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Hamburger Eyes Photos Capture Nudists, Elvis Impersonators, and David Hasselhoff

By Jennifer Maerz

Published: April 2, 2008

Powerhouse Books (Feb. 2008), $35 Ray Potes, one of the head honchos at the San Francisco–based photo mag Hamburger Eyes , thinks of his biannual black-and-white zines as movies. "I...

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New McSweeney's Joke Book Not So Funny

By Frances Reade

Published: April 2, 2008

By the editors of McSweeney's Vintage (April), $12.95 Our friends on Valencia Street deliver us an enthusiastically nerdy collection of literary humor, a work by and for those of us who,...

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Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone

By Annika Dukes

Published: January 23, 2008

By Beth Lisick William Morrow, $24.95 There's no denying that Berkeley author Beth Lisick's life is funny. Her 2005 memoir, Everybody Into the Pool , was hilarious. But for her new...

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Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield

By Frances Reade

Published: January 23, 2008

By David Nadelberg Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $14.95 Schadenfreude, as the past year of closely monitored starlet meltdowns has proven, is rising faster than Guitar Hero as a lazy...

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Magical Moments of Change: How Psychotherapy Turns Kids Around

By Frances Reade

Published: November 21, 2007

By Lenore Terr, M.D. W.W. Norton, $27.95 Magical Moments of Change is possibly the cheesiest title ever applied to a deeply fascinating book on the human psyche and the possibilities...

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oPtion$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

By Will Harper

Published: November 21, 2007

By Daniel Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) Da Capo Press, $22.95 This book illustrates the danger in trying to transform something that works best as a bite-sized snack (a blog parodying...

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Shortcomings

By Frances Reade

Published: October 24, 2007

First, full disclosure on possible circle-jerky conflict-of-interest: This book talks some brief shit about S.F. Weekly . In return, S.F. Weekly will talk some brief shit back, while also...

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Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life

By Michael Stoll

Published: October 24, 2007

Plenty of successful fiction writers have slaked our thirst for more intimate knowledge of the creative process by giving us tell-all memoirs. KQED's Michael Krasny has penned a lively and...

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SF-Based Novel 'Bearing the Body' Probes Sexual and Emotional Hang-Ups of Middle-Aged Men

By Christopher Jensen

Published: September 26, 2007

Bearing the Body Nathan Mirsky is in for some bad news: His brother Daniel — once the family's favorite son, now a total burnout — has died under mysterious circumstances in San...

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Desert Gothic

By Frances Reade

Published: September 26, 2007

Nothing is Gothic about this debut short-story collection, filled with lives as arid and lonely as the sun-baked Nowherevilles of Nevada and Arizona where they play out. Waters, raised in Reno and...

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Seduced by Madness: The True Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case

By Carol Pogash (William Morrow, $24.95)

By Will Harper

Published: August 15, 2007

By Carol Pogash William Morrow, $24.95 True-crime books rely on the sensational, and few if any murder cases in the Bay Area have ever been as sensational as the case of Susan Polk. The...

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The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

By Andrew Keen (Doubleday, $22.95)

Published: July 18, 2007

As the Bush administration has slowly discovered in the Middle East, democracy isn't always a panacea and it can actually have unintended — and unwanted — consequences. In his...

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The Mother Garden

By Robin Romm (Simon & Schuster, $22)

Published: July 18, 2007

The majority of Robin Romm's debut collection is concerned with two things: dying mothers and literary quirkiness. The Berkeley-based author seems to be, in the accusing words of one of her...

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All Blacked Out and Nowhere to Go

Hiya Swanhuyser

Published: June 20, 2007

By Bucky Sinister Gorsky Press (May), $12.95 Anyone who's quit both God and whiskey ought to get a free pass to write bad poetry. But anyone who's kicked firewater, a vengeful deity, and...

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The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty

Blair Campbell

Published: June 20, 2007

Familiarity breeds contempt, or so the old saw goes. But contempt is a mild word for what Rosa Mondavi expressed one day in 1976 in the midst of Mondavi v. Mondavi, the trial pitting her eldest son...

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Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

Published: May 23, 2007

By David Talbot Free Press, $28 "[S]omebody has something new to say about the Kennedys? I find that hard to believe," a friend replied after I cancelled our drink date due to deadline...

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Adverbs

Frances Reade

Published: May 23, 2007

By Daniel Handler Harper, $13.95 Turns out Daniel Handler, best known for introducing a generation of children to dark, absurd post-modern literature under his Lemony Snicket handle, can...

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World Leader Pretend

Published: April 25, 2007

By James Bernard Frost St. Martin's Griffin (April, $13.95) You don't have to be a total nerd to enjoy James Bernard Frost's debut novel World Leader Pretend , but I think it would help....

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The Yiddish Policemans Union

Published: April 25, 2007

By Michael Chabon HarperCollins (May, $26.95) Michael Chabon loves to shoehorn his outsized imagination into the conventions of whatever genre catches his fancy, and here he decided the...

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Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind

Frances Reade

Published: March 28, 2007

By Elizabeth Mayer, Ph.D. Bantam, $26.00 Elizabeth Mayer was an academic scientist at UCSF who passed away just after completing this unassuming and astounding book. She considered...