Books

Since 1999, the annual literary festival, Litquake, has featured 11,500 authors and performers appearing before an audience total of 315,000. And in 2025, it’s gaining considerable steam in the East Bay. Numerous writers, poets, illustrators, playwrights and...

Elizabeth Rosner‘s new book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, is by no means a prescriptive, how-to, self-help book. But it could be. Focused on listening and hearing, the Berkeley-based writer remembers and...

EBM: Oddest library request you (or a colleague) received from a guest? BLAINE WENTWORTH (HE/THEY): One of the oddest requests was from a community member who wanted to hold their child's birthday party at the library. They hoped...

He’s part dog, part man, a champion of justice—and the canine hero of the Fremont Main Library’s most checked-out book.  Since the beginning of the year, readers have checked out Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea...

Setting out to resolve a puzzling question about why women over the age of 50 choose or are forced into lives of fear over flat-out fun and fulfillment, New York Times bestselling writer Caroline Paul uncovered the...

Way back in the day, before everyone was hunched over their phones on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), it was common to see people reading newspapers, magazines and—it’s true—books. In line with its message of carrying people not...

Roach has been decorated with awards—including a lifetime achievement award well before her span of years is over—and her books have been published in 21 languages. She has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. Roach was an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ Engineering Journalism Award, a category for which, as her website jokes, “let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant.”