Vroman's Bookstore Events

Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101

Here is what is coming up at Vroman's Bookstore, and what has already happened there. Concerts, games, festivals and the smaller nights that never surface in a generic search — no account needed.

Coming up 3 events

Coming Soon

12 days away

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John Stephens, "Age of Fury"

In 13 days · Oct 20 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

The kids who were handed a fat fantasy paperback at the right age did not read it so much as move into it, and they are adults now with the sequels still outstanding in their heads. Stephens writes that kind of book - the enormous, plot-dense, siblings-against-an-unfair-cosmos kind - and he came to it after a career writing television, which shows in the pacing and in how little patience he has for a slow chapter. The Pasadena crowd for this skews younger and more enthusiastic than the usual weeknight author event, which changes the texture of the questions entirely: fewer people asking about process, more people asking what happens to a particular character and refusing to accept a non-answer. Vroman's has been in business since 1894 and has the oldest bookstore charter in Southern California, and the second-floor room where this happens still has the feel of a place where the staff decide the programming rather than a publisher. Free, open to anyone, seven o'clock on a Tuesday. Bring the kid who will not stop talking about the first one, or come alone and admit it is for you.

Monthly

20 days away

Vroman's Fiction Reading Group

Monthly · Next Oct 28 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Reading alone is fine until you finish something enormous and realise there is nobody in your life you can say the last page to. That is the hole this fills, on the fourth Wednesday of every month, upstairs, for an hour, for free. No application, no reading list you have to have kept up with, no requirement beyond having read the book or being willing to sit there while people who did talk about it. October's is Lincoln in the Bardo, which is George Saunders at his strangest - a graveyard, a grieving president, a hundred and sixty-six narrators interrupting each other - and it is precisely the kind of book that works better out loud with other people than it does alone in a chair. The group skews across four decades of age, which is unusual and is the best thing about it; the retired teacher and the twenty-four-year-old disagree about the same paragraph and both turn out to be right. It is one hour. It meets whether or not you came last month. Second floor of the oldest bookstore in Southern California, every fourth Wednesday, indefinitely.

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

Coming Soon

21 days away

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

Oct 29, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

You can stand at the corner of Spring and Third in downtown Los Angeles and not know that the ground under you was owned, in the 1860s, by a woman who had walked to California behind a wagon as someone else's property and then sued her way free in a Los Angeles courtroom. Biddy Mason bought that lot, became one of the wealthiest landowners in the city, founded the First African Methodist Episcopal church in her own home, and then was mostly written out of the story of how this place was built. Waite is a historian at Durham who works on slavery in the American West - the part of the history that the national narrative keeps placing somewhere else - and he has reconstructed her life from the court records. This is the rare local-history event that is genuinely news rather than nostalgia. Free, upstairs at Vroman's, a Thursday evening in Pasadena. There is a memorial wall to her downtown on the alley that bears her name, and almost nobody who walks past it knows what it commemorates. After this you will.

Previously at Vroman's Bookstore 9

This Happened

Monte Burke, "Men of Troy: The Epic Afternoons, Wild Nights, and Enduring Legacy of Pete Carroll's USC Trojans"

Today · Oct 7 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

For about seven years this city had a football team that felt less like a program and more like a weekly party everyone was invited to, and if you were here for it you have never entirely stopped talking about it. The Coliseum on a hot afternoon, a roster that read like a future NFL draft board, a coach who seemed to be having more fun than anybody. Burke went and reported the whole thing out - the afternoons and, pointedly, the wild nights - and the book is neither a hagiography nor a hit piece, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. What makes this worth a Wednesday in Pasadena is the room rather than the reading. A sports book event at a literary bookstore draws two crowds who do not normally sit together: people who can still name the 2005 starting backfield, and people who came because they trust the store's judgement about nonfiction. The second floor event space holds maybe eighty, free, no ticket. Someone will ask about the Bush Push and the answer will take fifteen minutes. That is the whole reason to come.

Sonali Kolhatkar discusses & signs Breaking Ice: Community Defense Against State Terror and Maga Fascism

This Happened

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Sonali Kolhatkar discusses & signs Breaking Ice: Community Defense Against State Terror and Maga Fascism

Sep 3, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Political exhaustion has a particular texture: too much input, no framework, nowhere to set any of it down. It arrives in fragments, mostly through people angrier than you and less informed, until caring at that volume starts to make you useless. There is a real difference between doomscrolling and sitting in a room while a journalist who has covered immigration enforcement and community response for years lays out how the pieces connect, then takes questions from strangers who are just as tired as you are. Breaking Ice is an argument about community defense, and the crowd it pulls in Pasadena tends to be people who came straight from work, still in the clothes, choosing this over the couch. Expect long questions and longer answers. Nobody leaves early, and the room is small enough that you end up talking to whoever sat down next to you. Thursday the 3rd, 7:00pm. RSVP required.

This Happened

Joseph Fink, in conversation with Mara Wilson, discusses & signs The Nudge: A Psychological Thriller

Sep 1, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Some people drive home in the dark with a podcast in their ears and find a desert town that does not exist more comforting than the one they actually live in. That listener has usually never met another one in person. The voice has been in their head for a decade — across a move, a bad year, a commute they otherwise could not have survived — and it has always been a solitary arrangement, headphones and a highway. Which is the strange thing about a night like this: the person whose sentences you have been carrying around turns out to be a guy standing at a podium in a bookstore, taking questions, slightly amused. The room fills with people who all have the same reference points and have never once been able to use them out loud. Southern California's oldest independent bookstore has hosted this exact kind of gathering since 1894, long before anyone called it a fandom. Ticketed, 7:00pm, the first Tuesday in September. Go alone if you have to. You will not be the only one who did.

This Happened

Sam Quinones discusses & signs Our Lady of the Angels: The Virgin of Guadalupe on the Walls of Los Angeles

Aug 31, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Ask ten people who have lived here twenty years to explain Los Angeles and you get ten confident answers that do not overlap anywhere. That is the condition of the place — everyone is an expert on the two square miles they know and a tourist everywhere else. Long-form reporting on this city draws a specific reader: the person who keeps a mental list of the neighborhoods they have not understood yet, who reads about a street they have driven a thousand times and finds out what was happening on it. A Monday-night talk pulls that reader out of the house at the start of a workweek, which is a real filter — the people who show up on a Monday are the ones who actually care. Expect long questions from the audience and longer answers. Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookstore, holding down Colorado Boulevard since 1894. A Monday, 7:00pm, at the very end of August. Ticketed.

This Happened

Vroman's Fiction Reading Group

Aug 26, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Finishing a novel that undoes you and having nobody to tell is its own small grief. You text one friend who has not read it. You consider writing a review you will never post. The feeling has nowhere to go, so it goes flat, and by the time somebody finally does read the thing you have lost the exact shape of what you wanted to say about it. A standing reading group quietly solves a problem most readers never name out loud: it guarantees that on a set evening there will be a room of people who have been inside the same book at the same time, and who will argue with you about the ending. There is no audition and no backlog you were supposed to have finished years ago — there is the current title and whatever you thought of it. The store itself has anchored Colorado Boulevard since 1894, which is a long time to have been handing strangers the same book and letting them fight about it. Free, 7:00pm, Wednesday the 26th. Check the store's event page for the month's title before you come.

This Happened

Diana Giovinnazo, in conversation with J. Ryan Stradal, discusses & signs Daughters of Naples

Aug 25, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Somewhere in a drawer there is a photograph of a woman nobody living can name. She is standing in front of a building in a country your family left, and the story that went with her died with whoever last told it. Second and third generations carry that gap around quietly — a surname they cannot pronounce the old way, a recipe with a step missing, a grandmother who answered questions in a language that ran out before the answers did. Historical fiction set in the place your people came from does something a family tree cannot: it puts weather and noise and a wet street back around the photograph. Readers who come to a Tuesday-night talk for this are rarely casual about it. They bring their own version of the drawer. Free-flowing question sessions here tend to turn into people telling their own family stories to a stranger with a microphone, which is the entire point. Tickets required; the talk begins at 7:00pm on the 25th. Bring your version of the drawer. Somebody there will want to hear about her.

This Happened

James Queally, in conversation with Tod Goldberg, discusses & signs Surviving the Lie: A Russell Avery Novel

Aug 18, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Everybody in Los Angeles has a version of the city they think is the real one, and almost nobody's version includes the 3am parts — the watch commander's log, the press conference nobody attended, the case that got two paragraphs and then nothing. Crime fiction written by somebody who actually worked that beat reads differently than crime fiction written by somebody who researched it, and the readers who can tell the difference tend to be a little obsessive about it. They will drive across the county for a writer who gets the procedural details right. A Tuesday night in a bookstore is where that crowd surfaces: retired detectives arguing with novelists, court reporters, a couple of people who just love a good LA noir and want to hear how the sausage is made. Free entry, which keeps it the kind of room where people ask real questions instead of performing. Southern California's oldest independent bookstore, in business since 1894. Free entry, 7:00pm, Tuesday the 18th. Come with a question you actually want answered.

This Happened

April Dávila, in conversation with Lian Dolan, discusses & signs Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less

Aug 17, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

The manuscript is in a folder you have stopped opening. Not because the idea died — the idea is fine, the idea wakes you up sometimes — but because sitting down with it has started to feel like walking into a room where someone is waiting to tell you what is wrong with you. So you do not sit down. You reorganize your desk instead. You read about writing. Months go by, and the not-writing becomes its own heavy thing you carry into every conversation where somebody asks how the book is going. A Monday night talk about the mechanics of getting out of your own way is not a productivity seminar; it is closer to a room full of people admitting the same private failure at the same time, which is the only condition under which anyone actually starts again. It is free, which matters — nobody has to justify the cost of showing up to something they are not sure they deserve. It costs nothing and starts at 7:00pm on Monday the 17th. The folder is still sitting in your drawer.

This Happened

Olivie Blake, in conversation with Amy Tintera, discusses & signs Dreamland

Aug 11, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Most people who love these books have only ever loved them alone. At 1am, thumb on a screen, three chapters past the point where sleep was still an option, with nobody in the house who would understand why you are crying about a fictional academic. The fandom lives online because that is where it was born, and there is a specific hunger that builds in a person who has spent years talking about a story only to strangers with usernames. Then you walk into a room in Pasadena on a Tuesday night and forty of those strangers have faces. They brought their annotated copies. The tabs are color-coded, and somebody two rows up has the same tab system you thought you invented. The oldest independent bookstore in Southern California has been putting authors in front of readers here since 1894, which means the shelves behind the folding chairs have watched a hundred and thirty years of exactly this: people finding out their private thing is a shared thing. Doors at 7:00pm on Tuesday, August 11. Bring the copy with the tabs in it.

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Vroman's Bookstore Events

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