Bay Area book tours and launch parties have been canceled due to the coronavirus, so KALW producer Lisa Morehouse brings author readings to you in this socially-distanced book tour.Subscribe to this podcast in NPR One, Radio Public, or your favorite podcast player.
Danielle Teller lives in Palo Alto. Her book "Forged" came out in May 2025. It's about a Gilded Age con artist who steals money from banks in the name of love.
Lori Ostlund lives in San Francisco. Her story collection "Are You Happy?" came out in May 2025. It's about the specter of violence that hangs over women in the queer community, but with humor.
Bonnie Tsui lives in Berkeley. Her book, "On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters," was published in April 2025. It poses the question, what is power in a body? And blends science, culture, and history to answer that question.
Khan Wong lives in San Francisco. His novel, "Down in the Sea of Angels," was published April 2025. It's about a young woman with the psychic ability to know the history of any object that she touches.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett lives in Richmond. Her poetry collection, "Mud in Our Mouths" came out in March 2025. It's about road tripping to visit family in Tennessee and simultaneously traveling back through many past selves.
Brittany Newell' book, "Soft Core," is about a stripper named Ruth who is plunged into a nocturnal journey through SF's underground when her ex-boyfriend disappears.
Kat Crosswell lives in Oakland. Her coming of age novel for middle grades, called, "Pieces of Eight: A Harper Family Mixtape," came out in July 2024.
Ellen Barker's new book, Still Needs Work, is about a woman who loses her tech job and spends the next year scrambling to keep her life together.
Maxine Rose Schur lives in Novato. Her book, Star Brother came out in August of 2024. It's about a lonely teenager who makes a discovery that leads to an adventuring rescue mission.
Samantha Schoech book of stories, 'My Mother's Boyfriends' is a collection about familial and personal relationships. It's full of sympathetic characters who make terrible choices.
Elizabeth Horner Turner lives in San Francisco. Her book, Horsemouth and Aquariumhead, came out in September 2024. It's a chapbook of flash Fictions, which are really short stories that imaginative and sometimes unsettling.
Gloria Huang lives in Palo Alto. Her book, Kaya of the Ocean came out January 7th, 2025. It's about an Asian-American girl in Hawaii who struggles with anxiety... until she discovers some mysterious powers.
Emmerich Anklam lives in Berkeley and works for the independent publishing house, Heyday Books. He's the editor of Heyday At 50, which was released in September.
Alison Owings lives in San Francisco. Her book, The Mayor of the Tenderloin, came out September 10, 2024. It's essentially a redemption story about Dale Seymour, who started Code Tenderloin.
Davis author Jack Gedney dives deep into the lives of California woodland birds in his new book, 'The Birds in the Oaks: Secret Voices of the Western Woods.' It came out on October 15th, 2024.
Berkeley author L. John Harris reads from his new book, "Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession." It documents his search for the story behind an anonymous portrait of a young girl wearing a red head cover.
Anita Felicelli lives in Mountain View. Her book, How We Know Our Time Travelers, came out on December 3rd, 2024. It's a short story collection about time, memory and desire.
Jeff Miller's book, Bay Area Wild Life: an Irreverent Guide, will make you fall in love with the wild animals that can be found in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area.
The second edition of River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin, by Stephen Most, is about the largest dam removal and watershed restoration project in history.
Terry Tierney lives in Oakland. His poetry collection, Why Trees Stay Outside, came out October 1st, 2024. The poems question our relationships with each other and the earth.
Bay Area authors Stephanie Wildman and Adam Ryan Chang bring us a new children's book, illustrated by Dream Chen. It's about moving, change, and the collective comforts of home.
Sacramento Author Aaron Carnes makes a case for loving ska music in the expanded second edition of his book, In Defense of Ska.
Napa author, John Stallcup, reads from his new book, K'aa Lani, Many Arrows. It's a history of the Navajo, wrapped in a political thriller, and it's full of surprises.
Alameda author, Jeff Raz, reads from his book, An International Circus Affair. It's about the lasting impact of connections between Nanjing, China, and San Francisco, in the world of circus.
Oakland Author, Lenore Weiss, reads from her new environmental novel, Pulp into Paper. It's about the death of a young boy forcing out the truth about what's happening at the local paper mill.
Zack Rogow reads from his memoir, it's about his dad who was a widely published fiction writer, a Drama critic on Broadway, captain of a ship in the U.S. Navy in World War Two. And tragically, he died in an airplane crash when Rogow was just three years old.
Sam Sax reads from his new book. It's a queer Jewish coming of age story told in these nonlinear fragments. It's titled "Yr Dead" and it came out in August.
Tiburon author Sheri Joseph, reads from her new book. It's a near-future love and adventure story about genetic screening tests making it impossible to hide a secret identity. Her novel, Edge of the Known World, was released September 3rd, 2024.
San Anselmo author Nina Schuyler reads from her new book, centered around nature and the changing climate. Her collection of stories, In This Ravishing World, came out July 2, 2024.
Marie Mutsuki (MOO-ts-key) Mockett lives between San Francisco and Tokyo. Her novel Tree Doctor, is set in Carmel, and came out March 19th, 2024.
Palo Alto author Ecy Femi King, reads from her new book about exploring Stanford's introductory computer science classes in graphic form.
Berkeley author Summer Brenner reads from her memoir. It's a family memoir, it's about her brother David who was schizophrenic and who came to Berkeley during the last year of his life to live with her.
Josh Fernandez reads from his memoir about a life lived in opposition to the status quo, sometimes to a fault. From anti-racist action to street violence to jail to unrelenting joy in the belief that another world is possible.
Woodacre author Molly Giles reads from her new book: a memoir about her life in the Bay Area crossing and recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It's called "Life Span."
Oakland author Aida Salazar's children's book When Moon Blooms is about Mexican-Indigenous culture. It came out on February 27th, 2024.
San Francisco author Katie Flynn reads from her new book about characters who face their monsters and sometimes become them. It's called "Island Rule."
Oakland author Natalie Foster writes a provocation for the economy that she says we deserve in America. Her book is titled "The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America's Next Economy."
Berkeley author William Smock reads from his new novel about the most irresponsible, disobedient boy in the world. It's called "Bobby Lord of Acton Waters."
San Francisco author Lissa Soep reads from her book "Other People's Words." It's about friendship as a great love and how we hold loved ones close after they're gone through the language that they leave behind.
San Francisco author Ethel Rohan reads from her book "Sing, I." It's about a middle aged woman living in Half Moon Bay and questioning if she's in her right life and what she should or perhaps should not do about that.
Mae Respicio lives in San Rafael. Her middle grade novel, Isabel in Bloom is about 12-year-old Isabel, who's leaving the Philippines for San Francisco to finally reunite with her mother, an overseas Filipino worker whom she's only seen five times in five years.
Carolina Ixta's debut novel, is about a young Latina woman named Belen Dolores Ixtel del Toro who was trying to find her way in a very messy and very complicated senior year of high school.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett lives in Richmond. Her poetry chapbook "Familiar" is about a time traveling witch, childhood trauma, healing, and transformational magic. And there's footnotes.
Margaret Juhae Lee lives in Oakland. Her book, Starry Field is about her family's search for information about my grandfather, who was a student revolutionary in colonial Korea.
Jason Roberts lives in Oakland. His book is about one of the most important rivalries in history, a rivalry that shaped the nature of our relationship to the natural world.
Sasha Vasilyuk's novel is about a Soviet World War Two veteran with a dangerous secret, and it's loosely based on her grandfather.
Eizabeth Stix's book is a collection of linked stories full of quirky, lonely characters all seeking connection but who can't help getting in their own way.
We hear a reading from local actor and Zen Buddhist priest, Peter Coyote. It's about Japanese gift wrapping around Buddhist teachings.
Madeleine Cravens poetry collection is about queer relationships and family history set in New York City.
Minnie Phan lives in Oakland. Her new book Simone is a collaboration with Viet Thanh Nguyen. It's about wildfires and Vietnamese families' experience with climate change.
Mara Kardas-Nelson reads from her book about the history of small anti-poverty loans, how those came to dominate international development, and what that means for poor borrowers around the world.