The Booksmith is excited to be hosting Ira Madison III for an exclusive in-store reading and signing for his brand new debut essay collection Pure Innocent Fun. More details to come, but save the date and join us!

Please note: Because this is a pre-pub event, purchasing a copy of the book is required for entry. Seats are limited and will be first-come, first-served!

About Pure Innocent Fun

In this nostalgic and raucous collection of sixteen original essays, Ira Madison III—critic, television writer, and host of the beloved Keep It podcast—combines memoir and criticism to offer a brand-new pop-culture manifesto.

“This is the most fun I’ve had reading all year. Like Chuck Klosterman before him, Ira Madison III takes seriously and analyzes the pop culture detritus that took up hours of our lives.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda

You can recall the first TV show, movie, book, or song that made you feel understood—that shaped how you live, what you love, and whom you would become. It gave you an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject—and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.

In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “a virgin who can’t drive.”

Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.

About the Author

Ira Madison III is the host of Crooked Media’s pop culture podcast Keep It. His television writing credits include Uncoupled, Q-Force, Nikki Fre$h, and So Help Me Todd. He has written for GQ, New York Magazine, Interview, MTV News, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. Nylon named him one of the “most reliably hilarious and incisive cultural critics writing now.” He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Watch What Happens Live, The Wendy Williams Show, and the second season of the Netflix drama You. Ira Madison III lives in New York City.

About the bookstore

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