Books & Books remembers the great Lawrence Ferlinghetti, American poet, painter, social activist and founder of City Lights Bookstore. City Lights, named after the 1931 Charlie Chaplin film, was originally a pop-culture journal published in a cramped space above a flower shop by Peter Martin, a transplanted New Yorker. When it folded, Martin told Ferlinghetti about his idea to open a book store specializing in paperbacks, which were then a new product. They each put up $500, and City Lights Books was born in June 1953. “Once we opened the door,” Ferlinghetti said, “we couldn’t get it closed.”

Booksellers everywhere join us in a chorus of hallelujahs for 101 spirited years.  

“In this courageous, daring and tender-hearted memoir, Sharon Stone interrogates her own trauma and a myriad of losses and discovers the gift of clear seeing. The Beauty of Living Twice is so much more than a celebrity tell-all. It is an act of reckoning, contrition, and above all, love.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

The Beauty of Living Twice (Knopf, $27.95) is a celebration of women’s strength and resilience, a reckoning, and a call to activism. Sharon Stone tells her own story to Gloria Estefan in what promises to be a remarkable evening. 

Klara and the Sun is a radiant new novel about the bond between Klara, an Artificial Friend, and Josie, her human companion. Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro returns to a familiar dystopian realm but, this time, with a brilliant tale of hope and love. Join Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, in a live, virtual conversation with award-winning and bestselling author Neil Gaiman!

From the New York Times bestselling author of I See You Made an Effort comes a timely and hilarious chronicle of downward mobility, financial and emotional. With signature “sharp wit” (NPR), Annabelle Gurwitch gives irreverent and empathetic voice to a generation hurtling into their next chapter with no safety net and proving that our no-frills new normal doesn’t mean a deficit of humor.

A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs.

Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them. With images from McCartney’s personal archives—handwritten texts, paintings, and photographs, hundreds previously unseen—The Lyrics (Liveright, $100), spanning sixty-four years, becomes the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

A marriage spirals out of control when the issues of our day—cultural, political, and social—becoming intensely personal in this fresh, whip-smart novel for readers of Meg Wolitzer and Fleishman Is in Trouble. 

Allison Saft’s Down Comes the Night is a snow-drenched romantic fantasy that keeps you racing through the pages long into the night.

"Utter magic. It’s everything I have ever wanted from a book. Truly spectacular and a must read for all fans of fantasy." - Emily A. Duncan, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Saints

From the author of Elsey Come Home, a stunning novel about a mother caring for her two teenage sons while the crumbling fishing industry her New England community relies on threatens to collapse around them.

A behind the scenes look at the music that is currently the soundtrack of the globe, reported on and written by Leila Cobo, Billboard's VP of Latin Music and the world's ultimate authority on popular Latin music.

Decoding "Despacito" (Vintage, $16.95) tracks the stories behind the biggest Latin hits of the past fifty years.

The explosive story of the illegal gold trade from South America, and the three Miami businessmen who got rich on it—until it all came crashing down. Dirty Gold (PublicAffairs, $28) lifts the veil on a massive and very illegal international business that is more lucrative than trafficking cocaine, and often just as dangerous.

By the award-winning writer of Beautiful Thing, a masterly inquest into how the mysterious deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls (Grove Press, $26) returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?

Based on the true story of the world’s biggest art caper, Art Heist Experience is a true-crime walking show where socially distanced groups move through outdoor locations to gather clues. As an amateur detective, you’ll interact with a wild group of wily career criminals, slimy con men, rumpled art-recovery specialists, a possible inside man, a gentle psychopath and the larger-than-life but definitely real self-proclaimed "Greatest Art Thief of All Time.” Can you help crack this case?