Tag archives: Chaucers Books

Chaucer’s Choices
By Steven Libowitz   |   September 17, 2024

A trio of SoCal authors autograph and talk about their new books this week as the midtown bookstore Chaucer’s Books also gets ready for its own 50th anniversary celebration. On September 15, UCLA professor Teddi Chichester’s Wildlife Crossings of Hope: Connecting Creatures Around the Globe combines first-person reporting with research – and stunning two-color art […]

Juicy Joyce, and Chaucer’s choices
By Steven Libowitz   |   June 18, 2024

Turning from the stage to the page, it took a full century for Santa Barbara to buddy up to Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the life and work of Irish writer James Joyce every June 16; the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom. Dublin’s been […]

Words on Stage: Pitches, Poetry and Pico
By Steven Libowitz   |   April 9, 2024

Grad Slam, the annual event in which UCSB graduate students present their research in three-minute talks meant to quickly spotlight the exciting work they are doing on campus, wraps up its 11th year with presentations from the seven finalists on April 5 at Campbell Hall. The pitches are designed to captures the students’ research in […]

Two Birds with One Signing
By Steven Libowitz   |   December 12, 2023

Chaucer’s Books closes out its impressive year of in-store events on December 12 with husband-and-wife authors Neal Allen and Anne Lamott surrounding Allen’s latest, Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic. The new book finds the former journalist and corporate executive turned writer and spiritual coach diving into how our own internal critical voice gets in […]

A Golden Book
By Richard Mineards   |   October 3, 2023

To Chaucer’s, the bibliophile bastion in Loreto Plaza, to hear Chicago-based author Melanie Benjamin, 60, expound on her latest novel California Golden, about two sisters navigating the surf culture and tangled ties between mothers and daughters in the ‘60s. A prolific historical novelist, Benjamin wrote The Aviator’s Wife on Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which has been […]

Taupin’s Timely Tome ‘Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me’
By Steven Libowitz   |   September 26, 2023

Bernie Taupin, Sir Elton John’s lifelong lyrical collaborator, steps out from the 22nd row to share his account of the 55-years-and-counting creative relationship between the duo, and just about everything else in his adventurous life. Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me is much more than a companion piece to 2019’s biopic Rocketman,or John’s autobiography Me, […]

Book ‘em 
By Steven Libowitz   |   June 6, 2023

Chaucer’s has booked a whopping four in-store signings at its Loreto Plaza location this week, starting with No. 1 New York Times bestselling Young Adult author P. C. Cast on Sunday afternoon, June 4. Cast, whose novels count more than 20 million copies in print in over 40 countries, had the last installment of herTales […]

Book ’em: Chaucer’s Choices 
By Steven Libowitz   |   March 21, 2023

Santa Barbara-born author Caroline DeLoreto, a Functional Diagnostic nutrition-practitioner, LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) counselor, energy healer, and educator who worked as a health teacher at Santa Barbara Middle School for 15 years, has scheduled two local events to launch her new book. From Lyme to Light: A Spiritual Journey and Guide to Healing […]

Book ’em
By Steven Libowitz   |   March 7, 2023

Cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, who has been praised for making scientific discoveries read like riveting mysteries, is coming to town to talk about his new book, The Song of the Cell, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Emperor of All Maladies […]

Chaucer’s Choices 
By Steven Libowitz   |   February 28, 2023

The midtown bookstore goes local for author events on three successive days to mark the end of the month, beginning Sunday, Feb. 26, with Shaunna and John Stith’s Black Beach: A Community, an Oil Spill, and the Origin of Earth Day. With Earth Day 2023 barely a month away, the Stiths’ first children’s picture book […]

Book ‘em 
By Steven Libowitz   |   October 25, 2022

As Time Goes By, the new novel from SBCC English professor emeritus W. Royce Adams, follows his protagonist called Old, who is now near death and reflecting on key life moments dealing with love, lust, friendships, betrayal, and illness. Working on his memoir, Old asks himself “playful existential questions with no pertinent answers,” examining whether […]

Art Book Talk Mid-week in Mid-town 
By Steven Libowitz   |   September 6, 2022

Painter Richard Schloss, who has worked and exhibited in Santa Barbara since 1972, brings his half-century of experience to his brand-new book, Painting the Light. A member of Santa Barbara’s The Oak Group since its inception in 1986, Schloss nowadays has largely eschewed painting en plein air in favor of working in his studio on […]

Joffrey Juxtaposes Past, Present, and Future of Dance
By Steven Libowitz   |   May 10, 2022

Choreographer Gerald Arpino, the co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet who succeeded Robert Joffrey as its artistic director from 1988 to 2007 and composed nearly 50 ballets for the company, would have turned 100 next January. So, it’s fitting that Arpino’s 1986 work Birthday Variations forms the centerpiece of the Joffrey’s two-day, eight-work pair of performances […]

Chaucer’s Choices
By Steven Libowitz   |   April 26, 2022

This week, Chaucer’s Books’ event schedule includes a rare paid event, an outdoor one at that, featuring Max Brallier, the multiple New York Times bestselling author and Netflix series creator. Ever so clever, Chaucer’s is calling the event “Last Kids on Earth, Day” in honor, not only of Brallier’s epic, eight-book adventure series that was […]

Book ‘em: Writers’ Round-up at Tecolote
By Steven Libowitz   |   March 17, 2022

Prolific local literature lover Steven Gilbar, who probably spends as much time involved in books, research, and writing as he does practicing law, has just added another new title to his two dozen-strong published collection, this one sharpening the local angle to focus on writers who call Montecito home. Titled The Little Book of Montecito […]

Hone Your Shopping Craft by Going Local
By Nick Masuda   |   December 21, 2021

The pandemic has brought about a lot of changes to people’s everyday lives, with eating out replaced by delivery services, while brick-and-mortar shopping took a temporary backseat to online services. But, along the South Coast, small business is the spine of our community, the glue that keeps us all together. And that has never been […]

Finding Your Path: Book Delves into Issues of Representation
By Nick Masuda   |   November 22, 2021

Nikki Barthelmess knows what it’s like, to look Caucasian on the outside, her appearance failing to showcase her bicultural background. She’s heard the quips about Latinas — those around her not aware that she is Mexican American. She’s seen the ignorance, from the halls of local schools to the business world. “We’ve got a long […]

Six Questions: Mulling Things Over With Montecito Pianist
By Steven Libowitz   |   October 5, 2021

Pete Muller, the math whiz who leveraged his skills to create and manage a massively successful quant-driven hedge fund company that uses complex models to detect and predict inequities in the markets, seems even more invested in his burgeoning singer-songwriter career these days. The piano-playing Montecito resident, who released three solo albums mostly as a […]

Grateful and Still Going Strong: 4 Questions with Rock Photographer Jay Blakesberg
By Steven Libowitz   |   June 17, 2021

San Francisco-based photographer Jay Blakesberg is a self-confessed Deadhead whose work has appeared everywhere from Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, Relix to Time, and Vanity Fair. Over a 40-plus-year career he has taken pictures of innumerable rock legends, including the Grateful Dead, Phish, Radiohead, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, and Tom Waits, to […]

Creating Hope with Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama
By Steven Libowitz   |   May 20, 2021

It’s no surprise that UCSB Arts & Lectures has turned to the XIV Dalai Lama for the keynote event in its year-long 2021-2022 Creating Hope programming initiative. After all, not only has His Holiness, who is believed to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, spent much of his life encouraging people to be […]