Babylon Salon

presents a special performance

Saturday, December 17, 2022

in The Sycamore's outdoor patio

2140 Mission St, San Francisco [16th St BART]

Come for drinks at 5 // Show starts at 5.30pm

featuring

Jamil Jan Kochai

(The Haunting of Hajji Hotak; 99 Nights in Logar)

finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction

“A remarkable collection…seamed with sharp wit, and often hilarious…Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking) was published in July 2022. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

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Jasmin Darznik

(The Bohemians; Song of a Captive Bird; The Good Daughter)

“Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers an intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression, and their impact on humanity.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things

Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, including The Bohemians, a novel that imagines the friendship between photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese American assistant in 1920s San Francisco. A New York Times Book Review summer 2021 recommendation, The Bohemians is also one of Oprah Daily's best books of historical fiction for 2021. Darznik's debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” book and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Darznik is also the author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. She was born in Iran and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a J.D. from the University of California, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. She is an associate professor and chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her fourth book, a novel set in Old Hollywood, is forthcoming from Ballantine.

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Shruti Swamy

(The Archer; A House Is a Body)

"Shruti Swamy’s A House Is a Body will not simply be talked about as one of the greatest short story collections of the 2020s; it will change the way the all stories—short and long—are told, written and consumed. There is nothing, no emotion, nor tiny morsel of memory, no touch, that this book does not take seriously. Yet, A House Is a Body might be the most fun I’ve ever had in a short story collection.” — Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the LA Times First Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her novel, The Archer, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the California Book Award for fiction. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, AFAR Magazine, and the New York Times. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, A Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College. She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.

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Tom Lin

(The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu)

“In Tom Lin’s novel, the atmosphere of Cormac McCarthy’s West, or that of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, gives way to the phantasmagorical shades of Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. This is a superb novel that declares the arrival of an astonishing new voice.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

Tom Lin is an author based in Davis, California, where he is currently a PhD student in English at the University of California, Davis. His debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the 2022 ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, was a finalist for the 2022 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

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Matt Jaffe

(Kintsugi; Undertoad; The Spirit Catches You)

“The 21st century artist who is picking up where Bowie left off. Stunning, hypnotic, lovely and bloody sharp.” — IndiePulse Music

After cutting his teeth on open mics around the Bay Area, San Francisco songwriter Matt Jaffe was discovered by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. Together, they produced his first album at the age of 16, cementing Matt's dedication to music. Soon, he formed a band, dropped out of college, and has not looked back. Since then, Matt has written more songs than he can remember the words to, crisscrossed the country opening for Blues Traveler and Wilco, and co-written with Tom Higgenson of the Plain White T's. Inspired by the great lineage of rock n' roll, he marries literary lyrics with the undeniable urge to dance. Matt has served as musical director for experimental theater, collaborated with poets on genre-bending spoken word, and curated residencies among fellow songwriters. Having suffered from seizures since 2015, Matt also uses his music to unite local and national epilepsy communities. Matt will release his sixth album, White Roses in the Snow, in late 2022.

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in partnership with our friends

The Booksmith

in their new location at 1727 Haight Street, San Francisco

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Free Admission!