Category: N24th

  • Julia Flynn Siler Interviews Lauren Markham about A Map of Future Ruins

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    Jeanne Carstensen

    Lauren Markham’s first book, “The Far Away Brothers,” tells the story of identical twin brothers from El Salvador who fled violence at home to try to build a new life in California. A masterful work of narrative nonfiction, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2018 and picked up a…

  • Towers of Gold Lands on the NYT’s Essential California Reading List!

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    Julia Flynn Siler

    Frances Dinkelspiel’s Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, was picked by the New York Times for its California Reading List, alongside such classic titles as Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. Frances spent nearly a decade researching and writing about the life of her great-great-grandfather,…

  • Light on Fire is a California Book Award Award Winner!

    Light on Fire is a California Book Award Award Winner!

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    Julia Flynn Siler

    Gabrielle Selz’s Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis has been awarded a silver medal in nonfiction  in this year’s California Book Awards! Founded in 1931 during the depths of America’s Great Depression, the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards will celebrated its 91st anniversary this year. The purpose of the awards is…

  • Our Afternoon with Dirty Santa

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    Julia Flynn Siler

    A beloved holiday tradition of North 24th Writers is game that some people call a “Yankee Swap”, and others call “Dirty Santa.” Here’s how it’s played: Everyone draws a number from a hat – which establishes the order for picking from the wrapped books we’ve all brought. The person who drew number one goes first,…

  • A Pioneering Feminist Artist

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    Julia Flynn Siler

    North 24thers took a field trip this weekend to see a retrospective exhibit of Judy Chicago’s work at the De Young Museum. In a surprising and welcome decision, the curators started with recent pieces by this feminist pioneer and moved back in time to her earliest creations. The show begins with ceramic, glass, and needle…

  • Field Trip into TeamLab

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    Gaby Selz

    On a recent Monday afternoon, five members of North 24th, masked up and vaccinated, took a trip to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to see Continuity, the immersive, interactive exhibit by the Japanese collective: TeamLab. IMG_2966 In a series of darkened rooms, TeamLab explores alternative forms of perception by projecting digital images on every surface–walls,…

  • On warming up to the launch of my book on the artist Sam Francis

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    Gaby Selz

    By Gabrielle Selz I’m less than five months out from my book launch, and it still feels unreal to me. The manuscript is finished, but the material thingness of it doesn’t yet exist. It is out of my reach, gone off to the printer, but I still haven’t held a hard copy in my hands.…

  • Quote of the Day

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    Allison Bartlett

    “Beauty plus pity – that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.” – V. Nabokov