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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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Wall and Piece
Banksy
The collected works of Britain's most wanted artist. Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable, except maybe when it’s squatting in the Tate...
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Sex Press
The Sexual Revolution in the Underground Press 1965-1975
Vincent Bernière, Mariel Primois
From 1965 to 1975, an array of journals, magazines, fanzines, and underground presses were the voice of a dramatic sexual revolution. In Europe and the United States, this "sex press" consisted of publications such as Other Scenes, Yellow Dog, Actuel...
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Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson -- or anyone else -- has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced -- and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well - that she is the only person...
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The Woman in the Dunes
Kobo Abe
If you've seen the 1964 Teshigahara film you've already experienced Abe's brilliance (he wrote the screenplay as well). If you haven't, read this first. The haunting story of a vacationing entomologist trapped in a sand-pit with an enigmatic woman...
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Shotgun Seamstress
Zine Collection
Osa Atoe
Shotgun Seamstress collects all of the issues of a fantastic punk fanzine into one book that focuses on African American queer & feminist artists and musicians. Full of interviews, reviews, and so much more, Shotgun Seamstress was put out from 2006-2012
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That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
Carlo Emilio Gadda
Gadda creates an incredible portrait of Italy in this novel—complex, lustful, mischievous and tragic. His language is sprawling and epic, finding sublime moments in small details. It is no wonder that both Pasolini and Calvino hold this book in such...
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Incarnadine
Poems
Mary Szybist
The anticipated second book by the poet Mary Szybist, author of Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
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Building Stories
Chris Ware
This graphic novel is quite an achievement; multi-layered stories that focus on the people who live in an apartment building in Chicago. The detail of the drawings and the real life anxieties take you inside the lives and hearts living day to day.
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The World Until Yesterday
What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Jared Diamond
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its millions of years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf...
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Forged
Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age
Jonathon Keats
According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of "forging" the Mona Lisa, questioning..
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis
The arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
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Solar Throat Slashed
The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire's poems have body, a jagged dimensionality. They climb off the page and fill up the room. They feel around for the sun. The poems get hot and explode into energetic shards, only to reform and explode again. The bilingual edition is a must...
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Just My Type
A Book About Fonts
Simon Garfield
A hugely entertaining and revealing guide to the history of type that asks, What does your favorite font say about you?
Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product we buy.
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Guitar Zero
The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age
Gary Marcus
Just about every human being knows how to listen to music, but what does it take to make music? Is musicality something we are born with? Or a skill that anyone can develop at any time? If you don't start piano at the age of six, is there any hope?
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East Hill Farm
Seasons with Allen Ginsberg
Gordon Ball
During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of the Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was "a haven for comrades in distress" in rural upstate New York...
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The Eve of Destruction
How 1965 Transformed America
James T. Patterson
At the beginning of 1965, the U.S. seemed on the cusp of a golden age. Although Americans had been shocked by the assassination in 1963 of President Kennedy, they exuded a sense of consensus and optimism that showed no signs of abating.
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The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
This is a deep, magical, densely captivating book about space, our homes, how we live in them, and how dwellings and space affect us; it is as much a book of philosophy as a work of serious literature. It requires careful, preferably leisurely...
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Both Flesh & Not
Essays
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was beloved for his inimitable voice and wit-and, for many of his readers, admired as much for his astonishingly perceptive and inventive essays as he was for his fiction. Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal...
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