Rebecca Solnit at Woodward's Garden for dinner and a reading from Faraway Nearby, Tuesday, September 17, 6pm 

($55 per person, 3-courses + passed noshes with a glass of Prosecco)

We are thrilled that Rebecca Solnit has said yes to a night at the Garden to read from her new Faraway Nearby. The snap above is from the dinner she did with us two years ago for Infinite City, which was gorgeous.

Faraway Nearby is a memoir of sorts, yet in true Solnit fashion, is really about many things. It is tangential, layered, lyric, a story about story itself.

Here are some lines I've tweeted from it recently:

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them

...distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves

And here's what some brill people say about it: 

Solnit opens a door into a maze of stories within stories, a dreamlike memoir composed of fairy tales, literary criticism, history, philosophy...  — Meehan Crist | Bookforum

Faraway Nearby is a finely-wrought, intense and eloquent manifesto... — Marina Warner | The Guardian

Solnit finds herself in similar territory to (WG Sebald's) discursive, wandering erudition. In what other stylistic context could Wile E. Coyote and the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi appear on the same page?  — David Anderson | Granta

Along with Sebald, Solnit has been likened to such luminous writers as Annie Dillard and Susan Sontag. She is one of our very best. Her Faraway Nearby is shimmering. We are lucky, lucky, lucky.

At Woodward's Garden, September 17, 6pm, $55 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). Reserve through Open Table or call us at (415) 621-7122.

Menu to come. We're thinking something lamby & something apricot. Veg options, too. 

Faraway Nearby will be for sale at the dinner. Solnit will sign books, too.

C Magazine at the Perfumed Garden

This was an evening, friends.  To read more:  C Magazine at Woodward's Garden Scent Dinner...

So You Have a Business for 18 Years...

and this is what you're finally in the paper for:


Monday March 29, 2010
-- Cuba Gooding Jr. had lunch at Cafe de la Presse on Tuesday. And just after listening to Phil Claypool sing Nat King Cole songs at a Haight Ashbury Free Clinic event, Steve Sodokoff spotted Natalie Cole sitting next to him at Woodward's Garden.


I guess any publicity...

Julia-O-Rama

It's a kind of madness friends, this all Julia all the time. A fellow tweeter says she never thought she could tire of Julia Child, but now she just sort of wants her back in the kitchen. And it's morphed into a Julia wildfire week for me. I was flabbergasted Monday to be the Julie & Julia Sony site's featured blog-of-the-day (see previous post). I'm cooking five dishes from le glorious Mastering the Art for our Woodward's menu.

We're meeting friends early Sunday to catch said publicity-flamed flick, then racing to Napa to fire-up a Julia fête with more friends just for fun and for the Knopf's "Be Like Julia" contest (though I can't possibly think how I could be any MORE Julia at the moment). My 8-year-old is in her room trilling random Julia bon mots, so steeped is she in the mania. Truly I'm way through the looking glass here... every White Rabbit is Lapain au Saupiquet, every Dodo bird Pigeonneau en Vin Rouge.

How on earth did this come to be? Will the Julia insanity ever subside? What I can say is that her Poulet Poele a l'Estragon is a wonder; that the reason for all the fuss and frenzy is illuminated in one single bite.