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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 and Recommended Titles at the City Lights Bookstore
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Telegraph Avenue
A Novel
Michael Chabon
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary...
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Holy Sh*t
A Brief History of Swearing
Melissa Mohr
Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a...
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Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
A Novel
David Rakoff
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo...
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A Very Short Tour of the Mind
21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain
Michael C. Corballis
Why do we remember faces but not names? If your brain were cut in half would you suffer more than a splitting headache? How does your dog remember where it buried its bone but you can't find your keys? And do we really only use ten percent of our brains? In A Very Short Tour of the Mind, Michael C. Corballis answers these questions and more...
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Spillover
Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
David Quammen
Ebola, SARS, Hendra, AIDS, and countless other deadly viruses all have one thing in common: the bugs that transmit these diseases all originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In this gripping account, David Quammen takes the reader along on this astonishing quest to learn how, where from, and why these diseases...
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How Music Works
David Byrne
How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Drawing on his work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and myriad collaborators—along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists—Byrne shows how music emerges from cultural circumstance as...
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Salinger
David Shields, Shane Salerno
Based on eight years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than 200 people—and published in coordination with the international theatrical release of a major documentary film from the Weinstein Company—Salinger is a global cultural event: the definitive biography of one of the most beloved and mysterious figures of the...
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Robert Oppenheimer
A Life Inside the Center
Ray Monk
Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb—a breakthrough that was to have eternal...
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Wear Your Dreams
My Life in Tattoos
Ed Hardy
This is a fascinating look into the life of a legend – his beginnings, his rise to fame in the 60's and 70's, and beyond. Written in a stream of consciousness type of format, it’s easily digestible and provides valuable insight into the world of tattooing. If you’re a tattoo fanatic, this is a must-MUST-read. —Recommended by Anah, City Lights
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Tenth of December
Stories
George Saunders
George saunders has this ability to pair the grim with the quirky, the brutal with the bizarrely hopeful, so that his stories never tip over completely into darkness. He captures the nastiness of violence, consumerism and sexism while keeping the tone...
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Brief Encounters with the Enemy
Fiction
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Sayrafiezadeh follows his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free (2010), with an arresting fiction debut that chronicles modern, nameless cities crumbling in the shadows of war. These eight stories offer first-person accounts of alienated men seeking significance, who view war as an opportunity for escape or adventure.
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Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
A Life of David Foster Wallace
D. T. Max
Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, David Foster Wallace has become more than the representative writer of his literary generation—he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age, a figure whose...
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How to Create a Mind
The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
Ray Kurzweil
The bestselling author of The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain. Ray Kurzweil is arguably today's most influential futurist. In How to Create a Mind, he presents a provocative exploration of the...
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NW
A Novel
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith's new book is playful, psychogeographically rich, sometimes messy, dark, and has a wicked stiletto of an ending. Most of all, its subtleties hold up under the mulling over after you've finished reading it. A smart look at the complexities...
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The Voice Is All
The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
Joyce Johnson
A groundbreaking new biography of Jack Kerouac from the author of the award-winning memoir Minor Characters. Joyce Johnson brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend in this compelling new book. Tracking Kerouac's development from his boyhood...
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My Lunches with Orson
Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Peter Biskind
There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage...
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The Blind Man's Garden
A Novel
Nadeem Aslam
The acclaimed author of The Wasted Vigil now gives us a searing, exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11: a story of war, of one family's losses, and of the simplest, most enduring human impulses...
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