BERKELEY, CALIF. — In 1913, readers of the San Francisco Bulletin were transfixed by the serial publication of “A Voice from the Underworld,” the serialized memoir of a sex worker in the city’s Red Light district, the so-called Barbary Coast. Under the pseudonym Alice, these memoirs traced her life from childhood to young adulthood in California, frankly describing the harrowing experiences she had as a sex worker in the Paris of the West. The memoirs elicited an enormous public response; letters poured in from every region of the state, many of which were penned by sex workers themselves. Hundreds of these letters were published alongside the memoir, offering sex workers a public forum in which to share their stories. Highly influential at its time, “A Voice from the Underworld” stands alone as a primary source document for these women’s stories, all too often excluded from mainstream efforts for gender equality and worker’s rights. 

In Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, editors Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson have gathered the columns and letters from the pages of the Bulletin together in a single volume, introducing and contextualizing the significance of these accounts to contemporary struggles for sex worker’s rights, historical erasure, and the politics of visibility. Never before available outside of the library, Alice’s voice and story still hold power today. First released by Heyday in 2016, and now republished with a new preface by the editors, Alice is at once a fascinating document from a bygone century and a riveting account of a life on society’s margins. 

BERKELEY, CALIF. — Ninety percent of the fungal kingdom is undescribed or unknown to science. However, unlike the mysteries of the ocean floor or outer space, fungi live among us: they grow in our parks and communicate across vast brain-like networks that encompass all sorts of creatures, living and dead. When pioneering conservation mycologist and educator Aaron Tupac set out to learn about the mushrooms of the city they call home,  they realized that there were virtually no books dedicated to the subject. Far from the rural enclaves usually spotlighted by mushroom guides, Los Angeles boasts a diverse array of fungi—for those who know how to look. 

In Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus, Tupac offers the City of Angels its first comprehensive guide to its fungal neighbors: how to find them and, critically, how to live with them. More than just a hungry forager’s companion, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles blends practical tips for identification and conservation with an passionate argument that mushrooms have a lot to teach us about queerness, community, and what it means to be alive. Fungi can have many thousands of sexes, reproduce both sexually and asexually, and can often change their biological makeup in order to meet the needs of their environment. Drawing on their own nonbinary identity, Tupac describes a mycelial vision of ecology in the city, placing all living things in an interdependent web: uncategorizable, resilient, and ever-changing. 

Featuring original artwork and several new species of mushrooms never before found in guides, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles profiles over a hundred species of mushrooms, diving into their smell, taste, habitat and more. In Tupac’s guide, readers will learn not only how to meet their fungal neighbors, but why doing so matters, and what we can learn from the vast and mysterious world humming right beneath our feet. 

BERKELEY, CALIF. — Just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, lies Marin County—a landscape of redwood forests and misted hills that, between World War II and the 1980s, became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening. From blockbuster cinema to psychedelic rock, Eastern spirituality to speculative fiction, Marin helped forge a new American mythology.

In Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast (on sale September 1, 2026), David Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening—what he calls the “Marinaissance.” The movement gave rise to Star Wars, nurtured the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead, and seeded a creative revolution that reverberated across music, religion, literature, film, and philosophy.

Marin was not only home to cultural juggernauts such as George Lucas, Alan Watts, Janis Joplin, Robin Williams, Gary Snyder, and Philip K. Dick—it profoundly shaped their work. As Perlis writes, “The Marinaissance is multitudes,” manifesting everywhere from the Jedi’s belief in the power of the self to Shel Silverstein’s anti-authoritarian children’s verse. Marin was a nexus of East-meets-West spirituality and a proving ground for sounds and stories that would dominate global culture.

Drawing from deep archival research and dozens of firsthand interviews—including voices like Anne Lamott and Peter Coyote—Perlis reconstructs an era of radical experimentation. From mud-sunk Sausalito houseboats to back-to-the-land communes, Morning in Marin traces how a loose network of freethinkers—united by Zen practice, psychedelic exploration, reverence for nature,  self-sufficiency, and a belief in human potential—sparked an “inner revolution” that ultimately reshaped global entertainment and spiritual life.

But Perlis also charts the contradictions. He examines the unique conditions that allowed the Marinaissance to flourish—producing some of the most valuable intellectual property and devoted fan cultures in modern history—while identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that led to its fragmentation.

The result is a sweeping, immersive cultural history: a rollicking constellation of Zen teachers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, psychedelic rockers, New Age visionaries, and New Hollywood power brokers whose iconoclasm broke—and then remade—the mold of American culture.

Morning in Marin is both a portrait of a place and a story of how local experimentation became a global empire—how a quiet county north of the Golden Gate helped script the American imagination.