The 2017 One Book One Marin selection is The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
Join us for a discussion of the book with Librarian, Pam Klein.
From Booklist – “Starred Review” – This powerful collection of interconnected short stories by the gifted Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, 2013) spans the gamut of the Russian experience, covering the years 1937 to the present. In the opening story, The Leopard, set in 1930s Leningrad in the catacombs beneath the city, Roman Markin, a censor working for the government, meticulously removes all traces of so-called dissidents from paintings and photographs. In their place, he creates images of his late brother, from boyhood to old age. Roman is driven by guilt for having informed on his brother, seeking to preserve his brother’s image and his own grief. Art is one defense against the bleak, oppressive society created under communism; another is the biting black humor of the hopeless. In The Grozny Tourist Bureau, the former deputy director of an art museum has been recruited as tourism director of his bombed-out city. Well aware of the absurdity of his mission, he seeks inspiration in the pamphlets from the tourism bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. Marra, in between bursts of acidic humor, summons the terror, polluted landscapes, and diminished hopes of generations of Russians in a tragic and haunting collection.–Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist
Marra was a 2011–2013 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, he teaches at Stanford University as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, CA.
Rare & Special Book Sale at the Library – a joint sale sponsored by the Friends of the San Rafael and San Anselmo Libraries
Public Sale:
Saturday, January 28 from 10:00 – 4:30 pm
Sunday, January 29 from 1:00 – 3:00 pm
Member Preview Sale:
Friday, January 27 from 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Renew or become a member of the Friends at the door. The Preview is an Upstairs/Downstairs event with books displayed in the Meeting Room downstairs and also upstairs in the Reading Room. Guests may buy books at the Preview; food and wine will be served.
Proceeds benefit San Rafael Downtown, Pickleweed branch, and the San Anselmo Library.
Saturday, January 7, from 10:00 – 2:00 pm in the Library Meeting Room
Member Preview Sale: Friday, January 6, from 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Renew or become a member of the Friends of the San Rafael Library at the door.
This sale will offer hundreds of slip-cased comics in mint condition from various publishers from the 1960’s and 1970’s, all part of a collection donated to the Library. To round out this sale, there will be graphic novels, books about the history of comics, how to draw comics and other more recent comic books for sale. Come early for the best selection.
Proceeds benefit the San Rafael Public Library and Pickleweed branch.
In this class presented by community members from the Canal, learn to make a variety of Mexican Salsas including red and green salsas, and spicy and mild. Get a chance to taste the salsas and share cooking secrets with other community members.
Bring your little ones and learn how to make homemade playdough using natural ingredients. We will add essential oils to each color so that your playdough looks and smells great! Children will help measure and mix ingredients. Once the playdough is made, there will be many tools and toys that you and your little ones can play with. Make friends and learn how easy it is to make playdough!
Space is limited, please stop by the Children’s Room Reference Desk or call us at 415-485-3322 to register
Looking to get out of the house for some screen-free fun at the end of winter break? Come to Game Day at the Library! We’ll provide a selection of new and classic board games for families with children of all ages. There will even be a visiting Magic the Gathering expert available to counsel young planeswalkers! Stay the entire time or drop-by for just a game or two!
In the mid-1960s, artists, writers, and musicians moved into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district with hopes of creating a new social paradigm. By 1967, during the highly publicized “Summer of Love,” the neighborhood would attract as many as 100,000 young people from all over the nation. Local bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack; the San Francisco Sound found visual counterparts in the creative industries that sprang up around it.
Through a wide array of iconic rock posters, interactive music and light shows, “out-of-this-world” clothing, and photographs from the years surrounding this pivotal moment, Summer of Love celebrates the city’s rebellious and colorful counterculture and explores the visual and material cultures of a generation searching for personal fulfillment through social change. The immersive exhibition includes rock posters by artists including Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson along with examples of the handcrafted, one-of-a-kind garments created by such designers as Brigitta Bjerke, K. Lee Manuel, and Jeanne Rose.
FAMSF Docent speaker: Ellen Hardin
At the De Young: April 8, 2017 – August 20, 2017
Poster above: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, “Skeleton and Roses,” Grateful Dead, Oxford Circle, September 16 & 17, Avalon Ballroom, 1966. Color offset lithograph poster, 19 15/16 x 14 in.
Stuart Davis: In Full Swing is the first major exhibition in 20 years dedicated to this key figure in American modernism. Featuring approximately 75 works—spanning from the artist’s breakthrough series in the 1920s focusing on tobacco packages and household objects to the painting left on his easel at his death, in 1964—the exhibition highlights Davis’s unique ability to assimilate the visual languages of European modernism, the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, and the rhythms of jazz into colorful, complex works. Blurring distinctions between “high” and “low” art, between abstraction and figuration, and between text and imagery, these paintings reflect both the excitement and turbulence of the artist’s times.
Davis was a lifelong jazz enthusiast, and his working method of appropriating and reworking his own earlier compositions shares with that musical genre the concept of variations on a theme, and similarly conveys a distinctly modern sense of dynamism and vibrancy. This is the first major exhibition to install works from different periods of the artist’s career alongside one another to explore their persistent thematic and visual interconnections. Davis’s innovative works paved the way for major developments in American postwar art such as Pop, and they remain resonant, relevant, and influential today.
At the De Young: April 1, 2017 – August 6, 2017
Painting above: The Mellow Pad, 1945–1951. Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm)
Marking the centenary of Auguste Rodin’s death in 1917, this exhibition, featuring about 50 objects from the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection, presents a significant opportunity to examine the legacy of the artist who has been called the father of modern sculpture. The Legion of Honor holds one of the finest collections in the world of sculpture by Rodin cast during his lifetime.
At the legion of Honor: January 28, 2017 – December 31, 2017
Sculture above: The Age of Bronze (detail), ca. 1875–1877. Bronze, 71 1/2 x 21 1/4 x 25 1/2 in
Monet: The Early Years will be the first major US exhibition devoted to the initial phase of Claude Monet’s (French, 1840–1926) career. Through approximately sixty paintings, the exhibition demonstrates the radical invention that marked the artist’s development during the formative years of 1858 to 1872. In this period the young painter developed his unique visual language and technique, creating striking works that manifested his interest in painting textures and the interplay of light upon surfaces.
This exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience Monet’s mastery before Impressionism, and includes paintings that are profoundly daring and surprising. Depictions of moments both large and small, with friends and loved ones, in the solitude of forests and fields and in the quiet scenes of everyday, offer new revelations about an artist that many consider to be ubiquitous.
With a selection of works gathered from some of the most important international collections – the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other public and private collections worldwide – Monet: The Early Years authoritatively demonstrates the artist’s early command of many genres, not only the landscapes for which he has become so renowned but also still lifes, portraits and genre scenes.
At the Legion of Honor: February 25, 2017 – May 29, 2017
Painting above: La Grenouillère, 1869. Oil on canvas, 29 3/8 x 39 1/4 in
Saturday, January 7, from 10:00 – 2:00 pm in the Library Meeting Room
For families with children ages 3 and older.
