If reading provides the perfect escape, it's likely a lot of us are turning to books right about now. Why shouldn't they feature Bay Area authors and topics?
Recent and upcoming local releases include a new cookbook from a beloved vegetarian restaurant, timely poetry collections, some incredible art volumes, and a crop of fiction to entertain all tastes.
Soft Core, byBrittany Newell
Newell’s voluptuous descriptions of San Francisco alone are worth the read—sensual and atmospheric and evocative of all those feelings you've had driving around in the fog without a destination. Her novel about a dancer and sex worker who lives in drafty Victorian is full of character and life, as Ruth, aka Baby, inhabits an underworld of beautiful women, complicated needs, late-night hours, and lots of secrets. Newell is a writer and performer whose work has been published in Granta, n+1, The New York Times, Joyland, Dazed, and Playgirl. // $28, Macmillan
Expert of Subtle Revisions, by Kirsten Singer-Anderson
For readers of mystery and historical fiction, Menger-Anderson’s debut novel offers a feast of parallel historical eras (including Half Moon Bay in 2016), time-traveling mathematicians, and the unraveling of old secrets. Previously, she wrote Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, a collection of short stories that was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in fiction. Her stories and essays have also appeared in a variety of publications including Ploughshares, Southwest Review, LitHub, and Undark. // $28, Penguin Random House
Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk
Folk’s short story collection Out There was delightfully weird and deeply visionary. We can’t wait for her upcoming novel, also full of San Francisco connections, about a frequent flyer with an unusual sexual obsession with planes who believes it’s her destiny to “marry” one of her suitors and unite with her soulmate plane for eternity. “Audaciously imagined. Slyly executed. Surprisingly tender. Deliciously weird,” says Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch. // $29, Penguin Random House
Awake in the Floating City, by Susanna Kwan
Debut novelist Susanna Kwan explores the unexpected relationship between two of the last people living in a flooded, futuristic version of San Francisco—neither the artist nor the 130-year-old woman she cares for is ready to leave the city. Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, calls the book "an astonishing work of art...This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake.” // $28, Penguin Random House
Burial Fragments, by Keith Ekiss
San Francisco poet Keith Ekiss’ new collection features "San Francisco, the millennial city: Mission and Market, bars and cafes, hills, bridges, and ocean. To read the pages...is to follow a gorgeous thread of urban encounters until you reach the center of the anxious, frenetic, marvelous, and random maze that is life and fatherhood at the edge of America and the 21st century," says author Maria Hummel. Ekiss is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and author of Pima Road Notebook. // $18, Gunpowder Press
Diver, by Lewis Buzbee
From the author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop comes a moving autobiographical novel about one California family in the 1960’s, the memories that bind a young boy to his lost father, and the abiding love between a parent and son. A longtime bookseller, Buzbee is a fourth-generation Californian who lives in SF. // $19, Bookshop.org
Smother, by Rachel Richardson
Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson's writes poems steeped in the losses of climate change and the defiant work of surviving. Her third collection, Smother, explores an impossible question: how do we raise our children in a burning world? Bringing up young daughters and grieving the death of a mother friend, the poet documents a string of fires across the California landscape and the rage, sorrow, and detachment that follow the pervasive smoke. Richardson is the co-founder of the creative writing organization Left Margin Lit, and the author of two other poetry collections. // $26, W.W. Norton
Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco, by Gary Krist
In Trespassers at the Golden Gate, Gary Krist, who previously brought New Orleans and Chicago to life in noteworthy nonfiction books, recounts the sensational true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco. Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair shone an early spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and acceptable gender expression in the 1870s, revealing the city's transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis. // $32,Penguin Random House
On Muscle, by Bonnie Tsui
Have you ever wondered what muscles are and what they mean to us? From the bestselling author of Why We Swim comes a mind-expanding exploration of this essential part of our bodies, from ancient obsession to modern science. Meet female weightlifters, cutting-edge researchers, and incredible double dutch jump-ropers, and learn about the different muscles that make our hearts beat, help birth babies, and engineer our movement. Local author Mary Roach (Stiff, Gulp) says “On Muscle is literary and deeply personal, but also rigorously researched and powerfully inspiring.” // $29, Hachette
The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, by Alexis Madrigal
In this in-depth urban history, award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal tells Oakland's interwoven stories to reveal an American city that has been at the crossroads of many major themes of the twenty-first century. The Pacific Circuit delves into city hall politics, traces the intertwining arcs of venture capital and hedge funds, and offers unprecedented insight into Silicon Valley’s genesis and growth. "A dazzlingly imaginative (and surprisingly hopeful) telling of how everything—our cities, our globalized economy, our planet—ended up this way—and how it all started in Oakland…a marvel of real-life storytelling…” says Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Stay True. // $32, Macmillan
The Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos
Featuring a preface by award-winning novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner, and an interview of the artist by photographer and writer Stephen A. Heller, this enthralling street photography book from Barbara Ramos is a time capsule of a bygone moment in California history. The black-and-white portraits of SF's streets in the 1970s—two men leaning in for a kiss at a peace rally in Golden Gate Park, a group of Hari Krishnas singing on Market Street—were unearthed fifty years after they were taken. The book is “... a gift to those of us who love San Francisco: its streets, its people, its history. Ramos has frozen each of those in time and given us a gorgeous permanent record of this city’s past.” says KQED." // $35, Chronicle Books
Seasons of Greens: A Collection of New Recipes from the Iconic San Francisco Restaurant, by Katie Reicher
There isn't much more comforting than a cozy meal with a bay view on a misty day at Greens Restaurant. With her new cookbook, Katie Reicher, executive chef there since 2020, gives us a chance to recreate the food (if not the atmosphere) that makes this iconic vegetarian restaurant so special. With more than 120 recipes, Reicher pays homage to the amazing chefs who came before her while showcasing plants in new and exciting ways. From root vegetables and rice transformed into biryani to Green’s version of summer rolls (made with sweet potato and peanut sauce for a Thai twist), all of the recipes are created with seasonality and substitutes in mind. // $45, Weldon Owen
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), this tome is a landmark survey of the wide-ranging looped-wire sculptures and art practices of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative artists. Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) used everyday materials in a variety of media over her more than six-decade-long career, from her student days at the experimental Black Mountain College in the 1940s to her later years in her adopted home city of San Francisco. Essays and other writings in the book consider Asawa and her work within the context of modern abstract sculpture and in relation to her Asian-American identity. The accompanying exhibition runs at SFMOMa from April 5th through September 2nd. // $65, Yale University Press
