In an ironic twist indicative of our times, authors Joanna Ho and Caroline Kusin-Pritchard were about to go on stage to discuss their new kids’ book The Day the Books Disappeared at a San Ramon elementary school when they were told not to mention banned or queer books.

As KRON4 reports, the authors say their visit to Country Club Elementary School in the East Bay city of San Ramon on October 17 was cut short when they were told at the last minute by school officials that they couldn’t talk about certain themes in their presentation, which addressed scenarios surrounding the banning of books, including “uncomfortable historical truths, race or racism, and diverse family structures.”

As the site Book Riot explains, the authors frame the concept of book-banning in an age-appropriate manner in the book using individual preferences as an example. The main character uses his newfound ability at making books disappear to get rid of books on topics he doesn’t find interesting, and before he knows it, even the books he likes start disappearing.

Per Book Riot, the authors’ presentation consisted of 45 slides that mainly featured pages from the book along with a few informational graphics about books that have been banned nationwide.

When the authors refused to censor their presentation, they were asked to leave. ​​“Our book was literally written because of book banning; we could not leave that out of our presentation,” Ho told KRON4.

The school district released a statement saying the students who were attending the program — ages four to nine — were too young to understand the concept of book-banning. Per KRON4, the district claims that they contacted the authors’ management with the request in advance, which the authors dispute.

“We were not asked to adjust for younger audiences despite what the district statement says. They told us not to talk about book bans or mention queer books. We did not choose to leave, we were told to leave when we wouldn’t agree not to talk about book bans or mention gay books,” said Ho.

“Caroline was like this is completely out of our integrity like, we won’t be changing our presentation if we’re giving the presentation,” Ho added.

Book Riot notes that there’s an active chapter of Moms For Liberty in Contra Costa County where San Ramon is located, which puts political pressure on public schools and libraries to censor topics on race, sexuality, and gender. The outlet also writes that in 2023, a high school in San Ramon received backlash for including in its library the book Gender Queer and other LGBTQ+ themed books, along with various books by and about Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, which SFist covered at the time.

“Book banning is real, it’s happening everywhere, it’s happening in California,” Kusin-Pritchard told KRON4.

Image: ‘The Day the Books Disappeared’

Related: San Ramon Parents Want To Jump On The Public School Book-Banning Bandwagon

The youngest of Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman's four children, Abe, who was raised in Berkeley, has been brought up on a criminal rape charge in New York, where he is attending college.

Bay Area authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are now supporting their youngest son and youngest child as he faces criminal prosecution in New York City. As the New York Post first reported, 20-year-old Abraham Chabon was charged on June 12 with second-degree strangulation and first-degree rape, stemming from an incident that allegedly occurred in January 2024.

The younger Chabon, 21, who has at times gone by Abe Waldman, is accused of grabbing a woman by the neck and applying pressure to the point of strangulation. According to prosecutors, Chabon continued to choke the woman while carrying her to a bed, and then raped her while also striking her repeatedly in the face "causing stupor and loss of vision in one eye." According to statements in a police report, the woman experienced "pain, swelling and bruising to her neck and face."

The incident allegedly happened in a building on East 12th Street, according to the complaint.

In a statement to the New York Times, an attorney for Chabon, Priya Chaudhry, said that her client "is innocent and was as shocked by these false allegations as anyone." Chaudhry added that "Mr. Chabon has strong family support and a devoted partner who all believe in his innocence. We hope the prosecutor’s investigation reveals his innocence quickly."

Chabon is now out on bail, which was set last week at $45,000 cash or $150,000 bond.

Abe Chabon is the son whom Michael Chabon wrote about in a GQ piece in 2016, about a trip they took to Paris Men's Fashion Week that was a bar mitzvah present for then 13-year-old Abe. The boy was interested at the time in a possible career in men's fashion, and Chabon wrote, "Abe was just a kid who loved clothes. He loved talking about them, looking at them, and wearing them, and when it came to men's clothing, in particular the hipper precincts of streetwear, he knew his shit." And, "From the moment he became himself, what made Abe different—from his siblings, from classmates, from most of the children who have ever lived—was the degree of comfort he felt with being different."

Both mother and father have written about their experiences being parents, Waldman most notably in a 2005 essay that made her infamous on mommy blogs for saying that her love for her husband was more passionate, and of a different quality, than her love for her children. That infamy ultimately led to what she's described as a very uncomfortable Oprah appearance, and her 2009 memoir Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace, which became a bestseller.

As the Times notes, Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has been adapted into an opera that has it's premiere at New York's Met this fall. Chabon's second-most-recent novel, 2012's Telegraph Avenue, is set in Oakland and Berkeley.

Top image: Novelists Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon attend the 20th Annual AFI Awards at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on January 03, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images for AFI)

San Francisco author Kate Folk is releasing a new book, Sky Daddy, which deals with the taboo subject of objectophilia set against the backdrop of SFO and Silicon Valley. The main character, an online content moderator, gets her thrills via AirTrain rides around SFO, fantasizing about encounters with aircraft.

KQED notes that Sky Daddy balances dark humor with an empathetic look at objectophila, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which someone forms a romantic or sexual attraction to inanimate objects, such as buildings, vehicles, or furniture.

Its unique premise, as detailed by Kirkus Reviews, provides a deeper look into a rare mental health disorder and how it intersects with the under-appreciated job of online content moderation, in which underpaid workers are exposed to relentless traumatic online content.

Sky Daddy is scheduled for release on April 8 through Random House.

Update: This post was revised to include information about objectophilia.

Image: Good Reads

Acclaimed fiction writer, poet, and playwright Denis Johnson, most famous for his short story collection Jesus' Son which was turned into a 1999 film of the same name, died Wednesday at the age of 67 at his home in Sea Ranch, in Sonoma County. The cause was cancer, as the SF Chronicle reports, and his death was confirmed by his literary agent Nicole Aragi.

He is survived by his third wife, Cindy Lee Johnson, and their three children.

Johnson was a huge figure in the fiction world despite having written relatively few books. Jesus' Son, was cited in a 2006 New York Times poll as one of the most important works of fiction of the previous 25 years. His last book, Laughing Monsters, was published in 2014, and he won the National Book Award in 2007 for Tree of Smoke, his novel about the Vietnam War. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for that novel, as well as for his 2012 novella Train Dreams. The New Yorker has assembled all of the stories of his that they published over the last three decades, which are linked and available to read here. I highly recommend "Work" from 1988, one of the central, most compact and most moving of the stories that ended up in Jesus' Son.

Work, however, was not necessarily something Johnson was fond of. He joked with the New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman just a few weeks before his death, when she asked him if he would contribute something on the topic of "jobs" to this year's fiction issue. "Come now," he wrote back, "don’t you know that in certain circles we don’t even utter ‘the J-word’? My second wife came home one day and said, ‘When are you gonna get a job?’ and it came over me like a revelation, and I said never. And she left. But she came back. (Later left again.) — That’s my whole contribution to the J subject.”

He also claimed only to have written his last novel so that he could buy a piece of land he wanted next to his own in Idaho.

The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani writes:

In his own novels and poems, Mr. Johnson fulfilled that task with extraordinary savagery and precision. He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor. Whether set in the bars and motels of small-town America, or the streets of wartime Saigon, his stories depict people living on the edge, addicted to drugs or adrenaline or fantasy, reeling from the idiocies and exigencies of modern life, and longing for salvation.

Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and the man who published Jesus' Son, called Johnson “one of the great writers of his generation," and added in a statement to the Associated Press, "He wrote prose with the imaginative concentration and empathy of the poet he was."

Kakutani adds, "Mr. Johnson’s America, past or present, is uncannily resonant today. It’s a troubled land, staggering from wretched excess and aching losses, a country where dreams have often slipped into out-and-out delusions, and people hunger for deliverance, if only in the person of a half-baked messiah. Reason is in short supply here, and grifters and con men peddling conspiracy thinking and fake news abound; families are often fragmented or nonexistent; and primal, Darwinian urges have replaced the rule of law. And yet, and yet, amid the bewilderment and despair, there are lightning flashes of wonder and hope — glimpses of the possibility of redemption."

San Francisco children’s author Robert D. San Souci died at age 68 following a head injury from a fall on Market Street. He was found unresponsive in mid-December by friends with whom he had missed a lunch appointment, reports KQED. The author published over 100 books, including the notable Fa Mulan: The Story of A Woman Warrior, which served as the basis for the 1998 Disney hit Mulan.

San Souci was born in 1946 in San Francisco, where he spent his early childhood in the Sunset before his family moved to Berkeley. He studied creative writing at St. Mary's College in Moraga, graduating in 1968. A decade later his first book was published. He frequently collaborated with his brother, Daniel, an illustrator.

Though San Souci remained in the Bay Area (he resided in Noe Valley) his multicultural stories were far-reaching. "The city will always be "home base" for me, but my travels have taken me all across the country, where I have found inspiration for many of my books," wrote San Souci on his website.
My books — many of them retellings of traditional tales — celebrate peoples and places all around the world,”

Daniel San Souci told KQED that his brother's fascination with Native American tales, which he took on in stories like Two Bear Cubs: A Miwok Legend form California's Yosemite Valley, resulted from his Berkeley years.

“There would be a whole group of us who would go to the Oaks Theatre (on Solano Avenue) all the time... And everyone was always cheering when the cavalry came and the bugle was calling, except Bob. Bob was always for the Indians. And it was because he was doing so much reading about Native Americans at the time."

According to KQED, Daniel San Souci says he’ll announce plans for Robert's memorial to be held in February or March.

Do you live at 891 Post, 620 Eddy, 1155 Leavenworth, or 20 Dashiell Hammett? If you do, you're walking the hallowed halls of one of Dashiell Hammett's apartments. But there's nary a neighborhood without notable literary significance in San Francisco, as illustrated by this informative interactive literary map assembled by The Chronicle.

The maps spans the Bay Area and details such literary factoids like Jack London's birth (in a house that was located at 615 Third Street in San Francisco) and grisly deaths (science fiction writer Robert Duncan Milne was run over by a cable car while drunkenly crossing the street at Market and Montgomery). Toggle over to the "Passages" section of the map for a lovely collection of Bay Area literary mentions, from The Joy Luck Club to The Kite Runner to (ahem, Fremont) to Divisadero:

"I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word 'divisar', meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.' "

Absent is the memorable first paragraph of Hunter S. Thomson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, which we'll include here, just for kicks:

January '73

Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 AM. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn ... out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of "Seal Rock" looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light. About 200 seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound.

Get your literary fix for the day over at The Chronicle's map, which also includes a list of independent bookstores, local authors working today, and upcoming Litquake events.

[Chron]

Neuroscientist David Eagleman's new book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is a series of fictional explorations of the afterlife that range from downloading one's consciousness to a computer to meeting God (both male and female versions). Fans of Radio Lab on NPR may have heard him as well as a couple pieces from the book on their recent episode about the afterlife (listen to the podcast here).

Mr. Eagleman will be reading this evening at Rakestraw Books in Danville, and tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Books Inc. at Opera Plaza in SF. He spoke with SFist this week in the midst of his book tour.

SFist: How do you define "the afterlife" in Sum? Where did your fascination with ideas of the afterlife begin?

David Eagleman: When I was younger I asked a rabbi whether Jews believed in an afterlife, and, if so, what the afterlife looked like. He answered, "You ask two Jews, you'll get three opinions." I was deeply impressed by the freedom of opinion implied by that answer. I think that brief conversation was probably the seed which turned into Sum about a decade later.

Wall Street Journal Senior Technology Editor Julia Angwin recently took an investigative look at the back-stories of MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who prior to founding the social networking and glitter-gif bohemoth dabbled in porn, hacking, spam and spyware before stumbling on their mega-million-dollar meal ticket. The book is called Stealing Myspace and you can find it here or at an independent bookseller in your neighborhood.

SFist pulled Julia aside for a few questions:

SFist: How did MySpace cannibalize, or in your eyes improve upon, what Friendster created in terms of social networking in the early aughts?

Julia Angwin: MySpace noticed that Friendster was deleting accounts of "Fakesters" -- or people who were not who they claimed to be. MySpace saw the Fakesters as an opportunity and welcomed them onto its site. The freedom of MySpace has proved extremely popular - there are dozens of people pretending to be Britney Spears or Rupert Murdoch on the site at any given time. Of course, there have also been many stoires of people who have donned the MySpace mask of anonymity to ill effect.

It's interesting to note that Facebook has returned to the old Friendster model. It seems that people want both kinds of online venues - places to be anonymous, such as MySpace, and places to be their real selves, such as Facebook.