Join us on Monday, September 28 as we welcome Tananarive Due and Leigh Bardugo to the shop for the release of MAZYWOOD. Save the date! RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are limited and on a first-come, first served basis. You can reserve a seat in advance with the purchase of a book or a $3 sliding scale donation to our program.

About the book

All the Sinners Bleed meets Erasure in this literary thriller from the award-winning author of The Reformatory following the grandson of a famous Black actress who returns to his grandmother’s cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood.

When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.

Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.

Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.

About the author

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due).

Leigh Bardugo is the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Familiar, The Invisible Parade, and the Ninth House trilogy. She is also the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series) which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology— and much more. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders (Book+seat, Pay it Forward!+seat) will have seats held until 7pm. 
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available.
• Books will be for sale on the night of the event.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com