Events

Author and graphic artist BRIANA LOEWINSOHN comes to Mrs. Dalloway's on Tuesday, March 21, at 7pm to launch her new graphic memoir Ephemera. Briana will read from and sign copies of her book and will be joined by THIEN PHAM in conversation.

To attend this free event, you must sign up on Eventbrite or contact us at the store prior to the presentation. Walk-ins cannot be accommodated.

Ephemera is a poetic and dreamlike take on a graphic memoir set in a garden, a forest, and a greenhouse. The story drifts among a grown woman, her early memories as a child, and the gossamer existence of her mother. A lyrical entry in the field of graphic medicine, Ephemera is a story about a daughter trying to relate to a parent who struggles with mental illness. Gorgeously illustrated in a painted palette of warmy, earthy tones, it is a quiet book of isolation, plants, confusion, acceptance, and the fog of childhood. Loewinsohn’s debut book is an aching, meditative twist on autobiography, infusing the genre with an ethereal fusion of memory and imagination.

"Ephemera is a beautifully rendered melancholy memoir. A deep mix of fondness and sadness. A lovely work!" - Peter Bagge

BRIANA LOEWINSOHN is an American cartoonist. These days she teaches high school art and draws comic books. She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband, daughter, and son. If she doesn't text you back, she is probably gardening. Follow Briana on Instagram @brianabreaks .

THIEN PHAM is a graphic novelist, comic artist, and educator based in Oakland, CA. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Sumo and did the art for the middle-grade graphic novel Level Up, written by Gene Luen Yang. He is an ongoing comic contributor to EaterSF and as such eats. A lot. Follow Thien on Twitter at @CobraTalon, and Instagram at @thiendog

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on March 21st.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

Author KIM TODD visits Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Wednesday March 29th, at 7pm to read from, discuss, and sign her new paperback release of Sensational: The Hidden History of America's "Girl Stunt Reporters."

To attend this free event, you just sign up on Eventbrite or contact us at the store prior to the presentation.  Walk-ins cannot be accommodated.

In the waning years of the 19th century, women journalists across the United States risked their safety and reputations to expose the hazardous conditions under which many Americans existed. Donning disguises, they stole into sewing factories to report on child labor, fainted in the streets to test public hospital treatment, posed as lobbyists to reveal corrupt politicians, and more. Thanks to their daring exploits, these “girl stunt reporters” changed laws, helped launch a labor movement, championed women’s rights, and more. After a decade of headlines and fame, though, these trailblazers faced a vicious public backlash. Accused of practicing “yellow journalism,” their popularity waned until “stunt reporter” became a badge of shame.

Sensational is a vivid history that brings to light these writers and pays long overdue tribute to the essential part they played in revolutionizing modern journalism. Kim Todd traces how their influence would arc across the century from the Progressive Era “muckraking” of the early 1900s to the personal “New Journalism” of the 1960s and ’70s to the “immersion journalism” and “creative nonfiction” of today. Todd reveals how these bold and unconventional writers changed how people would tell stories forever.

“A gripping, flawlessly researched, and overdue portrait of America’s trailblazing female journalists. . . . In this important and immensely readable book, Kim Todd has restored these long-forgotten mavericks to their rightful place in American history.”—Abbott Kahler, author (as Karen Abbott) of The Ghosts of Eden Park

KIM TODD is the award-winning author of Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America, winner of the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Salon, Sierra magazine, Orion, and Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, among other publications. She is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on March 29th.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space permits

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

Bestselling author ALKA JOSHI visits Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Tuesday, April 4th to present the third book in her Jaipur Trilogy, The Perfumist of Paris. The first installment, The Henna Artist, was a Reese's Book Club Pick, and now the final chapter takes readers to 1970s Paris, where Radha’s budding career as a perfumer must compete with the demands of her family and the secrets of her past.

SPECIAL OFFER: Pre-order a signed copy of Alka Joshi’s The Perfumist of Paris and receive a LilaNur Parfums Discovery Set with your copy of the book! LilaNur Parfums is a fragrance house which combines the best of Indian and French perfumery traditions, pairing exquisite Indian ingredients with French master perfumery. More information about LilaNur can be found at lilanur.com. While supplies last, copies must be picked up at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore.

The event is free, but you must sign up in advance on Eventbrite or contact us at the store prior to the presentation.

Paris, 1974. Radha is now living in Paris with her husband, Pierre, and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her daughters, and she’s finally found her passion—the treasure trove of scents.

She has an exciting and challenging position working for a master perfumer, helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can’t give up this thing that drives her.

Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra—women who use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She’s on the cusp of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about is heading to Paris to find her—upending her carefully managed world and threatening to destroy a vulnerable marriage.

ALKA JOSHI was born in India and raised in the U.S. since she was nine. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. Joshi's debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately became a NYT bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick, was Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, & is in development as a TV series. Her second novel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur was published in 2021.

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on April 4th.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK INS will be accommodated only if space allows.

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

Join us at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Wednesday, April 5th at 7:00 pm when ecological designer and author FELIX DE ROSEN comes to read from, discuss, and sign his new book A Garden's Purpose: Cultivating Our Connection With the Natural World. It's a book filled with essays and stories to inspire us to nurture diverse, meaningful relationships with gardens and landscapes.

The event is free, but you must register on Eventbrite online or contact the store.

The garden provides a powerful, generous way of looking at the world. Through stories and essays, this gracious volume, written in a highly accessible tone, invites readers on a journey to understand gardens as places where we build mutually beneficial relationships with the living world around us.

As beautiful spaces, gardens fill us with hope and wonder. As gathering places, they nurture friendships and communities. Thoughtfully crafted, they make us pause and appreciate our surroundings. Full of edible plants, they nourish us. Full of diversity—human and non-human—they connect us with the polychromatic world in which we live. They make us feel at home in our own bodies, in our cities, and on our planet.

Each chapter in this book is dedicated to a specific idea or element of the garden, from places where gardens grow (i.e., a driveway in San Francisco, a bathtub as a planter) to garden management (why some lawns need watering every few days, and some gardens can go almost a full year without irrigation) to color and texture (i.e., how fine-textured plants like grasses can be used to unify a space), and everything in between. Hundreds of gardens from all corners of the globe are included, photographed in glorious full color.

Perfect for home gardeners, landscape designers, or as a gift for the gardener in your life, this is an ode to the wonder, design, and habitat of gardens, and an inspiration to nurture meaningful relationships with the natural world around us.

FELIX de ROSEN is a landscape designer, climate activist, and author from Oakland, California. His mission is to connect people to the living world, by exploring the permeability between our bodies, cultures, and ecosystems. He consults on ecological regeneration projects by cultivating radically hopeful visions of the future. He believes imagination, humor, and bodily awareness are starting points to advance systemic solutions to the planetary crisis. His design practice, Studio Polycultura, uses writing, landscape design, and event production to "compost" stale understandings of nature, ecology, and life into life affirming soil. He received a Master of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley and a Bachelors in Government from Harvard.

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on April 5th.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

PLEASE leave your non-service companion animals at home.

OUR shared restrooms are not accessible after 6:30 PM, please plan accordingly.

Join us Thursday April 6th when author MARY OTIS comes to Mrs. Dalloway's to read, discuss, and sign her debut novel Burst, which explores the relationship complexities between mothers and daughters, the desire to escape, and the longing to connect. Burst is a powerful story about how we become—and unbecome—our mothers, how we absorb the past, and how we burst into our own futures. Mary will will be joined in conversation by LAURA COGAN and will also sign copies of her book at the end of the event.

To attend this free event, you must sign up on Eventbrite or contact us at the store prior to the presentation. Walk-ins cannot be accommodated.

Viva has always found ways to manage her mother’s impulsive, eccentric, and addictive personality. She’s had to—for her entire life, it has always been Viva and Charlotte against the world. After accidentally discovering an innate ability for dance, Viva chases her new passion with the same fervor with which her mother chases the bottle. Over the years, Viva’s talent becomes a ticket to a life of her own, and as she moves further away from home to pursue her dream, Charlotte struggles to make peace with her own past as a failed artist and the effects of her addiction. When tragedy strikes, Viva begins a downward spiral and must decide whether she will repeat her mother’s mistakes or finally take control of her life.

Told from interwoven perspectives with lyrical writing as deft as a choreographed dance, Burst excavates a mother-daughter relationship to reveal its gorgeous beating heart.

MARY OTIS is the author of the short story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have been published in Best New American Voices, Electric Literature, Tin House, Zyzzyva, McSweeney's, Bennington Review, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. She has taught fiction at UCLA and was a founding professor in the UC Riverside Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Originally from the Boston area, Mary lives in Los Angeles.

LAURA COGAN has been the Editor and Executive Director of ZYZZYVA for over 10 years. In that time, she has spearheaded a redesign of the print journal and two website redesigns; expanded the journal’s programming and circulation; developed the presence of visual arts in the journal; and championed the continued excellence of the journal’s content. She has been an invited speaker and panelist at a number of conferences and schools, including The Community of Writers, Saint Mary’s College, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Litquake, and LA Times Festival of Books. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. from New York University. In 2022, ZYZZYVA was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize.

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on April 6th.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

Join us Wednesday April 19th at 7:00 pm when bestselling author J. RYAN STRADAL comes to the store to read from, discuss, and sign his new novel Saturday Night At The Lakeside Supper Club. He will be joined in discussion by Mrs. Dalloway's own CAROLYN HUTTON. Ryan's new book is a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them.

This is a free event, but you must register online at Eventbrite or contact us in the store prior to the event.

Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed.

Ned is also an heir—to a chain of home-style diners—and while he doesn't have a head for business, he knows his family's chain could provide a better future than his wife's fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation?

In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, Stradal has once again given us a story full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage; what we hold onto and what we leave behind; and what our legacy will be when we are gone.

J. RYAN STRADAL is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in California with his family.

THIS EVENT is free but pre-registration is required. Registration ends at 4:30 pm on April 19th.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

PLEASE leave your companion pets at home.

OUR shared restrooms are not accessible after 6:30 PM, please plan accordingly.