City Lights is a landmark general bookstore, internationally known for our expert selection of titles and our commitment to free intellectual inquiry.
Founded in 1953 as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, we now offer both hardcovers and paperbacks from all of the major publishing houses, along with an impressive range of titles from smaller, specialty publishers. Our shop features an extensive selection of poetry, fiction, translations, politics, history, philosophy, music, spirituality, and more, with a staff whose special interests in many fields contribute to the hand-picked quality of what you see on the shelves.
New Releases
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The Mermaid of Black Conch
Monique Roffey $26.00 Add to cart -
Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art
Brian Doherty $30.00 Add to cart -
Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism
Joanna Scutts $30.00 Add to cart -
African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
David Hackett Fischer $40.00 Add to cart -
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Robert Samuels $30.00 Add to cart -
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
Sasha Lapointe $25.00 Add to cart -
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
John Markoff $32.00 Add to cart -
Rebel Speak: A Justice Movement Mixtapevolume 2
Bryonn Rolly Bain $24.95 Add to cart -
America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice
Treva B Lindsey $24.95 Add to cart -
Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments
Erin L Thompson $25.95 Add to cart -
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds
Thomas Halliday $28.99 Add to cart -
Moon Witch, Spider King
Marlon James $30.00 Add to cart -
You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays
Zora Neale Hurston $29.99 Add to cart -
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing
Sofi Thanhauser $30.00 Add to cart -
Beasts of a Little Land
Juhea Kim $27.99 Add to cart -
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
David Graeber $35.00 Add to cart -
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Nikole Hannah-Jones $38.00 Add to cart -
In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism
J P Daughton $30.00 Add to cart
Events
Monday, August 22, 2022, 6:00 pm PST
Second Stutter - Volume Five - Launch Party
City Lights Live presents Second Stutter Volume Five Launch Party with Jimmy Santiago Baca, Jaime Chavez, Tureeda Mikell, Norma Cole with Adrian Lurssen, Ivan Arguelles, and Eleni Stecopoulos.
Hosted by Solomon Rino
Virtual
Event
Event
Staff Picks
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The Rabbit Hutch
Tess Gunty $28.00 Add to cart -
Nevada
Imogen Binnie $17.00 Add to cart -
Fruiting Bodies: Stories
Kathryn Harlan $25.00 Add to cart -
Anon
Steven Seidenberg $17.95 Add to cart -
Nightcrawling
Leila Mottley $28.00 Add to cart -
My Hollywood and Other Poems
Boris Dralyuk $16.95 Add to cart -
Pure Colour
Sheila Heti $26.00 Add to cart -
Olga Dies Dreaming
Xochitl Gonzalez $27.99 Add to cart -
Manywhere: Stories
Morgan Thomas $26.00 Add to cart -
A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce
Massimo Montanari $18.00 Add to cart -
Cruel Fiction
Wendy Trevino $16.00 Add to cart -
Bee Reaved
Dodie Bellamy $17.95 Add to cart -
We Run the Tides
Vendela Vida $16.99 Add to cart -
Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong $16.00 Add to cart -
D. S. Marriott
Before Whiteness: City Lights Spotlight No. 21
$15.95$11.17 Add to cart -
Lovers of Today
Garrett Caples $18.00 Add to cart -
Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba
Basma Ghalayini $15.95 Add to cart -
Detransition, Baby
Torrey Peters $18.00 Add to cart -
Grievers
Adrienne Maree Brown $15.00 Add to cart -
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke $17.00 Add to cart -
Laserwriter II
Tamara Shopsin $26.00 Add to cart -
Matrix
Lauren Groff $28.00 Add to cart -
The History of Bones: A Memoir
John Lurie $28.00 Add to cart -
Model Citizen: A Memoir
Joshua Mohr $27.00 Add to cart -
In the Country of Others
Leila Slimani $26.00 Add to cart -
Honey Mine: Collected Stories
Camille Roy $17.95 Add to cart -
The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club
Doug Henderson $16.00 Add to cart -
Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover
Annie Sprinkle $29.95 Add to cart -
Nohow on: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho
Samuel Beckett $15.00 Add to cart -
Homeland Elegies
Ayad Akhtar $16.99 Add to cart -
Transversal: Poems
Urayoán Noel $16.95 Add to cart -
In Still Rooms
Constantine Jones $18.00 Add to cart -
I Am, Am I, to Trust the Joy That Joy Is No More or Less There Now Than Before
Evan Kennedy $18.95 Add to cart -
Creatures of Passage
Morowa Yejidé $25.00 Add to cart -
Dawn
Octavia E Butler $16.99 Add to cart -
Sarahland
Sam Cohen $24.00 Add to cart -
Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church: Limited Edition Box Set
Nathaniel Mackey $65.00 Add to cart -
Collected Poems
Sonia Sanchez $29.95 Add to cart -
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories
Mariana Enriquez $27.00 Add to cart -
Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime
Alex Espinoza $21.99 Add to cart -
Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Terry Tempest Williams $19.00 Add to cart -
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks
Terry Tempest Williams $20.00 Add to cart -
Assata: An Autobiography
Assata Shakur $18.95 Add to cart -
There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists
Cindy Milstein $23.00 Add to cart -
Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories
Samuel R Delany $17.95 Add to cart -
Exhalation
Ted Chiang $17.00 Add to cart -
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Jia Tolentino $18.00 Add to cart -
The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth $24.00 Add to cart -
The Walking-Away World
Kenneth Patchen $18.95 Add to cart -
Finna: Poems
Nate Marshall $17.00 Add to cart -
Someone’s Dead Already
Tongo Eisen-Martin $15.00 Add to cart -
Fever Dream
Samanta Schweblin $17.00 Add to cart -
The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Yukiko Motoya $16.95 Add to cart -
Where the Wild Ladies Are
Aoko Matsuda $16.95 Add to cart -
Birthday
César Aira $13.95 Add to cart -
The Book
Stephane Mallarme $15.95 Add to cart -
Family and Borghesia
Natalia Ginzburg $14.95 Add to cart -
Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997
Kevin Killian $29.95 Add to cart -
Verge
Lidia Yuknavitch $16.00 Add to cart -
Intimations: Six Essays
Zadie Smith $10.95 Add to cart -
City of Night
John Rechy $18.00 Add to cart -
Essays and Fictions
Brad Phillips $16.95 Add to cart -
Sing to It: Stories
Amy Hempel $16.00 Add to cart -
Telephone
Percival Everett $16.00 Add to cart -
Dance on Saturday: Stories
Elwin Cotman $17.00 Add to cart -
Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography
Andrea Warner $18.95 Add to cart -
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Art Spiegelman $16.95 Add to cart -
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman $16.95 Add to cart -
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall $26.00 Add to cart -
Alienation and Freedom
Frantz Fanon $48.00 Add to cart -
Black Futures
Kimberly Drew $40.00 Add to cart -
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke $27.00 Add to cart
Women in Translation
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Talk to My Back
Murasaki Yamada $29.95 Add to cart -
Peignot
Laure: The Collected Writings
$25.00$17.50 Add to cart -
Mister N
Najwa Barakat $17.95 Add to cart -
Why I No Longer Write Poems: [Bilingual Georgian-English]
Diana Anphimiadi $18.95 Add to cart -
The Green Hand and Other Stories
Nicole Claveloux $22.95 Add to cart -
Paradais
Fernanda Melchor $19.95 Add to cart -
Woman Running in the Mountains
Yuko Tsushima $17.95 Add to cart -
Crisis of the European Subject
Julia Kristeva $19.95 Add to cart -
Hildegard of Bingen
Honey Meconi $21.95 Add to cart -
The Portable Cixous
Helene Cixous $34.00 Add to cart -
Mona
Pola Oloixarac $17.00 Add to cart -
Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition
Nelly Sachs $30.00 Add to cart -
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
Tove Ditlevsen $20.00 Add to cart -
Thank You for Not Reading
Dubravka Ugresic $15.95 Add to cart -
Strangers I Know
Claudia Durastanti $27.00 Add to cart -
People from My Neighborhood: Stories
Hiromi Kawakami $15.95 Add to cart -
Letters from Tove
Tove Jansson $19.95 Add to cart -
The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War
Delphine Minoui $17.00 Add to cart -
Inseparable: A Never-Before-Published Novel
Simone De Beauvoir $26.99 Add to cart -
The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante $18.00 Add to cart -
Sato the Rabbit, the Moon
Yuki Ainoya $17.95 Add to cart -
Aslı Erdoğan
The Stone Building and Other Places
$15.95$11.17 Add to cart -
Cristina Peri Rossi
State of Exile
$14.95$10.47 Add to cart -
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo $14.95 Add to cart -
The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II
Svetlana Alexievich $18.00 Add to cart -
The Pillow Book
Sei Shonagon $19.00 Add to cart -
In Other Words
Jhumpa Lahiri $16.00 Add to cart -
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works
Juana Ines de La Cruz $14.95 Add to cart -
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Expanded)
Anna Akhmatova $40.00 Add to cart -
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Yoko Tawada $16.95 Add to cart -
Last Words from Montmartre
Qiu Miaojin $15.95 Add to cart -
Água Viva
Clarice Lispector $14.95 Add to cart -
Human Acts
Han Kang $17.00 Add to cart -
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk $17.00 Add to cart -
Valentino and Sagittarius
Natalia Ginzburg $15.95 Add to cart -
Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama $19.95 Add to cart