Two new Last Gasp Books releases (The Drawings of Laurie Lipton and Incurable Disease) explore the unsettling art of Laurie Lipton and Elizabeth McGrath.
San Francisco is famous for many things, one of which is its vast literary legacy, a legacy that stretches back to its earliest days. On October 2, 1988, 12 small streets scattered throughout the city were renamed for famous authors and artists who had lived in San Francisco, as proposed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
25 years later, we’ve devised a bike tour and interactive, multi-layered map connecting all 12 streets and authors, from Jack London to Jack Kerouac, South Park to North Beach. The tour itself is admittedly not for the faint of heart nor gear—these streets were not named because of their proximity to bike lanes— and there’s plenty of traffic to dodge, hills, one-way streets, and even a set of stairs to climb, but it’s still a diverting and unique way to celebrate both the literary and the adventurous spirit of San Francisco. Takes between two and three hours from start to finish, and lands you right in front of two very important literary landmarks: City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Café!
David Lester depicts the shadowy relationship between words and actions in the graphic novel, The Listener.
And as I peruse the many books deemed by many opinions to be the best of the year or, grander yet, best of the decade, I find myself compiling a modest, literary list of my own: 10 Sexy Books Published in 2009.
Tags:
Gloria Vanderbilt,
Mary Gaitskill,
Roberto Bolle,
sex books,
Stephen Elliott, others,
The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, others,
Stephen Elliott,
2009
Perhaps the primary virtue of Rebecca Solnit's clear-headed new book is that it does not simply swap one interpretation of disaster -- as anticonsumerist reckoning, for instance -- for another, such as Jerry Falwell-style damnation. Solnit is interested in how people act in the aftermath, for better and for worse.