WEDNESDAY, October 7, 2026 · 6-8PM, FREE
Join East Bay author Barry Bergman for a conversation about his debut novel Proles — a darkly comic coming-of-age tale set against the turmoil of the Nixon years. Barry will be introduced and in conversation with fellow author Steve Early.
Inspired by a blacklisted reenactment of a Southwest miners' strike, Proles follows Simon Bussbaum as he flees his middle-class life in Queens for the Arizona desert, eager to join American workers' march to the promised land of liberty and justice for all. His film-fueled summer of hard labor, toxic masculinity, and unrequited love goes wildly off-script — but it shines a revealing light on the power and perils of myth.
Bergman's debut, wrote Kirkus Reviews, "draw[s] on Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, and Hunter S. Thompson for its bleak, scorched earth-style depiction of the death of post-'60s American idealism."
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Barry Bergman is a New York City refugee, long ago replanted in the Bay Area. He's been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer/editor with bylines in Sierra, California, and Mother Jones, and a communications pro at UC Berkeley and assorted nonprofits. Before earning his journalism degree at SF State he worked in a variety of industrial settings, including two years in an Arizona copper smelter — an experience he'd later reimagine as the fictional backdrop for Proles.
Steve Early has been active in the Communications Workers of America for forty-five years. He lives in Richmond and belongs to the Richmond Progressive Alliance and East Bay DSA.
WHERE TO FIND THE BOOK: Proles is published by Serving House Books and is available at Bookshop.org, Book Passage, Mrs. Dalloway's, and other independent booksellers.
No tickets — just come by.