City Lights is turning 60! Join us as we celebrate all year long. For a listing of our special anniversary events, go here! Can't make it out to San Francisco? Follow along on the City Lights Blog

This Sunday at City Lights! One of Latin America's most distinguished writers, Eduardo Galeano, reads from Children Of The Days: A Calendar of Human History. May 19th @ 5pm. For more of our upcoming events, check here.

Welcome to City Lights Books of San Francisco

City Lights is a landmark independent bookstore and publisher that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics.

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture's only "Literary Landmark."... Read more>>

 

New at City Lights Bookstore


 

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Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society
Spawn of the Suicide Club!
Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, John Law
This book will prove to be a template for pranksters, artists, adventurers and anyone interested in rampant creativity, for years to come.

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Southern Cross the Dog
A Novel
Bill Cheng
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young...

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Astragal
A Novel
Albertine Sarrazin
As if the reader were riding shotgun, this intensely vivid novel captures a life on the lam. "L'astragale" is the French word for the ankle bone Albertine Sarrazin's heroine Anne breaks as she leaps from her jail cell to freedom....

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The Democracy Project
A History, a Crisis, a Movement
David Graeber
The Democracy Project is an interesting dialogue with Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto and Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World. —Recommended by Paul, City Lights Books

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The Accursed
Joyce Carol Oates
A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)—an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.

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Summa Technologiae
Stanislaw Lem
The Polish writer Stanisław Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his...

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Going Clear
Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Lawrence Wright
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief is based on more than two hundred interviews with current and former Scientologists, as well as other sources. The book offers an exhaustive account of the church, from its founding by...

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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
A Novel
Mohsin Hamid
His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation—and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey...

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AfroSurreal Manifesto
Black is the new black
D. Scot Miller
This. is. beautiful. —Recommended by Tân, City Lights Books A limited letterpress edition of 500 copies, produced as a companion piece to the exhibition Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at the Arcade Gallery, Columbia College Chicago.

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Ghana Must Go
A Novel
Taiye Selasi
Courageously and with great tenderness the people in this book are allowed rather than exposed. We get to know the sparkling fissures of where they have been broken, the beauty of their longing, and the tremendous strength of their love...

   

New and Forthcoming from City Lights Publishers

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The End of San Francisco
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Just in! An elegy for the dream of a radical queer community, and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it.

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Poems Retrieved
Frank O'Hara
A reissue of the classic, essential companion to O'Hara's "Collected Poems," with a new foreword by Bill Berkson. Berkson and Richard O. Moore will join us on Thursday, May 2nd, 7pm at City Lights to discuss the remarkable life and work of Frank O'Hara.

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National Insecurity
The Cost of American Militarism
Melvin A. Goodman
Now available! Former CIA analyst reveals why pumping more money into US military spending destabilizes both the economy and long-term national security.

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Joie de Vivre
Selected Poems 1992-2012
Lisa Jarnot
New Spotlight Poetry: A selection from twenty years of poetry from one of the key avant-garde women poets of the post-Language generation.

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Cha-Ching!
Ali Liebegott
New from City Lights/Sister Spit! A tender, unforgettable story about being young and broke in America, and the conjoined hearts of love and addiction.

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The Beautifully Worthless
Ali Liebegott
Back in print! Ali Liebegott's award-winning epic road poem has been compared to Jack Kerouac and David Wojnarowicz.

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Arguing for Our Lives
A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog
Robert Jensen
With public discourse more skewed than ever by big money's propaganda, our future hinges on our capacity for critical thinking.

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Robert Duncan in San Francisco
Michael Rumaker
A revealing portrait of a major poet of the SF Renaissance and a gripping account of late '50s gay life.

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Spying on Democracy
Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance
Heidi Boghosian
Coming soon: Spying on US citizens is rising as corporations make big bucks selling info about our private lives to the government.
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