David Perlis at Copperfield's Books
Marin native David Perlis launches Morning in Marin with a reading, conversation, audience Q&A and signing. Free; registration recommended.
Copperfield’s Books is delighted to welcome Marin County native David Perlis to Petaluma for the launch of his captivating debut novel, Morning in Marin —a poignant exploration of home, memory, identity, and the enduring pull of the places that shape us.
Join us for a special evening featuring a reading and intimate conversation followed by a live audience Q&A and book signing.
Free and open to all ages. Registration recommended for seating.
Across the Golden Gate and enter the rollicking creative scene of midcentury Marin County, a fertile font of risk-takers and radical thinkers. In these misted hills, currents of art and philosophy swirl, giving rise to the seismic cultural awakening out of which Star Wars, Alan Watts, and the Grateful Dead all emerge. Marin is where Anna Halprin dances, Philip K Dick dreams, Gary Snyder circumambulates, and Janis Joplin hides. What made Marin such a galvanizing force of iconoclasm and counterculture: Was it the money, Mount Tamalpais, the acid trips? With a fresh voice steeped in local lore, David Perlis dips into parties on Sausalito houseboats, hangs around communes in West Marin, and introduces us to the visionaries who sowed the seeds of an organic inner revolution that bloomed into a global commercial empire--transforming Marin along the way as outsider elements became the consummate insiders. Blending pop culture, biography, and a deeply affectionate sense of place into an immersive narrative history, Morning in Marin traces a movement of Zen thinkers, Beat poets, mystic feminists, and psychedelic rockers from their radical beginnings through their crises and contradictions. Forging an unbroken chain from bohemians and Beats to New Age and New Hollywood, Perlis reveals how the people, places, and ideas of Marin combined to create a lasting American mythology.
Author: David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.
David Perlis at Mill Valley Historical Society
Between World War II and the 1980s, Marin County became the unlikely epicenter of a cultural awakening, one whose reverberations would be felt across the country and around the world. In his new book Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, David Perlis delivers the first comprehensive narrative history of this awakening—what he calls the "Marinaissance."
In this talk, Perlis will delve into the early figures and cultural influences of this movement, which would give rise to Star Wars, the Grateful Dead, Alan Watts, and much more, seeding a creative revolution that would script the American imagination for generations.
David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.
Debuts October 2026 — Alice
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute Returns in New Edition, Illuminating the Hidden History of Sex Workers' Lives and Labor in Early California
Edited by Bay Area historians Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson, the republished volume brings a landmark firsthand account of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—and the voices of hundreds of working women—back into print with a new preface.
BERKELEY, Calif. — More than a century ago, readers across California followed the remarkable story of “Alice,” an anonymous sex worker whose serialized memoir, “A Voice from the Underworld,” appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913. Writing under a pseudonym, Alice recounted her journey from childhood to adulthood and offered an unflinching portrait of life in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast red-light district.
The series became a statewide sensation. Readers responded in droves, sending letters from every corner of California—many written by sex workers themselves. The Bulletin published hundreds of these responses alongside Alice’s memoir, creating one of the earliest public forums in which sex workers could tell their own stories in their own words.
Now, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, edited by Bay Area historians Devon Angus and Ivy Anderson, brings together Alice’s complete memoir and the accompanying letters in a single volume. Originally published by Heyday in 2016 and now reissued with a new preface by the editors, the book restores an extraordinary primary source to readers and scholars while highlighting its enduring relevance to conversations about labor, gender equality, historical erasure, and the politics of visibility.
At a time when the histories of sex workers have often been excluded from mainstream narratives of workers’ rights and women’s movements, Alice offers a rare firsthand record of lives lived at society’s margins. The collection reveals not only Alice’s remarkable story but also the collective voices of women whose experiences have too often gone undocumented.
Both a compelling personal memoir and an invaluable historical archive, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute invites readers to reconsider California’s past through the perspectives of women whose lives shaped it, even as they were written out of its history.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
Keep up with Heyday on social:
Ivy Anderson is a San Francisco based writer by way of Ojai, California. Focused on issues of Bay Area ecology and radical history, her reportage on water management issues has recently been published in Water Efficiency Magazine and her poetry in Poecology. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies with a Minor in Geography, runs a community garden, is on the board of a book store collective in San Francisco, and is currently leading a workshop on historic research through the Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s sponsored Healing Arts Collective Project.
Devon Angus is an artist, activist, and historian based in San Francisco, California. He has composed and performed a conceptual folk operetta based on San Francisco history, “The Ghosts of Barbary”, throughout the Bay Area, Switzerland, and Italy in 2014. He has organized and published a series of oral histories of immigrants in the Catskills region through the Skene Memorial Library in Fleischmanns, New York between 2001-2003 and was the recipient of an arts grant through the New York State Council on the Arts for his show “Songs and Stories of Old New York” in 2002. He is currently pursuing a History MA at San Francisco State University.
Debuts January 2027 — Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
First-of-its-kind Field Guide to LA’s Mushrooms
Reveals Our Own Queer Connections
Exploring the Mycoverse founder Aaron Tupac takes readers on a passionate
and personal trip through the mushrooms of Los Angeles and beyond, in this genderqueer and ecologically entangled new book.
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.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
Keep up with Heyday on social:
Aaron Tupac (they/them) is a fungal conservation researcher, educator, community organizer, and speaker based in Los Angeles. Aaron is the founder and organizer of the fungi-focused community education group Exploring the Mycoverse at Arlington Garden. Aaron works for the Fungal Diversity Survey, the only nonprofit focused on North America’s fungal biodiversity and conservation. They serve as a fungi collector for the California Fungal Diversity Survey Project, the first government-funded state-wide project of its kind. They are also the founder and serve as the chair of the North American Mycological Association’s Conservation and Stewardship Committee. As a lover of the more-than-human world, they are fascinated with how fungi can teach us about mindfulness, interconnection, and relationships.
Debuts September 2026 — Morning in Marin
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Immersive Narrative History Reveals Marin County’s Outsized Influence in the American Cultural Imagination
Morning in Marin by David Perlis dives into the culture-makers, from the Grateful Dead to George Lucas, who transformed the arts with a distinctive Marin-rooted sensibility.
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.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com
Keep up with Heyday on social:
Advance Praise for Morning in Marin
“Those of us who grew up in Marin always knew it was a special place. Just how special, and why, is brilliantly articulated in Perlis’s exhaustively researched book. Settled by artists and European influences after WWII, Marin became home to many of the important artists, writers, musicians, comedians, and entertainers of the last seventy-five years. Art for Art’s sake indeed.” —Huey Lewis
“This is a wonderful history of Northern California and its artists. Dave Perlis must have been everywhere. He knew everyone and recorded them perfectly. He knew their antecedents and their antecedents. He captured their stories. If I could have written it I would have. But I couldn’t. Dave Perlis could and did.” —Peter Coyote
“David Perlis has recaptured the times in a way that allows us to remember. For the younger generation of artists and seekers who are searching for such fertile ground and community, this journey back is a documentary of the remarkable, a tender ode to the magic.” —Daria Halprin
“An enchanted fog’s-eye view of the hyperreality on the far side of the Waldo Tunnel and how it rippled out to the rest of us. Both dreamy and meticulous.” —Jesse Jarnow, author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, cohost of The Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
David Perlis is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Marin County, California. For nearly a decade he co-hosted the late night talk show Night People on WFMU. He has worked for the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History. He now lives in Corrales, New Mexico. Morning in Marin is his first book.
