Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell Bring New Outlooks on Health Care
When it comes to health and healing, Americans are living in a difficult but interesting time. As we imagine new ways to heal ourselves and create healthy communities, two timely books—A Mind at Home...
View ArticlePreview: Author Anne Fadiman Comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz
Relentlessly curious and prolific, Anne Fadiman has won awards as a reporter, author, essayist and teacher, and has even been quoted in the New York Times Sunday Acrostic, which may be the ultimate...
View ArticleWallace Baine is Good Times’ Newest Writer
When I left the Santa Cruz Sentinel last November, I avoided the r-word (“retirement”) like it was the last donut in the tire shop’s waiting room. Many well-meaning people congratulated me on finally...
View ArticleAuthor Karen Joy Fowler on the Writing Life
If she didn’t write books, Karen Joy Fowler might spend most of her time reading. “I have to read while I’m writing a book,” says the author of the celebrated Jane Austen Book Club. “I am in this space...
View ArticleLocal Author Leslie Karst Appears at Bookshop Santa Cruz with ‘Death al Fresco’
“It was a wristwatch. A pretty expensive one, too, by the looks of it. I reached down to take hold of the watch, but it was entangled in the mat of kelp. Pulling harder, I finally succeeded and the...
View ArticleManuel Pastor Explores What Other States Can Learn From California
The citizens of California seem to have a talent for pioneering one regrettable socio-political phenomenon after another, years before the country as a whole heedlessly tries the same thing. There are...
View ArticleMichael Pollan Comes to Santa Cruz With New Book on Psychedelics
Bestselling author Michael Pollan wishes he did more LSD Pollan, who has written five New York Times bestsellers, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, is a self-proclaimed...
View ArticleSanta Cruz Journalist’s Thriller ‘See Her Run’ Out This Week
The only thing missing from novelist Peggy Townsend’s new thriller See Her Run is a trigger warning. So here goes: If you’re looking for a sweet little whodunit that could have been cribbed from Murder...
View ArticlePreview: Joel Selvin to Appear at Bookshop Santa Cruz with New Book about the...
Let’s be clear—Joel Selvin’s new book is not about the Grateful Dead. Technically, it’s about the ruins of the Grateful Dead. It’s about what happened when Jerry Garcia, the band’s lodestar and...
View ArticleKen Jenning’s New Book ‘Planet Funny’ Traces Comedy’s Evolution
Is it really a joke if no one’s laughing? One would think a professional comedian, especially one who is often mentioned in the same sentence as Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore, would have a ready...
View ArticleStephen Kessler Shares His ‘Garage Elegies’
The syncopated imagery for which Kessler’s body of poetic work is known has never felt more effortless than in Garage Elegies, a 125-page collection of musings on the deeper vagaries of life. Kessler...
View ArticleBeauty, Tragedy and Meaning in America’s Southwest
Tomomi Hanamure had a deep, insatiable love of American landscapes. Hanamure made several trips from Japan to the U.S., trekking across the Grand Canyon, visiting Wounded Knee, and learning the...
View ArticleMatt de la Peña’s ‘Carmela’ Writes the Book on Watsonville—For Kids
There is no explicit mention of Watsonville in Matt de la Peña’s new children’s picture book Carmela Full of Wishes. To most readers, the reference to “Freedom Boulevard” early on in the story of a...
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Jonathan Franzen’s Santa Cruz Escape
He is famously fond of birds. But you could argue that Jonathan Franzen’s spirit animal is of a different phylum altogether. Like some exotic Amazonian butterfly pinned under glass, Franzen has for...
View ArticleDalai Lama Makes Local Cameo at ‘Book of Joy’ Event
Without even winning the lottery or having a genie bestow him three wishes, Douglas Abrams somehow got to spend a week hanging out with perhaps the two most celebrated spiritual leaders on the planet,...
View ArticlePaul Skenazy Goes Time Traveling
The word “engaging” acquires new resonance in Paul Skenazy’s Temper CA, a book of quiet, relentless seduction. No explosions rattle these pages, no international intrigue—it is a small book of careful,...
View ArticleThe Legacy of ‘On the Road’s Al Hinkle
He was probably the least-likely person on earth to be taken for a seminal figure in the annals of the Beat literary movement, but lanky, easy-going, sweet-smiling Al Hinkle was certainly a critical...
View ArticleAuthor Micah Perks on ‘True Love’
In curiously urgent conversations, Micah Perks’ narrators dissolve reader’s defenses in her new book of short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape. Unravelling their intergrown...
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Fear and Loathing in Santa Cruz
A day is coming when someone, somewhere will express doubt that Hunter S. Thompson was a real person. They’ll say that he was just some mythological figure that arose out of the acid-blasted...
View ArticleAuthor Carolyn Burke Revives Famous Art Foursome
The voluminous correspondence of four charismatic companions inspires Carolyn Burke’s latest forensic biography. Her impressive new book Foursome provides, among other things, a compelling portrait of...
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