Our dystopias have gone back to the wilderness.

If Echo of the Boom is representative of the hysterical-realist novel of today, the main quality that differentiates it from its forebears is its treatment of humor.

A talk with Australian born Photographer Kate Seabrook about transit, typography, and the aesthetics of train stations.

Sometimes things aren’t what they appear, but that’s ok.

Ai WeiWei’s largest show to date is currently on display in Berlin.

Rachel Jones revisits a space influenced by the California art scene of the 60s, 70s and 80s – Chicago O’Hare airport’s underground tunnel.

Shorpy is a photographic archive of American history in all its beauty and ugliness

To see Vice at their best, you’ve got to see the coverage of Mexico they’ve been doing recently.

Read an excerpt from John O’Kane’s new counterculture history of Venice, California.

In the dark, fairy-tale like “Kid-Thing,” the filmmakers succeed in evoking the ambiguity and absurdity of childhood.

The epic Hecho en Oaxaca exhibit brought work from twelve street artists from around the world to Oaxaca.

Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago, known for his massive 2501 Migrants project, passed away in July. Here’s some of his work.

Ever wondered what those shoes dangling from the telephone wires mean?

A new memoir documents a young man’s reckoning with his mother’s murder in Tombstone, Arizona.

A poet draws inspiration from the mean streets of the Tenderloin neighborhood he’s lived in for nearly a decade. Creosote Minidoc #1

In his most recent book, one of America’s most important novelists experiments again, and this time, loses the thread.

The mystery that shrouds this man compounds the stunning beauty of his precious, few recorded songs.

Arthur Magazine has returned to carry the banner for the American counterculture, this time as a broadsheet.

Junot Diaz’s latest collection of short stories,This is How You Lose Her, continues to mine the author’s experiences as a Dominican immigrant in New Jersey

The debut by young Bay Area filmmaker Ryan Coogler brings a story of police brutality on BART to the big screen.

The work of two Oaxacan photographers explores creative memory and shamanic practice, at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Kathleen Alcott’s debut is a lyrical, heartfelt novel about the way people try to hold onto things that are transient by nature.

Mexico City. What can you say about 20 million people? Not much in general, but an awful lot in particular.

Golden West Signs in Berkeley keeps a vanishing craft alive.

In “Season of the Witch,” Salon.com founder David Talbot takes us through the turmoil, activism and passion of modern San Francisco’s violent birth in the 60s and 70s.

Last week, a macabre scene blurred cinematic and real violence; this week, we ask ourselves the nature of our sickness.

The big bass horn now boasts L.A. street cred, and schools are keeping an eye on their band rooms.

Big letters, the undead, skulls, and street signs: Polk Gulch graffiti.

Larry Rothe, author of a new history of the San Francisco Symphony, talks about the City, the orchestra, music, and writing.

Based on archival footage shot by a Swedish crew, the film offers a more balanced, outsider’s view on the American Black Power movement.

Levi Pata’s solo debut at Kokoro Studio in San Francisco displays worldly inspiration along with elemental flow.

In contrast to much science fiction, in Yu’s book, time isn’t fragile, it’s we who are fragile—time is malleable, self-healing, a river that splits apart and converges.

Though the characters that Woodrell has created are often strange, violent, even grotesque, they are always recognizably human.

The winter literary quarterlies are hitting bookshelves in San Francisco—Zyzzyva, 14 Hills, and McSweeney’s.

Héctor Tobar’s new novel takes a sprawling view of Los Angeles, from the gated communities to the back alleys and side streets where the marginalized and the forgotten create their own vibrant community.

Ice Cube has recently turned heads for appearing in a new role: as a cultural ambassador for the West Coast—his hometown of L.A., specifically.

Peter Orner’s new novel is an album of snapshots, capturing the dreams and disappointments of a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago.

Like the 4.2 magnitude earthquake last week that jolted the Bay Area, Litquake 2011 came and went quickly this October, leaving us all with different impressions.

Ozarks author Daniel Woodrell writes soaring, lyrical crime fiction that recalls Faulkner as much as Chandler. Our conversation with the author of Winter’s Bone and the new story collection, The Outlaw Album.

The “Original Shorts: Failure to Commit” Litquake event, at the Lone Palm on Monday, embodied everything that I love about the San Francisco literary scene.

The Scanners Project is a temporary bookstore meets art installation, a showcase of the tactile pleasures of physicality of books.

In Goldman’s hands, Aura becomes so indelible, so bristling with life, that when he writes of his life without her, our grief for his loss becomes as keening as his own.

Tyler Bewley paints landscapes mostly: colorful and whimsical dystopias depicting industrial excess, collapse, and reinvention.

A new monthly salon at Dog Eared Books, led by SF author Peter Orner, digs deep into the neglected books re-published in the NYRB Classics collection.

Dan Fante provides a refreshing and much-needed examination of his father, John Fante’s life, and the cloud of dirty glamor that surrounds it.

Steven T. Jones (aka Scribe) takes a deep look into Burning Man’s history and inner workings in his book, The Tribes of Burning Man.

“An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible.”

Watz’s work, like other contemporary computer-generated art, can be both harshly geometric and strangely organic. This result comes from working with a language that’s similar, in some ways, to nature itself.

Stephen Elliott’s memoir, The Adderall Diaries, captures the mood of the Bay Area’s underbelly as he explores the false confessions of others—and his own compulsions.

In this monumental work chronicling the history of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson’s greatest achievement is presenting three indelible individuals.