, during an election dependent on mail-in votes, the attacks escalated. This year, with mid-term elections fast approaching and the next presidential contest…

City Lights in conjunction with Fern Books present Eduardo Berti reading from his new novel An Ideal Presence Translated by Daniel Levin Becker published by Fern Books In 2015, the Argentinian novelist Eduardo Berti spent several weeks in a “medico-literary” residency at the University Hospital Centre in Rouen, France, observing and conversing with the staff and volunteers of its palliative care department. From that experience he created this series of lightly fictionalized testimonials from nurses, nursing aides, doctors, administrators, porters,…

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Raj Patel discussing his new book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis published by University of Chicago Press In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of…