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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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Opika Pende
Africa at 78 rpm
The tremendous variety of music that was pressed to shellac discs on the continent of Africa is truly astonishing. Popular songs, topical songs, work songs, comic songs, songs of worship, ritual, dance and praise--the sheer range of musical styles resists any easy categorization, just as African geography itself resists boundaries.
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Cold Mountain Poems
Twenty-Four Poems by H'an-sh'an
In 1953, Gary Snyder returned to the Bay Area and, at age 23, enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian languages and culture. He intensified his study of Chinese and Japanese, and taking up the challenge of one of his professors, Chen Shih-hsiang, he began to work on translating a largely unknown poet...
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The Roy Stories
Barry Gifford
In The Roy Stories Gifford brings his signature style to a collection of tales following the character of Roy, who has made appearances in a number of Gifford's previous story collections. Roy lives a mystical kind of life, skinning crocodiles in Southern Florida at age nine in the 1940s and playing in the back alleys of Chicago in the 1950s...
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The Men Who United the States
America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Simon Winchester
How did America become "one nation, indivisible"? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America's most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, such as Lewis and Clark and the leaders of the Great Surveys...
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Command and Control
Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
Eric Schlosser
Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A ground-breaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy...
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Bleeding Edge
A Novel
Thomas Pynchon
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech...
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Unfathomable City
A New Orleans Atlas
Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker
Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and...
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At Night We Walk in Circles
A Novel
Daniel Alarcón
Nelson's life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can't seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary..
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Brave Genius
A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize
Sean B. Carroll
n the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis, ascended to prominent, dangerous roles, and were very lucky to...
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Cartwheel
A Novel
Jennifer duBois
When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn't come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans. Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally...
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Cool Gray City of Love
49 Views of San Francisco
Gary Kamiya
Cool Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site...
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Winter Journeys by George Perec and The Oulipo
Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Michèle Audin, Jacques Bens
In 1979, Georges Perec (1936-1982) wrote a brief entertainment called "The Winter Journey" for a publisher's catalogue. It quickly became his most frequently reprinted short story. Set on the eve of World War II, it recounts the discovery of a great literary masterpiece that conceals a scandalous secret at the heart of the whole of modern French..
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The Daylight Gate
Jeanette Winterson
Set in seventeenth-century England during the reign of James I—the monarch who wrote his own book on witchcraft—The Daylight Gate is best-selling writer Jeanette Winterson's re-creation of a dark history full of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power. This is a world where to be Catholic is a treasonable offense. A world where...
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Young Man with a Horn
A Novel
Dorothy Baker
Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York.
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John Saturnall's Feast
A Novel
Lawrence Norfolk
A beautiful, rich and sensuous historical novel, John Saturnall's Feast tells the story of a young orphan who becomes a kitchen boy at a manor house, and rises through the ranks to become the greatest Cook of his generation. It is a story of food...
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
A Novel
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.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for
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The Hanging on Union Square
An American Epic
H. T. Tsiang
Originally self-published in 1935, H.T. Tsiang's hallucinatory, quasi-experimental novel The Hanging on Union Square explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York--an era of union busting and food lines--in an ambitious style that brilliantly blends Gertrude Stein's playful language with the political satire of Carl Sandberg's prose...
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Susan Sontag
The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
Susan Sontag, Jonathan Cott
"One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don't believe it’s true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is...
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