A momentous book launch begins tomorrow 10/8/08 for So Many Ways to Sleep Badly by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore at 7:30 pm at City Lights. Then on Friday she leaves to go on tour for two months — following is the info, please tell your friends, enemies, friendly enemies, the people pretending to be your friends, and even married gay people… If you aren’t familiar with her just keep reading!

Here’s what people are saying about the book — tour list below:

“A gender-bending novel [that] unearths subjects still relatively untouched in popular culture… you’re not going to be reading anything similar elsewhere.”
–Times of London

“Mattilda’s brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness.”
–Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Rose of No Man’s Land

“A book that has done nothing less than invent its own language.”
–T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s exhilarating new novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco — battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants, and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions, and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine.

First, the dates, followed by the complete info:

San Francisco: City Lights Bookstore — Wednesday, October 8, 7:30 pm
Portland: Powell’s on Hawthorne — Monday, October 13, 7:30 pm
Seattle: Elliott Bay Book Company — Wednesday, October 15, 7:30 pm
Olympia, WA: Evergreen State College Library — Thursday, October 16, 7 p.m.
Bellingham, WA: Village Books — Monday, October 20, 7 pm
Chicago: Women & Children First — Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 pm
Toronto: This Ain’t the Rosedale Library — Monday, November 3, 7 pm
Montreal: McGill University — Thursday, November 6, 7 pm
Amherst, MA: Food for Thought — Tuesday, Nov 11, 7:00 pm
Boston: Harvard Coop — Thursday, November 13, 7 pm
New York: Bluestockings — Tuesday, November 18, 7 pm
Philadelphia: Giovanni’s Room — Thursday, November 20, 5:30 pm
Baltimore: Red Emma’s — Monday, December 1, 7 pm
Washington, DC: Location TBA — Wednesday, December 3, 7 pm

He’ll also be featured at the following series:
Chicago: Bookslut Reading Series — Tuesday, October 28, 7:30 pm
New York: QT Reading Series at Dixon Place — Tuesday, December 9, 7 pm

(More California events to come in January and February!)

***THE BIG BOOK LAUNCH***
Wednesday, October 8, 7:30pm
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Ave. at Broadway
San Francisco, CA 94133
(415) 362-8193
www.citylights.com
A Litquake event!

***THE BIG BOOK TOUR***

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in PORTLAND
(with Thea Hillman)

Monday, October 13, 7:30 p.m.
Powell’s on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, Oregon
(503) 228-4651
www.powells.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in SEATTLE
(with Thea Hillman)
Wednesday, October 15, 7:30 p.m.
Elliott Bay Book Co.
101 S. Main St.
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 624-6600
www.elliottbaybook.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in OLYMPIA
(with Thea Hillman)
Thursday, October 16, 7 p.m.
Evergreen State College Library, Underground
2700 NW Evergreen Parkway
Olympia, WA 98505

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in BELLINGHAM
Monday, October 20, 7 p.m.
Village Books
1200 11th Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
(360) 671-2626
www.villagebooks.com

Bookslut Reading Series
(with Todd Hasak-Lowy and more TBA)
Tuesday, October 28, 7:30 p.m.
Hopleaf, Second Floor
5148 N. Clark Street
Chicago, IL
www.bookslut.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in CHICAGO
Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 p.m.
Women and Children First
5233 N. Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 769-9299
www.womenandchildrenfirst.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in TORONTO
(with Hal Niedzviecki, Stacey May Fowles, Tara-Michelle Ziniuk and
Sandra Alland)
Monday, November 3, 7:00 p.m.
This Ain’t The Rosedale Library
86 Nassau Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5T 1M5
www.thisaint.ca

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in MONTREAL
Thursday, November 6, 7:00 p.m.
McGill University
Biology Building
1205 Dr. Penfield Avenue
Room S 1/4
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in AMHERST
Tuesday, Nov 11, 7:00 p.m.
Food for Thought
106 N. Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 253-5432
www.foodforthoughtbooks.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in BOSTON
Thursday, November 13, 7:00 p.m.
Harvard Coop
1400 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02238
(617) 499-2000
http://harvard.bncollege.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in NEW YORK
Tuesday, November 18, 7 p.m.
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St (between Stanton and Rivington)
New York, NY 10002
(212) 777-6028
www.bluestockings.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in PHILADELPHIA
Thursday, November 20, 5:30 p.m.
Giovanni’s Room
1145 Pine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
(215) 923-2960
www.giovannisroom.com

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in BALTIMORE
(with Cristy Road)
Monday, December 1, 7:00 p.m.
Red Emma’s
800 St. Paul St.
Baltimore, MD 21202
(410) 230-0450
www.redemmas.org

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly in WASHINGTON, DC
Wednesday, December 3, 7:00 p.m.
Location TBA
Washington, DC

QT Reading Series at Dixon Place
Tuesday, December 9, 7:00pm
(with Douglas A. Martin and Magdalena Zurawski)
161 Chrystie Street (just above Delancey)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

Check my website (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) for any new events.

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly
By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Publication date: October 2008
Trade paperback original ISBN 978-0-87286-468-9 $15.95
Fiction/Queer literature
Contact: Stacey Lewis Stacey@citylights.com ph (415) 362-1901

“So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a ‘Sex in the Other City’ — only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn… This refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language.”
–T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts

“Like the best writers that have come before — David Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, William S. Burroughs — Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it’s a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it.”
–Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters

“Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don’t know how to swim. . . . You breathe in this new element — this frantic, fluid prose — and read like you have never read before.”
–Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth and The Last Time I Saw You

“In 1955, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an attack on the conformity and the alienation of that era. Now here’s another great paean to a counterculture of hustlers, junkies and visionary angels to wash the taste of the Bush years out of our mouths.”
–Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist and Denny Smith

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four groundbreaking nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Maximumrocknroll, and lives in San Francisco.

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
(415)440-1575
537 Jones Street, #3152
San Francisco, CA 94102
www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com
http://nobodypasses.blogspot.com