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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 Titles at the City Lights Bookstore |
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Shadow Tag
A Novel
Louise Erdrich
"Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could." When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed...
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The Poker Bride
The First Chinese in the Wild West
Christopher Corbett
When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses...
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The Lost Books of the Odyssey
A Novel
Zachary Mason
A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey...
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Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Dubravka Ugresic
Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf...
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A Reader on Reading
Alberto Manguel
In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in...
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Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Stories
Wells Tower
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside...
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Catherine Corman
Daylight Noir
Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City comprises photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations so hauntingly described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly...
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The Professor and Other Writings
Terry Castle
Unbelievable. I picked this book up because I knew the author was going to give a reading at the store, just meaning to skim it, to get an impression of her writing. I started with the memoir-within-the-book, "The Professor", and didn't put it down...
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Lords of Finance
The Bankers Who Broke the World
Liaquat Ahamed
"A magisterial work...You can't help thinking about the economic crisis we're living through now." --The New York Times Book Review It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any...
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The Original of Laura
Vladimir Nabokov
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy...
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Ransom
A Novel
David Malouf
In his first novel in more than a decade, David Malouf—arguably Australia's greatest living writer—gives us a stirring reimagination of one of the most famous passages in all of literature: Achilles’ rageful slaughter and desecration of Hector, and...
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You Are Not a Gadget
A Manifesto
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created...
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The Lost City of Z
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann
Recommended by Don, City Lights Books.
In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of...
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Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World
Gary Indiana
After 32 Soup Cans, neither America nor the art world would ever be the same. Gary Indiana offers a witty and opinionated biography of a momentous work of art--and its deeply troubled creator. In the summer of 1962, Andy Warhol unveiled 32 Soup...
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Summertime
Fiction
M. Coetzee
Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee...
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Towers of Gold
How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California
Frances Dinkelspiel
Isaias Hellman, a Jewish immigrant, arrived in California in 1859 with very little money in his pocket and his brother Herman by his side. By the time he died, he had effectively transformed Los Angeles into the modern metropolis we see today.
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Brothers
A Novel
Yu Hua
A bestseller in China, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok. Here is China as we've never seen it before, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history...
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Princess Noire
The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
Nadine Cohodas
From the author of the acclaimed Dinah Washington biography Queen comes this complete account of the triumphs and difficulties of the brilliant and high-tempered Nina Simone. Her distinctive voice and music occupy a singular place in the canon of...
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