Staff Recommendations

A listing of current favorites, recommended by the bookstore staff. Check back for new recommendations each month as we bring you the best of what we're reading. Browse by title, author or staff member!



  Anah
  |  Andy
  |  Dia
  |  Don
  |  Elaine
  |  Elaine Kahn
  |  Garrett
  |  Gent
  |  Jeff
  |  Jolene
  |  Layla
  |  Linda
  |  Lawrence
  |  Luke
  |  Maia
  |  Matt
  |  Nancy
  |  Paul
  |  Peter
  |  Scott
  |  Stacey
  |  Tân

   
<<< 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >>>
    sort list by title | author | publication date


Product image
Wingshooters
Nina Revoyr
Nina Revoyr in all her novels takes us through the complexities of race, class and history in riveting, page-turning novels that bring to mind the early work of chester Himes and Walter Mosley. Wingshooters, Revoyr's newest, is a book I could not put...
Product image
The Poisoner's Handbook
Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Deborah Blum
Fascinating and entertaining, tinged with both humor and horror, this account of the early years of forensic medicine in New York City is near unputdownable. We follow the city's Medical Examiner and head toxicologist as they develop the techniques for...
Product image
Tinkers
Paul Harding
"Tinkers is truly remarkable. . . . It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls."—Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Home and Gilead "In astounding...
Product image
Point Omega
A Novel
Don DeLillo
Don Delillo's newest work is a mini-masterpiece. It's quiet, dark , and hot in Delillo's landscapes and rooms, but they are filled with challenges and wonders, which are well worth the risk you'll take to explore them. Reading this novel is enlivening...
Product image
All About Love
New Visions
bell hooks
It really is all about love. - Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books. "The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love to better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About...
Product image
Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter
Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good—a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an...
Product image
Just Kids
Patti Smith
Winner of the National Book Award. Just Kids illuminates the impressive lover of literature that Patti Smith is. Her memoir will be of particular interest to City Lights enthusiasts as she is our quintessential reader, a fan of the Surrealists...
Product image
Bicycle Diaries
David Byrne
David Byrne's travel diaries illuminate the amazing power that dislocating oneself from their homebase has on the senses. His work sends him to cities in the US and around the world, and the visits are anything but passive.
Product image
Quiet As They Come
Angie Chau
Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as...
Product image
Girls to the Front
The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
Sara Marcus
In the early 1990s a group of friends in Olympia, Washington decided to tell the world what it felt like to be young and female in America. Through consciousness-raising meetings, zine exchanges, and numerous kick-ass all-girl punk bands, with the...
Product image
The Maze Runner
James Dashner
Thomas wakes up, with no memory, surrounded by other boys his age, in a place they call the Glade. All they know is that the stone door set in the insurmountable stone wall opens every morning and closes every evening. Outside lies a maze against which...
Product image
Mirrors
Stories of Almost Everyone
Eduardo Galeano
With Mirrors, the fabulist-historian Eduardo Galeano has produced a people's mythology of humanity. Teeming with indictments, hagiographies and impassioned reminders, this chronicle in anecdotes reveals the myriad reflections cast by every human face...
Product image
The Pleasures of the Damned
Poems, 1951-1993
Charles Bukowski
In going through this comprehensive collection the reader is able to see past the dirty-old-man façade that has plagued Bukowski's writing and glimpse at moments of sincere compassion and prophetic epiphanies. His poetry is constantly morphing into...
Product image
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed
Mumbo Jumbo is a book that moves. Reed's grasp on American race relations allows him to develop characters that are absolutely absurd and uncannily realistic. What is created is a scathing satire that elicits as many winces as it does laughs...

<<< 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 >>>