Bay City Books: New Books from Bay Area Authors – September 2024

Post Apocalyptic Valentine

Linda Watanabe McFerrin (Oakland)
7.13 Books, September 3, 2024

Linda Watanabe McFerrin, award-winning poet, novelist, travel writer, and founder of the literary group Left Coast Writers navigates the spaces between depression, humor, and dark revelation in her 17th book and newest poetry collection, Post Apocalyptic Victim. 

Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors 

Grace Feuerverger (Berkeley)
Amsterdam Publishers, September 8, 2024

There was no happiness in Grace Feuerverger’s Montreal childhood home. Her parents survived the Holocaust but the ghosts of their murdered families cast a veil of darkness over the family. Growing up with little parental love forced Feuerverger to seek support elsewhere. Winter Light tells how she found herself, built a community, and forged a successful career as a university professor. 

Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco

Alison Owings (San Francisco)
Beacon Press, September 10, 2024

“I could have gotten a PhD in sidewalks,” Tenderloin resident Del Seymour casually remarked in 2015 when he led San Franciscan oral historian Alison Owings on one of his walking tours. The throwaway comment catapulted Owings out of her complacency about homelessness and launched her on a journey to write Seymour’s life story. Mayor of the Tenderloin is the account of how Seymour overcame 18 years of homelessness and addiction to become one of the most respected advocates in San Francisco.

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild (Berkeley)
The New Press, September 10, 2024

The author of the acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land, which explained why disaffected white voters turned to Donald Trump, has now come out with an examination of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia. Arlie Russell Hochschild, an emerita professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, focuses on a group of blue-collar men in the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation. Through their stories, she explains why a “pride paradox” has made them turn to the right for political solutions. 

Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

Ryann Liebenthal (Oakland) 
Dey Street Books, September 10, 2024

There are 43 million people in the U.S. paying down their student loans. Collectively, they owe a staggering $1.6 trillion. The debt – despite President Joe Biden’s attempts to provide relief – weighs down generations, forcing them to put off traditional milestones like marrying, having families, and buying homes. In Burdened, Mother Jones reporter Ryann Liebenthal analyzes the role that for-profit colleges, private lenders, and the government have played in saddling many Americans with a debt that cannot be repaid.

Literary Journeys: Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature

John McMurtrie (Albany)
Princeton University Press, September 10, 2024

Literature is filled with journeys. Think of Ahab’s hunt for the white whale in Moby Dick. Odysseus’s quest to return home in Homer’s Odyssey. The road trip in Amor Towles’s Lincoln Highway. Now John McMurtrie, the nonfiction editor of Kirkus, has brought together an international team of writers, editors, critics, and scholars in Literary Journeys to explore the meaning of 75 journeys spanning 30 countries over 2,500 years. The bite-size entries are arranged chronologically and are illustrated with paintings, engravings, photographs, and maps.

Adventuregame Comics: Leviathan (Book 1): An Interactive Graphic Novel 

Jason Shiga (Oakland)
Abrams Fanfare, September 13, 2024 

Readers get to figure out how to defeat a mysterious sea monster in Adventuregame Comics: Leviathan, an interactive graphic novel by Jason Shiga, the creator of Meanwhile. Panels are connected by tubes, and depending on the path the reader selects, they will visit a castle, the town library, and an old wizard, while uncovering secrets that can stop the Leviathan.

Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening

Elizabeth Rosner (Berkeley)
Counterpoint, September 17, 2024

Elizabeth Rosner opens her newest nonfiction book distinguishing between hearing and listening. Hearing is a measurable, verifiable scientific mechanism. Listening, she argues, can be an art. Done well, it takes in more than the sound of words. It absorbs emotion and intent. It connects you to others and the natural world. In Third Ear, Rosner, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, weaves personal reflections with scholarly inquiry to contend that true listening builds social transformation.

The State of Fire: Why California Burns

Obi Kaufmann (Crockett)
Heyday Books, September 17, 2024

Obi Kaufmann’s illustrated atlases on the natural history of California have all been bestsellers but none have felt as urgent as his new book, The State of Fire: Why California Burns. Fires in the state are growing larger and deadlier and Kaufmann delves into the history, science, and future of fire ecology to explain why. His analysis is accompanied, as usual, by his gorgeous, evocative illustrations.

City Bird and Other Poems: City Lights Spotlight Series No. 24 

Patrick Dunagan (San Francisco)
City Lights, September 17, 2024

In City Bird, a long poem by Patrick Dunagan, a library assistant at USF, an underground denizen of San Francisco strolls through the city, noting the things that make it distinct.

I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems 

Matthew Zapruder (San Francisco)
Scribner, September 24, 2024

Matthew Zapruder, the author of six poetry collections, explores dreams, reveries, and failed elegies in his newest collection I Love Hearing Your Dreams. Zapruder uses dreams to not only show us the world as it exists, but as it might be.

The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco: A Mystery

Michelle Chouinard (Hayward)
Minotaur Books, September 24, 2024

Capri Sanzio makes her living giving tours about the serial killers of San Francisco. As the granddaughter of one of the city’s most notorious murderers, she is well-suited to the job (even though she believes William ‘Overkill Bill’ Sanzio is innocent). But when an Overkill Bill copycat strikes, killing Sanzio’s former mother-in-law, the tour guide suddenly finds she is a prime suspect. Chouinard, well known for her best-selling Detective Jo Fournier series, even makes San Francisco’s topography a character. 

The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global 

Adrian Daub (San Francisco) 
Stanford University Press, September 24, 2024

Who exactly is afraid of cancel culture? It’s not just the right, Stanford Professor Adrian Daub argues in his new book, The Cancel Culture Panic. Increasingly the left, including left-leaning media from around the world, is calling cancel culture an existential problem. Yet Daub says it’s “an old fear in a new get-up.” Daub explores how various groups use the fear of cancel culture to advance their political agendas.