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.

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Featured Titles at the City Lights Bookstore

Blank Spots on the Map
Blank Spots on the Map
The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World
Trevor Paglen
Welcome to a top-level clearance world that doesn't exist...Now with updated material for the paperback edition. This is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a road trip through a shadow nation of state secrets, clandestine...
The Forty Rules of Love
The Forty Rules of Love
A Novel of Rumi
Elif Shafak
An American housewife is transformed by an intriguing manuscript about the Sufi mystic poet Rumi In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel...
The Ask
The Ask
A Novel
Sam Lipsyte
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has "not been developing": after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife...
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Heidi W. Durrow
This debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy.  With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black...
The Routes of Man
The Routes of Man
How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
Ted Conover
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world. Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the...
The Man Who Sold the World
The Man Who Sold the World
Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
William Kleinknecht
The myth of Ronald Reagan’s greatness has reached epic proportions in recent years. The public rates him as one of the most popular presidents, and Republicans everywhere seek to cast themselves in his image. But, William Kleinknecht reveals, much...
A History of Iran
A History of Iran
Empire of the Mind
Michael Axworthy
Although frequently vilified, Iran is a nation of great intellectual variety and depth, and one of the oldest continuing civilizations in the world. Its political impact has been tremendous, not only on its neighbors in the Middle East but also...
The History of White People
The History of White People
Nell Irvin Painter
A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of "whiteness"—an illuminating work on the history of race and power. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots...
Valley of Death
Valley of Death
The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War
Ted Morgan
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America's Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along...
The Secret History of the World
The Secret History of the World
Mark Booth
They say that history is written by the victors. But what if history?or what we come to know as history?has been written by the wrong people? What if everything we've been told is only part of the story? What if it's the wrong part? In this...
Ballistics
Ballistics
Poems
Billy Collins
In this moving and playful collection, Billy Collins touches on an array of subjects—love, death, solitude, youth, and aging—delving deeper than ever before into the intricate folds of...
February
February
A Novel
Lisa Moore
The story of the man who never comes back from sea has been embedded in the lore of eastern Canada. Moore's third work of fiction (after Alligator) imagines the impact one such disaster—the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger—has on Helen O'Mara...
The American Girl
The American Girl
Monika Fagerholm
In 1969, a young girl makes a trip from Coney Island to the swampy coastland on the rural outskirts of Helsinki, Finland. There, her death will immediately become part of local mythology, furnishing boys and girls with fodder for endless romantic...
Day out of Days
Day out of Days
Stories
Sam Shepard
From one of our most admired writers: a collection of stories set mainly in the fertile imaginative landscape of the American West, written with the terse lyricism, cinematic detail, and wry humor that have become Sam Shepard's trademarks.
Why Translation Matters
Why Translation Matters
Edith Grossman
Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to...
Country Driving
Country Driving
A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
Peter Hessler
From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China. In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The...
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781 - 1997
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781 - 1997
Piers Brendon
After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. Yet it grew to become the greatest, most diverse empire the world had seen. Then, within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, a rapid demise that left an array of...
The Science of Liberty
The Science of Liberty
Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
Timothy Ferris
In his most important book to date, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—"the best popular science writer in the English language today" (Christian Science Monitor)—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism...