NCIBA/IndieBound/San Francisco Chronicle
Bestseller List

Top Shelf Picks

From Moe’s Books, Berkeley

Fiction

• Microscripts by Robert Walser. Newly translated manuscripts from this brilliant Swiss writer that were long thought to be written in code but were in fact stories written in letters a millimeter high.
• The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano. Five new stories and two essays (one on illness and a scathing one on literature) written with his usual incomparable intelligence and wild humor.
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds. An exquisite imagining of the events that led the nineteenth-century English poet John Clare into madness. In paperback.
• The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt. Newly in paperback, this is the intricate saga of an artistic community from the Victorian era through the devastation of World War I.

Poetry

• Mysteriosos and Other Poems by Michael McClure. He read at the Six Gallery the night that Ginsberg first read “Howl.” He co-wrote “Mercedes Benz” with Janis Joplin. This collection ranks with the best of his long and celebrated career.

Nonfiction

• Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good edited by R. Jeffrey Lustig, et al. Essays and commentary from Snyder, Vollmann, and Callenbach, among others, on this crucial issue.
• Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner. A surprise hit at Moe’s Books, this is an in-depth critical history of sound recording from Edison on through magnetic tape and digital technology. In paperback.
• Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde. From the genius that brought us The Gift, a new work that links the idea of a cultural commons to the intentions of America’s founding fathers.
• Twain’s Feast by Andrew Beahrs. The author researches eight American regional specialties (such as trout from Lake Tahoe and oysters and mussels from San Francisco) that a homesick Mark Twain reminisces about in A Tramp Abroad.
• Frida Kahlo: Her Photos edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. A riveting collection of over 500 of Kahlo’s personal photographs drawn from the Frida Kahlo Museum Archive.