We are excited to announce that we will be hosting a Story Time for our youngest readers beginning in February on Wednesday mornings @ 10:30. Our friend Carolyn Bressler will be reading stories geared to 2 to 4-year-olds. Please join us on February 3, 10, 17, and 24. Preschool groups welcome. Gentle reminder: we no longer have a public restroom so please plan accordingly.

The invention of the atomic bomb was a triumph of official secrecy and military discipline--the project was covertly funded at the behest of the president and, despite its massive scale, never discovered by Congress or the press. This concealment was perhaps to be expected in wartime, but Wills persuasively argues that the Manhattan Project then became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined American government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during World War II extended into the Cold War and finally the war on terror, leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for sixty-eight years and counting.

Garry Wills is a historian and author of more than twenty books including What the Gospels Meant and A Necessary Evil; he is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg. In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies.

Produced with Berkeley Arts & Letters (www.berkeleyarts.org).

$15 advance (Brown Paper Tickets or 800-838-3006), $20 door.

*Channing @ Dana

Double Feature: Filmmaker Haydn Reiss (Rumi: Poet of the Heart) presents the East Bay Premiere of Every War Has Two Losers – A Poet’s Meditation on Peace, based on the Journals of National Book Award Winner William Stafford, voiced by Peter Coyote, with narration by Linda Hunt, and music by John Gorka (www.everywar.com). Poet Maxine Hong Kingston will also be on hand.

Followed by

William Stafford & Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship. This extraordinary hour-long film documents the intimate friendship between two of America’s greatest poets, both National Book Award winners and peace activists. Before his death in 1993 Stafford, a uniquely eloquent conscientious objector during WWII, published 65 books of poetry and prose, and won the Western States Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Bly has already given us thirty books of his poems, prose and translations from many languages. The author of Iron John, co-founder of American Writers Against the Vietnam War, leader of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, and a popular teacher at the annual Great Mother Conferences, Bly has long provided a desperately needed spiritual depth to contemporary American poetry.

In documenting the creative friendship of Bly and Stafford, and then following it with this new film on younger writers’ responses to Stafford, Reiss has crafted two visionary testaments to the sacred power of peace. KPFA Radio was founded 60 years specifically to promote peace. $10 advance tickets at Moe's, Mrs. Dalloway's, Pegasus, and Pendragon or brownpapertickets.com (800) 838-3006 (12 door, $6 HC members). For further information: www.kpfa.org. Co-presented with KPFA Radio & Poetry Flash *2286 Cedar St.

Little Bee, a young Nigerian refugee, has just been released from the British immigration detention center where she has been held under horrific conditions for the past two years, after narrowly escaping a traumatic fate in her homeland of Nigeria. Alone in a foreign country, without a family member, friend, or pound to call her own, she seeks out the only English person she knows. Sarah is a posh young mother and magazine editor with whom Little Bee shares a dark and tumultuous past.

They first met on a beach in Nigeria, where Sarah was vacationing with her husband, Andrew, in an effort to save their marriage after an affair, and their brief encounter has haunted each woman for two years. Now together, they face a disturbing past and an uncertain future with the help of Sarah's four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. A sense of humor and an unflinching moral compass allow each woman, and the reader, to believe that even in the face of unspeakable odds, humanity can prevail. "An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia...Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence." -- The Guardian (UK)

"Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters' ethical struggles, Little Bee delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilised decency." -- The Independent (UK)

Chris Cleave is a columnist for The Guardian in London. His first novel, Incendiary, was published in twenty countries; won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award; was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize; won the United States Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction Award; and won the Prix Special du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007. For more information: www.chriscleave.com.

$12 advance (Brown Paper Tickets, www.brownpapertickets.com, or 800-838-3006), $15 door

Produced with Berkeley Arts & Letters (www.berkeleyarts.org).

*Channing @ Dana, Loper Chapel, enter through courtyard

"A superior story, not to be missed."--John Lescroart

"Every reporter worth his or her notepad is a sleuth at heart. McHugh brings this truth to life with crackling suspense."--Dan Rather

Paul McHugh has been a journalist for more than 20 years, reporting primarily on outdoor sport, resource use, and environmental issues. He continues as a stringer for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Bay Nature magazine. For more information: www.paulmchugh.net.

Gregg will speak about his favorites and bring "bands" of bare root roses for sale. This is the perfect opportunity to become informed about the best roses for our gardens, and to be able to purchase them on the spot. Mrs. Dalloway's will also feature a new crop of the best books on rose growing and care. We're delighted to have Gregg join us to share his knowledge and love of these remarkable plants, many with lineage going back as far as the 17th Century. Don't miss this wonderful afternoon.