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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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The Good Lord Bird
A Novel
James McBride
Quite the masterwork. A poignant delight with a sense of humor that sears to the bone. —Recommended by Scott, City Lights Books
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The New York Nobody Knows
Walking 6,000 Miles in the City
William B. Helmreich
As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever...
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Dracula
Penguin Classics Hardcover Edition
Bram Stoker
I'm sure you've seen the films, or some vampire TV show sometime in your life. But now here's your chance to discover where the phenomenon started. This Gothic novel, composed mostly of letters and journal entries and written in 1897, still holds all the horror of Transylvania and its inhabitants. A frighteningly bloody read. —Recommended by Don
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Silence Once Begun
A Novel
Jesse Ball
From the celebrated author of The Curfew ("A spare masterwork of dystopian fiction" —The New York Times Book Review), Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun is an astonishing novel of unjust conviction, lost love, and a journalist's obsession. Over the course of several months, eight people vanish from their homes in the same Japanese town, a single...
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Why Is That Bridge Orange?
San Francisco for the Curious
Art Peterson
Art Peterson has translated his lifelong love affair with his favorite city into a sparkling, well-researched guide, exploring San Francisco's quirks, landmarks and eccentricities. Why Is That Bridge Orange? links everyday sights that are the fabric of San Francisco with answers to nagging questions that tantalize the curious.
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For Today I Am a Boy
A Novel
Kim Fu
Peter Huang and his sisters—elegant Adele, shrewd Helen, and Bonnie the bon vivant—grow up in a house of many secrets, then escape the confines of small-town Ontario and spread from Montreal to California to Berlin. Peter's own journey is obstructed by playground bullies, masochistic lovers, Christian ex-gays, and the ever-present shadow of his...
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Fahrenheit 451
60th Anniversary Edition
Ray Bradbury
The temperature at which book paper combusts! Written in 1951, this dystopian novel is a must-read in today's world of disappearing bookstores and young readers who have never held an actual paperback. —Recommended by Don, City Lights Books
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Furious Cool
Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him
David Henry, Joe Henry
In this loose and lyrical labor of love, brothers David and Joe Henry have brought Richard Pryor back to pulsating life, capturing his spirit and genius and the monumental demons that fueled him. It's billed as a biography but it's really more than that, delving deep enough to make you look at Pryor and his legacy in a whole new light.
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Five Movements in Praise
A Novel
Sharmistha Mohanty
"Sharmistha Mohanty is remarkable above all for her determination to shift narrative away from the easy urgencies of Western fiction towards a text that hovers between the contemplative and the hypnotic, sculpting extended landscapes of feeling from the quiet friction between realism and myth."
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City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"This comprehensive selection from the influential City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a landmark retrospective, celebrating forty years of publishing and cultural history. From the introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Even though some say that...
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Subtle Bodies
A Novel
Norman Rush
In his long-awaited new novel, Norman Rush, author of three immensely praised books set in Africa, including the best-selling classic and National Book Award-winner Mating, returns home, giving us a sophisticated, often comical, romp through the particular joys and tribulations of marriage, and the dilemmas of friendship, as a group of college...
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Ripper
A Novel
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende—the New York Times bestselling author whose books, including Maya's Notebook, Island Beneath the Sea, and Zorro, have sold more than 57 million copies around the world—demonstrates her remarkable literary versatility with Ripper, an atmospheric, fast-paced mystery involving a brilliant teenage sleuth who must unmask a serial killer..
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Annihilation
Southern Reach Trilogy Book 1
Jeff VanderMeer
If J.J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a novel . . . it might be this awesome. Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second...
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Leaving the Sea
Stories
Ben Marcus
From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts—and his range—as never before. In the hilarious, lacerating "I Can Say Many Nice Things," a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian...
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The Days of Anna Madrigal
Armistead Maupin
The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching ninth novel in Armistead Maupin's bestselling "Tales of the City" series, follows one of modern literature’s most unforgettable and enduring characters—Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane—as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her...
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The Trip to Echo Spring
On Writers and Drinking
Olivia Laing
Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men...
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On Such a Full Sea
A Novel
Chang-rae Lee
On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future...
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Little Failure
A Memoir
Gary Shteyngart
After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging...
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