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Fall 2019 Book Guide

Fiction

Clockwise from top left: Liska Jacobs, Jon Roemer, Xuan Juliana Wang, and Sergio Troncoso

Fiction Picks

Fiction fans, take note: our fall picks feature two novels—wayward aunts and a small-press editor bent on mysteries—and two collections on the Chicano and Chinese American experience.

By Julia Ingalls, Kent Black and Lynell George
Téa Obreht’s second novel, Inland—which follows her Orange Prize–winning debut, The Tiger’s Wife—offers an epic reinterpretation of the American West and its mythic origin stories.

Téa Obreht Unravels the Myth of the West

By Emily Rapp Black
Steph Cha, whose novel Your House Will Pay grows out of a familiar violence.

Steph Cha’s Two Los Angeleses

By Oscar Villalon
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The Lightest Object in the Universe

By Kimi Eisele
bay area writer caro de robertis, whose fourth novel, cantoras, revolves around a group of women and the revolutionary love they share with one another in 1970s uruguay.

Liberation in Caro De Robertis’s Fourth Novel

By Charmaine Craig
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Nonfiction

Born in San Francisco, poet Gary Snyder was a member of the legendary Beat school of writers.

Local Hero

By David Biespiel
Author Joan Didion has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

On the Morning After the Sixties

By Joan Didion
Terry Tempest Williams stares down both love and loss in her latest book, Erosion—a collection of essays that are as relentless as they are tender and absolutely unwilling to “look away from all that is breaking our hearts.”

The End of the World As We Know It

By Pam Houston
In his first nonfiction book, Cruising, Southern California novelist Alex Espinoza examines a misunderstood aspect of gay male culture—through both a personal and a historical lens.

The Secret History of Cruising

By Alexander Chee
Shadowlands author Anthony McCann

Live Free or Die

By William Deverell
Upton Sinclair, militant international author and Socialist, who captured the Democratic nomination for Governor of California, reads a paper at a desk in 1934.

The Jungle of Politics, Then and Now

By David L. Ulin
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Nonfiction Picks: Lovers, Dreamers, and Flea

By Miriam Pawel and Heather Scott Partington
Alta California author Nick Neely

In the Footsteps of Portolá

By Dean Kuipers

Poetry

Talking with Matthew Zapruder

The poems in Father’s Day examine the complex ideas of parenthood, citizenship, and existence.

By Heather Scott Partington
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Art & Photos

Richie Silverman, extreme tanner, West Hollywood, California, January 1979. The photograph is from Roger Steffens’s The Family Acid: California, which looks back at the Golden State from 1968 to 2015.

Steffens’s Nonstop Set of Visual Stimulations

The Family Acid: California bears witness to a long, strange trip.

By Agatha French
A sunset “fog sandwich” engulfs the City by the Bay at dusk in this photograph from San Francisco on Instagram.

The Western Lands

Three new photo books look at the urban landscapes of the West—with mixed results.

By Claire Vaye Watkins
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Art and Photo Picks

Art and activism from California’s Native Americans and a celebration of the state’s iconic redwoods.

By Frances Dinkelspiel
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Special K for the Hollywood Set

A $6,000 therapy for severe depression holds promise for treating the “untreatable”—and inspiring creative breakthroughs on the back lot and for the author.

By Quinn Cummings
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Poetry

Poetry Picks

Celebrate a poetic change of season with essential works from Jim Harrison, Kim Shuck, and Forrest Gander.

By Ishmael Reed and Mark Haskell Smith