Featured Events in Oakland in May, 2025 (March Updated)

Please join us for a celebration of Kate Folk's debut novel, Sky Daddy, at Womb House Books. Kate will be in conversation with WHB's owner, Jessica Ferri, followed by Q&A and signing. Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could. . . . Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes. Nor can she reveal her belief that it’s her destiny to “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite her with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of. Both subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are. Pre-order your copy of Sky Daddy Order your copy of Out There Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There, a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among others. A recent Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received support for her writing from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. Her debut novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House in 2025. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco. Jessica Ferri is a writer and photographer based in Northern California. She is the author of Silent Cities New York, Silent Cities San Francisco, Buried Hollywoodland: The Cemeteries of Los Angeles and Buried San Francisco Bay Area: The Fallen Star. She is the founder of Womb House Books. Information Source: Womb House Books | eventbrite

Yunte Huang is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Charlie Chan (Norton, 2010), which won the Edgar Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His Inseparable (Liveright, 2018), also a finalist for the NBCC award, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, NPR, and Newsweek. He has published articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, PMLA, and others, and has been featured on NPR, CBS, BBC, C-SPAN, and others. His most recent book, the third and final installment of his “Rendezvous with America” trilogy, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, explores the tortured legacy of Hollywood’s first Chinese star against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. It was published by Liveright in 2023 and named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Information Source: Pasadena Heritage | eventbrite

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology. From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media. Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family. Pre-order your copy of Mother Media Hannah Zeavin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation. Information Source: Womb House Books | eventbrite