Vroman's Bookstore: Teo Rivera-Dundas discusses & signs Slow Guillotine (Zero Street Fiction)
2026-06-22 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Slow Guillotine follows three broke weirdos whose collective desire to make and think about art is constantly interrupted by their art-industry-adjacent minimum-wage jobs. Throughout the novel, the three friends’ day jobs in a failing independent bookstore, a sterile gallery in downtown Manhattan, and miscellaneous living rooms across the Long Island birthday-party-clown circuit interweave with their attempts to come to terms with their precarity, gender-dysphoric embodiment, and the floating dream of collective liberation.
Spanning one year and told through an obsessive first-person present tense, Slow Guillotine brings the bildungsroman structure through the autofictional looking glass, questioning how “coming of age” could be feasible in a society of debtors, wage laborers, and renters.

Vroman's Bookstore: David Litt discusses & signs It’s Only Drowning: A Memoir
2026-06-23 19:00 | Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
A former Obama speechwriter moves to the Jersey Shore and learns to surf with the help of his brother-in-law: a tattooed, truck-driving Joe Rogan superfan.
David, the Yale-educated writer with a fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with a shed full of surfboards, had never been close. But as America’s crises piled up and David spiraled into existential dread, he noticed that his brother-in-law was thriving. He began to suspect Matt’s favorite hobby had something to do with it.
David started taking surf lessons. For months, he wiped out on waves the height of daffodils. Yet, after realizing that surfing could change him both in and out of the water, he set an audacious goal: riding a big wave in Hawaii. He searched for an expert he could trust to guide and protect him–and when he couldn’t find one, he asked Matt. Together, they set out on a journey that spanned coasts, and even continents, before taking them to Oahu’s famously dangerous North Shore.
It’s Only Drowning is a laugh-out-loud love letter to surfing–and so much more. It’s an ode to embarking on adventures at any age. It’s a blueprint for becoming braver at a time when it takes courage just to read the news. Most of all, it’s the story of an unlikely friendship, one that crosses the fault lines of education, ideology, and culture tearing so many of us apart.

Vroman's Bookstore: Fiction Reading Group
2026-06-24 19:00 | Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
The Vroman’s Fiction Reading Group explores contemporary fiction -long and short– from a diverse selection of writers. Enjoy lively discussions at our one-hour meetings. Our Fiction Reading Group is free and inclusive – there are no requirements nor criteria to join. We announce upcoming titles 3-6 months in advance and choose titles that are available in paperback. Drop by our next meeting!
June’s pick is The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Fiction Reading Group meetings are held inside Vroman’s Bookstore on the second floor in the

Wellness in the Park: Strength and Bodyweight Bootcamp with Anytime Fitness
2026-06-25 18:00 - 19:00 | Playhouse Village Park, 701 Union St, Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Wellness in the Park is back with free outdoor classes presented by local studios and gyms. Starting June 25 at 6PM, Use your own bodyweight for exercises to create resistance and improve strength, flexibility, and endurance, as well as coordination.

Vroman's Bookstore: William Loving, in conversation with Ivy Pochoda, discusses & signs Fells Point
2026-06-25 19:00 | Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
What begins as a personal journey of late-life reckoning becomes a noir-tinged meditation on memory, mortality, and the search for purpose. By turns darkly funny and melancholic, Fells Point captures a soul—and a city—at a crossroads.
Daniel Doyle Jr., a jaded, middle-aged corporate communications flack in Baltimore, is drifting through life under a literal death sentence: a congenital heart defect that could take him any day. Determined to reclaim some meaning, he sets out to truly see and understand his city for the first time, creating a “bucket list” of cultural landmarks, lost institutions, and personal haunts across Baltimore. But as he traverses the city’s past and present, he realizes he’s being followed by a mysterious stranger who seems to appear wherever he goes. Is it paranoia, coincidence, or something more sinister?
Bio:
William Loving is the author of three novels, including City of Angles, Blue Earth River, and his latest, Fells Point. Before turning to fiction, he worked as a journalist at the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, covering city life, politics, and culture. His fiction reflects a journalist’s sharp eye for character and place, blending wit, suspense, and a deep connection to the cities that have shaped him. He lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife.

Wolhause: Knitting Foundations - For Beginners
2026-06-26 11:30 - 13:30 | Wollhaus Artisan Yarn & Tools, 696 E. Colorado Blvd. Suite 2, Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Wolhaus invites you to learn how to knit! Always wanted to learn to knit? Need a refresher? In this class, you will learn the skills required to get you started or continue on your knitting journey. No previous experience required!

First Church of Science: Learning to Love Your Enemy
2026-06-27 11:00 | First Church of Christ, Scientist Pasadena, 80 Oakland St., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Learning to Love Your Enemies workshop, a talk on Christian Science.

Vroman's Bookstore: Jeremy Atherton discusses & signs Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
2026-06-27 14:00 | CA
From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New Yorker Best Books of 2025 Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year Time Out 10 Best Books of the Year NPR Books We Love 2025
It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams–a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit–just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”
With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before–smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Following Gay Bar–called “a rich tapestry” by Vanity Fair and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson– Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.
A Recommended Book in the Washington Post, the New York Times Style Magazine, Observer, W Magazine, NBC News, E! Online, Queerty, Literary Hub, Stylist, & Dazed

Pasadena Heritage: The Places In Between with Andy Romanoff
2026-06-27 17:00 - 19:00 | Blinn House, 160 N. Oakland Ave., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Photographer and Writer, Andy Romanoff presents The Places In Between, an evening exploring travel, memory, landscape, and the strange poetry of the American road. Through short films, readings, photographs, and personal reflections, Romanoff traces the sometimes overlooked spaces between destinations: the faded towns, roadside encounters, desert highways, and fragments of memory that define the experience of travel in the American West.
Using photographs, film, and stories gathered over years on the road, the presentation moves through U.S. Route 66, the Loneliest Road, the Sierra Nevada, Silver City, roadside bars, and countless in between places typically seen through the windshield. Rather than focusing on destinations alone, The Places In Between looks at the landscapes, chance encounters, and fleeting moments that shape how we think about travel and the places we call home.
At its heart, the evening reflects on the idea that no matter how far the road stretches, every journey eventually circles back home to Los Angeles.

Pasadena Museum of History: Exploring Pasadena on Foot | Part 2: Route 66 & Car Culture in the Playhouse Village
2026-07-11 10:00 - 11:00 | Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena , CA, 91101, United States
This walking tour will pick up thematically where the previous tour finished and continue walking east on Colorado Boulevard through the Playhouse Village. Pasadena’s Playhouse Village was developed as a commercial district in the 1920s when automobile ownership was rising rapidly across the country. Many of its buildings represent important milestones in car culture, including the first parking garage in the city and a luxury car dealership catering to the Golden Age of Hollywood.
This tour will start at 585 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91101 (in front of Pasadena Presbyterian Church) and end on Colorado Blvd. & S. Lake Avenue.

Third@First: Piano Extravaganza
2026-10-18 16:00 - 17:00 | First United Methodist Church, 500 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA, 91101, United States
Acclaimed faculty pianists Bernadene Blaha (USC), Kevin Fitz-Gerald (USC), Sarkis Baltaian (Orange County School of the Arts), and First UMC’s own Junko Ueno Garrett (Occidental College) unite to play with eight hands on two pianos! Come hear music by Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Moscheles, Ravel, and Rossini.
