Booksmith presents: Craig Mod with Robin Sloan / Things Become Other Things | Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.

Once online tickets close, show up on the night of the event and ask a staffer about availability. Will likely be standing room, but you'll still be able to grab a book and get it signed! Questions? [email protected]~The Booksmith is thrilled to be welcoming Craig Mod to The Booksmith for the Things Become Other Things on May 12th at 7pm. He'll be in-conversation with Robin Sloan. Please join us! RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are limited and can be guaranteed with the purchase of a book.See you at the shop!About the bookA transformative 300-mile walk along Japan’s ancient pilgrimage routes and through depopulating villages inspires a heartrending remembrance of a long-lost friend, documented in poignant, imaginative prose and remarkable photography.“An epic, exquisitely detailed journey, on foot, through a rural Japan few of us are likely to experience. Uniquely unforgettable.”—William Gibson, New York Times bestselling author of NeuromancerPhotographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes—the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula—took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan at nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. For Mod, the walk became a tool to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”Tracing a 300-mile-long journey, Things Become Other Things folds together history, literature, poetry, Shinto and Buddhist spirituality, and contemporary rural life in Japan via dozens of conversations with aging fishermen, multi-generational inn owners, farmers, and kissaten cafe “mamas.” Along the way, Mod communes with mountain fauna, marvels over evidence of bears and boars, and hopscotches around leeches. He encounters whispering priests and foul-mouthed little kids who ask him, “Just what the heck are you, anyway?” Through sharp prose and his curious archive of photographs, he records evidence of floods and tsunamis, the disappearance of village life on the peninsula, and the capricious fecundity of nature.Things Become Other Things blends memoir and travel writing at their best, transporting readers to an otherwise inaccessible Japan, one made visible only through Mod’s unique bicultural lens.About the authorsCraig Mod is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of four books, including Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He is also the author of the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other publications.Robin Sloan is a fiction writer who splits his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley of California. You can sign up for his email newsletter, sent once every 29 ½ days, at www.robinsloan.com.About the bookstoreThe 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. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.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, but not guaranteed.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? [email protected]