LITERATURE

Cider anyone? Sparkling, Spiked or Natural--we'll have it all! Enjoy cookies and cider as authors Gail Tsukiyama, Brian Copeland and Cara Black join Kepler's Head Buyer, Frank Sanchez, to talk about their best book club picks of the season.

Cara Black frequents a Paris little known outside the beaten tourist track. A Paris she discovers on research trips and interviews with French police and private detectives. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and their teenage son. She is a San Francisco Library Laureate and a member of the Paris Sociéte Historique in the Marais. Her nationally bestselling and award-nominated Aimée Leduc Investigation series has been translated into five languages. Cara's most recent book is Murder in the Latin Quarter.

Brian Copeland is an actor, comedian, radio talk show host, playwright and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the past 12 years he has hosted a talk radio program for KGO (AM). In 2004, Copeland premiered his first one-man show, Not a Genuine Black Man, about his experiences growing up in the East Bay suburb of San Leandro in the 1970s, when it was considered a racist enclave due to its 99.4% white population and coordinated policies of housing discrimination and segregation. It became the longest-running solo show in San Francisco history. His memoir, Not A Genuine Black Man, is based on the play.

Gail Tsukiyama, born to a Chinese mother and a Japanese father,is the bestselling author of six novels, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai's Garden and, most recently,The Street of a Thousand Blossoms. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Gail has served as chair of the Kiriyama Prize fiction panel, and she is WaterBridge Review book reviews editor.