Bookstore Tour • Events & Readings • Storefront Banner Series / Mural • Map/Directions • FAQ • Contact Us
 |
Welcome to City Lights Bookstore!A Literary Meeting Place Since 1953, City Lights is a landmark general bookstore, internationally known for its expert selection of books and for its commitment to free intellectual inquiry. Here you can check out our events calendar, browse a selection of featured books, new releases and recommended titles from the City Lights staff, sign up to receive City Lights newsletters, and learn a bit of the history of City Lights.For any immediate questions or concerns, see our contact page or give us a call at (415) 362-8193 |
Featured Titles at the City Lights Bookstore
|
The Thing Around Your Neck Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape...
|
|
Outlaw Journalist The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson "Gets it all in: the boozing and drugging . . . but also the intelligence, the loyalty, the inherent decency." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
|
|
Pocket Pantheon Figures of Postwar Philosophy In this pint-sized collection of essays, Alain Badiou takes the reader through a keen yet poignant journey through the pantheon of late twentieth-century philosophy. Through the course of the collection – each essay homage to a figure that helped to...
|
| |
|
Banksy's Bristol Home Sweet Home Much of Banksy's early work on the streets of Bristol has been lost, but this book records those works which appeared throughout the city. Author Steve Wright explores the streets of Banksy's Bristol and interviews many of the people who worked with...
|
|
Juan the Landless Juan Goytisolo has radically revised his masterpiece Juan the Landless for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. Marking a turning point in Goytisolo's work from outright hostility for his homeland towards a growing appreciation and...
|
|
Shadows, Fire, Snow The Life of Tina Modotti 55 b/w photographs Ten years of research and the discovery of long-forgotten letters and photos enabled Patricia Albers to bring new recognition to this talented, intelligent, and independent photographer whose life embodied the cultural and...
|
|
Baader-Meinhof The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Book Description The Baader-Meinhof Group--later known as the Red Army Faction (RAF)--was a violent urban guerilla group which terrorized Germany in the 1970s and '80s, killing 47 people, wounding 93, taking 162 hostages, and robbing 35 banks--all in...
|
|
The Angel's Game In the turbulent and mysterious Barcelona of the 1920s, David Martin, a young novelist obsessed with a forbidden love, receives an offer from an enigmatic publisher to write a book like no other before — a book for which “people will live and die.” In...
|
|
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll An Alternative History of American Popular Music "There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear...
|
|
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work. We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the...
|
|
Brecht at Night This "documentary novel," the latest of Estonian author Mati Unt's deadpan and playful works to be translated into English, is about a little-known period in the life of the great Bertolt Brecht, when the writer—having fled Nazi Germany— became stuck...
|
|
Perfecting Sound Forever An Aural History of Recorded Music In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician...
|
|
In the Kitchen A Novel Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up to Brick Lane that will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original...
|
|
Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong In this sweeping work of memoir and commentary, leading cultural critic Paul Chaat Smith illustrates with dry wit and brutal honesty the contradictions of life in "the Indian business." Raised in suburban Maryland and Oklahoma, Smith dove head...
|
| |
|
Wonder “While fully aware that such an honorable title can only be used in great exceptions in Flemish literature, I would call Wonder a masterpiece.”—Paul de Wispelaere, Vlaamse Gids In his Faulknerian novels, Hugo Claus mixes expertly crafted stories of...
|
|
Anarchism A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two: The Anarchist Current (1939-2007) Continuing where volume one left off, this anthology documents anarchist writings from World War II up until the present day. Many of the translations (from Africa, India, China, Latin America, and Europe) have never before been published in English...
|
|
Black Water Rising A Novel Writing in the tradition of Dennis Lehane and Greg Iles, Attica Locke, a powerful new voice in American fiction, delivers a brilliant debut thriller that readers will not soon forget. Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most...
|
|
Bananas How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World In this compelling history of the United Fruit Company, Financial Times writer Peter Chapman weaves a dramatic tale of big business, deceit, and violence, exploring the origins of arguably one of the most controversial global corporations ever, and...
|
RSS