The Green Arcade, San Francisco, California, respectfully acknowledges that we are based in Yelamu, the traditional, un-ceded lands of the Ohlone people. We pay our respect to elders both past and present.
Specializing in books on San Francisco & California history,
the built & the natural environment,
politics & social justice,
cooking, food & farming,
select literature, noir, art, & children's books,
mostly new, some used
Store Hours
Tues-Friday 12-6
Sat-Sun 12-5
Please Wear a Mask
We are still shipping books from our “Online Shop.” The online shop is only a fraction of our inventory.
October 18, 6:30pm at The Green Arcade PRINCIPLED UNITY TOUR 2022 Hy Thurman & Kwame Shakur in Conversation Introduction by James Tracy
What does it mean to build unity in times of division and fragmentation? What lessons can we take from past struggles for liberation? Where must we walk without a map? The Principled Unity Tour 2022 brings together two dynamic working-class author-activists to explore these questions in conversation with each other and local audiences.
Hy Thurman is a co-founder of the Young Patriots Organization. Based in Chicago the Young Patriots mobilized poor whites against racism and poverty. Together with the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, they organized the First Rainbow Coalition. Hy remains active today with the Northern Alabama School for Organizers. His book Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes From the Struggle at the Edge of the Rainbow was published in 2021.
Kwame Shakur is the Minister of Culture for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. His book My Search for Answers, Truth and Meaning has been compared to the work of George Jackson. Formerly incarcerated for bank robbery, Shakur speaks to his own politicization and “breaking the criminal mentality.
James Tracy is a Bay Area-based author, organizer, and teacher. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power; No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements; and the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco's Housing Wars.
Thursday, October 20, 2022, 6:30pm
McRoskey Mattress Co. 3rd Floor, 1687 Market Street My Blue Coiling Snake, My Empty Room A Novel by Lynn Crawford
Please join Ellen Leonard and some of Lynn’s friends in celebrating her life and reading from her novel.
Lynn Crawford's powerful and deeply affecting novel records a love affair that begins in Detroit and concludes in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It recreates in closely observed detail a gay couple's experience during a perilous time, when love is threatened by homophobia in Detroit and a pandemic in the San Francisco. Yet it also transcends time and place to explore profound issues of love, grief, and forgiveness.
Lynn Crawford was a San Francisco writer, visual artist and psychotherapist. She studied and practiced Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, shamanism, and Jungian psychology. Lynn died on April 11, 2017. Thereafter her longtime partner, Ellen Leonard, compiled the manuscript and published the novel through Clover Heights Publishing.
Thank you to our host McRoskey Mattress Co.
Wednesday, November 2, 6:30pm Lucia Athens talks about her book: The Sustainability Revolutionists: Heroes and Hope for Our Common Future
Friday, November 18, 6:30pm A Poetry Reading With Norma Cole and Vincent Katz
Sunday, November 13, 5pm Book Launch Why It Is I Choose to Be Alien: Selected Poems of Laura Ulewicz
Readers TBA
Thursday December 1, 6:30pm World AIDS Day 2022 Readings with K.M. Soehnlein and Ron Goldberg
FEATURED PAST EVENTS:
Poets Tinker Greene and Norman Fischer Tinker Greene returns to the Bay with his book Blue Flame Ring Recorded Thursday April 14, 2022
“Tinker Greene. Polymath of wilderness and city living. Fan and lover of all the arts, especially poetry. Lots of channeling through things. An empath totally open to receive and collaborate. He builds bridges, the kind Lew Welch would need to get across.”
—Micah Ballard, on Blue Flame Ring
Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Soto Zen Buddhist priest who has written and published steadily since the 1970’s. Recent poetry titles include Nature, There Was A Clattering As… , The Museum ofCapitalism, and Selected Poems 1980-2013. His latest Buddhist title is When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflectionsfrom a Life in Zen. He lives in Muir Beach, CA with his wife Kathie, also a Zen priest.
A Special Zoom Event - Three in 2022: Poets’ Prose Susan Gevirtz, Jeanne Heuving and Eleni Stecopoulos read from new works, and discuss their turn to prose and its relationship to poetry.
Introduced by Ghazal Mosadeq Recorded Jan 2, 2022
L-R: Susan Gevirtz, Jeanne Heuving and Eleni Stecopoulos
Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, translator, editor and publisher of Pamenar Press, a multicultural experimental press. She has had her poetry and criticism published both in English and Persian in venues such as Poetry Wales, Plumwood Mountain, WD40, Revista de poesía, ensayo y crítica, Blackbox Manifold, Changes Review, Boiler House & Litmus Press.
Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). A book (untitled) is forthcoming from Pamenar Press. She is based in San Francisco.
Jeanne Heuving’s recent book, Mood Indigo (selva oscura), is poetry and prose as is her forthcoming Brilliant Corners (Chax). Recent scholarly publications include The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics (Modern and Contemporary Poetics, Alabama), and her edited volume, Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work (Contemporary North American Poetry, Iowa). She is the 2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.
Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, a collection of essays & poems forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2022. Her other books are Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid work of criticism & memoir, & Armies of Compassion (2010), a poetry collection.
Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Insomnia (University of Sussex), Second Stutter, Pamenar Online Magazine, DATABLEED, & [φρμκ].
Dmitry Samarov In Person at The Green Arcade Recorded Dec 2, 2021
Dmitry Samarov was born in Moscow, USSR in 1970. He immigrated to the US with his family in 1978. He got in trouble in 1st grade for doodling on his Lenin Red Star pin and hasn't stopped doodling since. After a false start at Parsons School of Design in New York, he graduated with a BFA in painting and printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. Upon graduation he promptly began driving a cab—first in Boston, then after a time, in Chicago. Dmitry will talk about and read from his two recent books Samarov's OldStyle and All Hack. He will be interrogated by Ben Terrall, producer of the cult 'zine Namaste Motherfu**er.
Hilton Obenzinger Reads From His Latest Collection Event recorded Thursday, November 4, 7pm
Witness 2017-2020 chronicles four years of troubles, shootings, wildfires, racial reckoning, planetary murder, plague, monumental lies, crazy delusions, me-too, an uprising for justice, and more. But a failed far-right insurrection had to be the capstone of these terrible times, and the nation is not done yet. What was once unfamiliar and strange ("flatten the curve") has become common, even banal, demanding a poem. Language has to keep up, and Hilton Obenzinger presents a powerful testimony.
Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, history, and criticism. His books include This Passoveror the Next I Will Never be in Jerusalem, which received the American Book Award. His autobiographical novel Busy Dying recounts, among other things, his participation in the student revolt at Columbia University in 1968. Recent works include How We Write: The Varieties ofWriting Experience and Treyf Pesach [Unholy Passover]. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated Columbia University in 1969, taught nursery and elementary school, ran an offset press at a community print shop in San Francisco's Mission District, worked as a commercial writer for business and industry, and taught writing, literature and American Studies at Stanford University. He is currently Associate Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford.
Rebecca Solnit in Conversation with Adam Hochschild ORWELL'S ROSES Event recorded Tuesday, October 19, 2021
ABOUT ORWELL'S ROSES, from the publisher:
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.
Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market.
The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
Reading and In Conversation emcee, Patrick Marks Event recorded Friday, Sept 10, 2021
Cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade
Authors’ books available at our online shop.
Check under category Roxanne, Amy and James Now Available:
American Geography
Books signed by Sandra Phillips can be ordered from The Green Arcade’s Online Shop
HERE NOW!
Orwell's Roses Autographed by the author, Rebecca Solnit
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Cinderella Liberator Autographed by the author, Rebecca Solnit
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The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @Gough
San Francisco CA 94102
(415) 431-6800
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