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

 

ABOUT OUR NEW BOOKSTORE SECTION, "PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE"

Created in the wake of the November 2016 election, our newest bookstore section, Pedagogies of Resistance, is designed to act as an educational course in revolutionary competence. These texts build upon one another to highlight the motivations, ideas, successes, and failures that define past and present revolutionary movements in order to illuminate possibilities for current and future movement builders. 

This developing list consists of nearly 200 books, and can be found on a visit to our bookstore—we hope you'll come by to check out our new section. Our democracy needs every one of us to be as informed and engaged as possible! Arm yourself with information. The list was originally conceived in January 2017 and then updated in July 2017.

DOWNLOAD THE LIST HERE, WHICH WE ENCOURAGE YOU SHARE.

 

 

 

 

Featured and Recommended Titles at the Bookstore

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W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits
Visualizing Black America
Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Britt Rusert
Recommended by Paul The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line."
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Negrophobia
An Urban Parable
Darius James
Darius James's scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary Negrophobia is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity of American racism.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf
(The Dark Star Trilogy)
Marlon James
Spilling copious amounts of warm blood, Marlon James has dipped into African folklore & myth to breathe new life into a genre that was in danger of stagnation. I had given up on anything contemporary resembling high fantasy. Then this book hit. What seemed old & stuffy now feels unique, shocking, & challenging. As it should. - Recommended by Daven
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One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
Luigi Pirandello
Another Spurl Editions book for you FREAKS out there. A book about a descent into madness, sprung from an outside observation, and thus realization, about his nose. Point your finger and holler MADMAN! MADMAN! MADMAN! recommended by Jared, City Lights Bookstore
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Carceral Capitalism
Jackie Wang
Wang's perspective is both scholarly and poetic, perfect for drawing close analyses of complex political interconnections. --Recommended by Ivy
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Compass
Mathias Enard
Every decade or so, a book comes along that demonstrates the true gift that is 'Literature'. Compass is just such a book, one that through one man's single sleepless night plumbs no less than mortality, love, music, and the historical intermingling of two great cultures seemingly at odds. -- Recommended by Christopher P.
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Emergent Strategy
Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne marie brown
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Essays
Hanif Abdurraqib
"THIS IS MY FAVORITE COLLECTION OF ESSAYS RIGHT NOW. IF YOU DON'T APPRECIATE HANIF ABDURRAQIB, YOU'RE NOT MY FRIEND! --Recommended by Jared
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Pasta for Nightingales
A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore
Giovanni Pietro Olina
This beautifully illustrated book brings together the newly commissioned, first-ever English translation of one of the earliest studies in ornithology with the original watercolors, now part of the British Royal Collection, that provided the inspiration for its engraved illustrations. —Recommended by Andy
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The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. —Recommended by Vanessa & Paul
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Little Man, Little Man
A Story of a Childhood
James Baldwin, Nicholas Boggs
Now available for the first time in forty years, this new edition of Little Man, Little Man—which retains the charming original illustrations by French artist Yoran Cazac—includes a foreword by Baldwin's nephew Tejan "TJ" Karefa-Smart and an afterword by his niece Aisha Karefa-Smart, with an introduction by two Baldwin scholars.