T.S. Eliot penned April the cruelest month, but for many, Prohibition represented hard times. W. C. Fields recalled it as a period in his life, “when I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”  (This line was discovered in an op-ed essay mentioned below…) The years between 1919 and 1933 [...]

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Books are good for lots of things–knowledge, reference, imagination, learning, fun, to name a few.  But some books over time have been rendered almost irrelevant. Such is the case with most encyclopedias. As our friends over at The Bold Italic mention, “if any of us owned encyclopedias today, there’s a slim chance that we’d choose [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan I don’t know about you guys, but I am really excited for the upcoming Porchlight Storytelling Series on Monday, November 21st. Why you ask?  Well for one, it’s a Porchlight first—where two people get up and tell the same story.   Think of when your friends try and tell the same [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan It’s BAAACCKK!  And this time, the San Francisco Public Library ‘s Literary Speed Dating will focus on connecting baby boomers with new love. On Aug. 2, for same-sex dating, and Aug. 9, for straight dating, interested book worms can come to the main library’s Latino Hispanic Community Meeting Room.  The event [...]

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By Marcia Schneider The American Library Association was the first organization to bring a large national conference to New Orleans post Katrina, in June 2006. Chris Rose, former columnist for the Times-Picayune, wrote an Op-Ed piece titled And the Librarians Shall Lead Them, praising the librarians and predicting that the conference would be a turning [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan Moon walking in the Library?  Not so out of this world at the IMBIBE at the Marina Branch Library party tonight from 7-10 PM. Cocktails, telescopes, astronauts and authors make up the second installment of Friends of the San Francisco Public Library’s Member-exclusive, after-hours cocktail party. The event celebrates the launch [...]

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By Marcia Schneider Public libraries, long recognized as a refuge for readers, students, intellectuals, the economically disadvantaged and more, have an increasingly important role in our society as community gathering place.  Open to all, this most democratic of all public institutions is undergoing an evolution, thanks to new technologies and the downturn in the economy.  [...]

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For the past month, San Francisco based artist and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton has been going to the library a lot. She visited every floor, took detailed notes and even waited out front before it even opened. From all this hard work came a beautiful and inspiring art-essay for The Rumpus entitled, Meanwhile, the San Francisco [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal This Wednesday, April 6, I’m interviewing Chris Rainier for City Arts & Lectures. I should probably be more nervous, because he is VERY FAMOUS but hey, this guy has spent his whole career walking into places where he doesn’t speak the language, and many where bullets are flying overhead, and he’s [...]

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By Katie Sue Ambellan Sorry for the late post today. Us folks here at The Readers Review are still trying to recover from the awesome IMBIBE library cocktail party on Friday, that we almost forgot tell ya about the new ZZYZZYVA website! Unveiled earlier today, ZZYZZYVA‘s site has a fresh, clean look, some new staff [...]

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