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| Book Passages | |
|---|---|
| Name | Book Passages |
| Type | Cultural institution |
| Established | 1987 |
| Headquarters | Corte Madera, California |
| Founder | Richard Robinson |
Book Passages Book Passages is a bookseller, literary program organizer, and cultural venue in northern California that hosts readings, author events, and community workshops. It connects authors and audiences through festivals, partnerships, and retail spaces, engaging with national and international literary networks and institutions. The organization collaborates with publishers, universities, libraries, media outlets, and non-profits to promote authors, journals, and literary movements.
Book Passages operates as an independent bookstore and event producer linked to regional and national literary ecosystems including Library of Congress, Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Brown University, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, California State University, Long Beach, San Francisco State University, Santa Clara University, Sonoma State University, Mills College, Scripps College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Amherst College, Vassar College, University of Michigan, University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, University of Southern California, Boston University, Northeastern University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Rutgers University, Purdue University, Indiana University Bloomington, Ohio State University, University of Notre Dame, Rice University, Emory University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Arizona State University and cultural funders such as National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Institution. It situates itself within literary circuits that include festivals like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Miami Book Fair, Bay Area Book Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Napa Valley Festival del Sole, South by Southwest, Brooklyn Book Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Hay Festival.
Book Passages programs feature author readings, book signings, panel discussions, workshops, children's story hours, and virtual webinars, working with publishers such as Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Bloomsbury Publishing, Faber and Faber, Vintage Books, Knopf Doubleday, Scribner, Little, Brown and Company, Crown Publishing Group, St. Martin's Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, University of California Press, Norton, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson PLC. Formats include print, hardcover, paperback, limited editions, boxed sets, audiobooks produced by Audible, Penguin Audio, Hachette Audio, Blackstone Audio, and e-books distributed through Amazon (company), Barnes & Noble, Kobo Inc., Apple Inc., Google LLC, and subscription platforms like Scribd.
Events at Book Passages have highlighted authors and figures from diverse traditions, attracting guests connected to literary and cultural histories such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Munro, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Dante Alighieri, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Mary Shelley — reflecting connections to prize cultures like the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, Costa Book Awards, PEN/Faulkner Award, Bram Stoker Award.
Book Passages navigates licensing and rights issues involving contracts with rights holders and agencies like Writers Guild of America, Authors Guild, Creative Commons, SESAC, ASCAP, BMI, Harry Ransom Center, British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and presses including Random House imprint structures. It must consider statutory frameworks such as the Copyright Act of 1976 (United States), international accords like the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, World Intellectual Property Organization treaties, and case law from courts including the Supreme Court of the United States, European Court of Human Rights, European Court of Justice, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Compliance includes permissions for excerpts, public performance rights, mechanical rights for audio, synchronization licenses, and agreements with collecting societies and rights management services.
Book Passages curates selections and invites contributors associated with anthologies, series, and landmark works such as The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Granta, The Paris Review Anthology, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic (magazine), The New York Review of Books, Poetry (magazine), Tin House, McSweeney's, Guernica (magazine), Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Paris Review Interviews, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Longreads, Narrative Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Zyzzyva, Conjunctions (magazine), The Believer (magazine), n+1, The Threepenny Review.
Book Passages partners with public institutions and educational programs including San Francisco Public Library, Marin County Free Library, Corte Madera Library, California State Library, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, NPR (United States), KQED, KQED-FM, KALW, Minnesota Public Radio, PBS, BBC Radio 4, and community organizations to provide literacy initiatives, school visits, teen writing camps, adult literacy workshops, and festival scholarships. It also collaborates with museums and cultural centers such as Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art to integrate literature into broader public programming.
Category:Bookstores