Michelle Tea

"You guys," Michelle Tea announces into the microphone, "I wrote a book that has amulets in it. Can you handle that?"

The crowd at The Secret Alley, a magical, sinuous forest hidden inside a nondescript building on Capp Street, would happily "handle" anything Tea offered. Three flights up, we sprawled underneath trees, casting the occasional envious glance up at the amorous couple who'd scored the tree house. Our bellies swelled with perogies from the Old World Food Truck, chocolate from Dandelion, and Drambuie cocktails.

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Discrimination is Unacceptable--Unless You're Fat

Last week, the New York Times' Liesl Schillinger declared 2013 "The Year of the Cat," and the evidence suggests she is correct. Monopoly has ousted the flatiron, aka nobody's favorite token, in favor of a silver cat. Grumpycats.com was in demand at South by Southwest. There are books on training cats, dealing with cat OCD, and getting inside a cat's brain.

And, of course, there is Vinecats.com.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore was barely legal when she sought refuge in San Francisco, but the now-infamous radical queer troublemaker was disappointed with what she found. In The End of San Francisco, a new book that is part memoir, part social history, Mattilda casts a critical eye on her time in the Bay Area. Over the last couple of weeks, we emailed about her new book, published by City Lights Bookstore.

This is a memoir written in the moment of tragedy, rather than at a safe distance. Traditionally, there's usually a good deal of seemingly necessary space between the actual life event and the process of committing it to the page. Was this a conscious decision?

Yes. I'm not interested in a safe distance, or in massaging the reader's allegedly fragile world view, like most memoirs insist on doing. I think this weakens the potential for honesty and depth of feeling. Memoir is an incredibly tired genre, taking the wildest, messiest, and most creative lives and turning them into laminated timelines. I wanted to create something more layered and intimate and explosive.

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10 New and Forthcoming Books from City Lights

Tiled Steps, 2005, by Colette Crutcher and Aileen Barr, at Sixteenth Avenue and Moraga Street.

New York City might be home to the big houses, but this scrappy city just happens to be the epicenter of publishing on the Best Coast. Join Alexis Coe every Wednesday for Read Local, a series on books produced in the Bay Area.

San Francisco might not be the cultural center of the world, but unlike Manhattan, we're surrounded by public art. The city's urban landscape reflects its citizens' celebration of diversity, creative energy, and political activism. Often commissioned or funded by the tireless efforts of the San Francisco Arts Commission, one can hardly walk a block without passing a sculpture garden, WPA mural, music venue, or photography exhibition.

What isn't always abundant, however, is how the work got there, but a new book from Bay Area publisher Heyday Press, San Francisco: Arts for the City: Civic Art and Urban Change, 1932-2012, fills that void. Writer Susan Wels begins with one of the San Francisco Arts Commission's first projects, the WPA murals at Coit Tower, once hotly contested, and concludes with the 2003 sculpture on the Embarcadero, Crouching Spider by Louise Bourgeois. Here are sample pages from a book that belongs on every San Franciscan's coffee table.

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UC Press Highlights North Africa's Cultural Achievements

Kota Ezawa, San Francisco Center for the Book

New York City might be home to the big houses, but this scrappy city just happens to be the epicenter of publishing on the Best Coast. Join Alexis Coe every Wednesday for Read Local, a series on books produced in the Bay Area.

No publisher in this city speaks to the mission of "Read Local" more than the San Francisco Center for the Book. Local publishing takes myriad forms throughout the 4,000 square-foot facility on Rhode Island Street, where books are made, exhibited, and sold. Ardent readers with artistic leanings can, and should, take one the 300 classes offered throughout the year, on everything from letterpress to tunnel books, but the nonprofit also promotes the craft of the handmade book through their own imprint. Every year, the SFCB sponsors an Artist-in-Residence, who devotes 12 months to producing a trade and deluxe edition of their project. The books are sold alongside the imprint's small plates edition series, four-inch square letterpress-printed books issued in editions of 100 signed and numbered copies.

Here are four beautiful, limited edition books produced by the SFCB:

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McSweeney's Amy Fusselman Hits Hard
UC Press Highlights North Africa's Cultural Acheivements

The published title may read Poems for the Millennium, but editors Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour spent years calling it Diwan Ifrikiya, a combination of the Arabic word for "a gather, a collection or anthology" and an Arabization of the Latin word "Africa." Whatever it is called, they hoped the fourth volume in this ongoing series will, to borrow a line from Frank O'Hara, satisfy readers who want to "see what the poets of North Africa are doing these days."

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Zest Books Makes Reading Fun For Teens

I want to talk to my dad, but my dad is dead now. I know we can't have a regular conversation so I am trying to stay open to alternatives. I am trying to figure out other ways we can communicate.

In The Pharmacist's Mate and 8, Amy Fusselman takes on the dichotomy of life and death, parenthood and childhood. She does so in earnest language, presented in a slim, double-sided volume, and yet despite these familiar idioms and tropes, Fusselman had completely destabilized me just five pages in. I hardly knew what happened, only that I had been summarily reduced by a writer of disarming talent -- one I had never even heard of, but she knew me, alright, and I felt, rather creepily, desperate to know her.

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How to Be a Real Cook

Zest Books produces award-winning, nonfiction books for teens. They recently released Zoo Station, a book that has been a cult classic in Germany for 35 years, but much of their list is originally published titles on relationships, health, how-to, pop culture, school life, style, and true stories, like a newly launched line of memoirs and first-person accounts. Here's a look at five of their most interesting offerings.

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Olivia Ngai on Publishing and How Bloggers Are Changing the Book World
Avant-Punk Puppets and Radical Reads

New York City might be home to the big houses, but this scrappy city just happens to be the epicenter of publishing on the Best Coast. Join Alexis Coe every Wednesday for Read Local, a series on books produced in the Bay Area.

Recent college graduates are struggling to enter just about every field, but book publishing is notoriously elitist, and has one of the highest attrition rates. As a reviewer, I often communicate with interns about logistics, but never before have I noticed the same intern's name pop up at totally different houses. Readers, meet the intrepid Olivia Ngai, an intern at both the publishing arm of City Lights and the lesser-known Zest, producer of books for teens.

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Avant-Punk Puppets and Radical Reads

New York City might be home to the big houses, but this scrappy city just happens to be the epicenter of publishing on the Best Coast. Join Alexis Coe every Wednesday for Read Local, a series on books produced in the Bay Area.

AK Press, a worker-run collective that publishes and distributes radical books and media, certainly exhibits the liberal ethos of the East Bay. Good luck calling and asking for the person in charge, because these self-proclaimed anarchists structure their Oakland workplace the same way they make their books: Collectively. Here's a sampling of their offerings, which includes books, video, audio, wearables, zines, periodicals, and more:

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Everything You Want to Know About Asian Culture