The best-selling modern romance novelist — and former Oakland lawyer — has been praised by everyone from New York Times and Washington Post reviewers to Shondaland and Reese Witherspoon, via her Hello Sunshine book club.

Guillory, a Stanford University law school alum, was several years into her law career when  she realized something was missing in her life.  She decided to try writing and quickly fell in love with what was then simply a new hobby.

“I looked forward to working on my book every night,” she says. “I thought about it all the time.”

In 2015, Guillory submitted the first half of a draft for her first novel, “The Wedding Date,” to NaNoWriMo — the annual National Novel Writing Month project for aspiring authors. With their support in hand, a book deal soon followed. She published that novel and two more while still working full time at her law firm.

Flash forward, and Guillory is now a full-time author who has just published her eighth book, “Drunk on Love,” which offers an intoxicating romance set at a Black-owned Napa Valley winery. Specific locations may vary from book to book, but every Guillory novel has been set in California.

“I grew up here,” she says, “and I feel like so much of the media doesn’t reflect the California that I know and love, and that I’ve been a part of my whole life. We have such diverse communities, full of all different kinds of people. I started thinking about Napa Valley, and it all just clicked. It’s such a beautiful and unique location, but it’s also got this reputation about it. People often about talk it like a haven for rich people and tourists, but I wanted to think about what it would be like for the people who really live there and work there on a day to day basis.”

The novel follows the story of winery owner Margot Noble, who goes out for drinks one night with a friend. She meets a charmer named Luke, and after hitting it off with great conversation, has a fabulous one-night stand with the suitor … or so she thinks. Her world soon gets turned upside down when she goes in to work the next morning and meets the winery’s newest hire. Of course, it’s Luke.

The book offers up a fun and frothy story that poses a serious question: What’s most important, doing what you love or being with the person you love?

The romance genre appealed to Guillory from the start, she says, both because of the mix of stories you can tell and the stories she never saw told.

“Romance novels at their core are really about character, really thinking about who these people are and how they came to find one another,” she says. “Growing up, I didn’t see a lot of Black women represented in those stories. When I was little, most of the books I read about Black women were about the struggle. Obviously, there’s a place for those books, but I what I really love is seeing Black women get their happy ending.”

As she redefines what Black literature can be, she’s branching out, too. Her other projects include a “Southern Belle Insults” short story series with Keke Palmer, a “Black Love Matters” essay anthology, and a collaborative novel, “First Street,” about four recent law school graduates clerking for the Supreme Court.

“Literature in general has really been dominated by whiteness,” she says. “Over the past little while, publishing has started to be more diverse and pay more attention to communities of color, but these communities read all the time, and as those books sell more, publishing is opening its eyes.”

Guillory’s Book Recommendations

“Partners in Crime” by Alisha Rai: This whirlwind romance offers shady characters, sultry settings and a love story with a splash of danger.

“Counterfeit” by Kirstin Chen: Plotting meets Prada in this story of fashion, friendship and crime, centered on a pair of Asian American women who hatch a scheme to make it big selling counterfeit handbags.

“On the Rooftop” by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: This nostalgic novel tells the hopeful story of a struggling black family living in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood during the 1950s.

“Yerba Buena” by Nina LaCour: This lesbian romance is a beautiful story of two star-crossed women circling in the same orbit, but struggling to truly find one another.

“Bomb Shelter” by Mary Laura Philpott: Philpott’s powerful memoir recounts the experiences of a woman who lost her teenage son.

Weir’s latest sci-fi novel, “Project Hail Mary” (Ballantine Books, $29), is very much an apocalyptic story. It deals with an imminent climate disaster that threatens all of humanity. And if that sounds familiar, you’ve either been reading the news or you’ve stepped into a bookshop.

The past few years have seen an explosion of speculative fiction mirroring real-life emergencies, from the rise of fascism to environmental degradation to the toxic legacy of colonialism.

Why would authors want to dabble in apocalypse and dystopia, when the world is doom-filled as is? For Weir, a former Mountain View resident who lives in Chicago now, it boils down to the belief that society will eventually make things better.

“I’m a fairly optimistic person, at least when it comes to humanity. I think we’re a fairly cool species,” he says. “I think we can all agree that 2020 sucked, right? But I’d rather live through 2020 again than 1920. I don’t know about you, but none of my friends has died of typhoid fever. My Black friends can go into any business they want. I would rather live through the peak of the pandemic than the routine year of 1920 – although they had a pandemic just finishing up then, too.”

In “Project Hail Mary,” scientists notice that the sun is dimming at an alarming rate. The culprit is a weird space organism that imbibes the star’s energy in order to breed. Astronauts must venture forth and figure out what makes it tick. Fortunately, Weir has given his hero, Ryland Grace, some tools to battle Armageddon – he’s a former microbiologist from San Francisco, albeit a goofy one prone to making dad jokes. (Grace is partly based on the author himself; look for Ryan Gosling to play him in the movie version.)

The novel’s enemy is reminiscent of blue-green algae blooms, which are caused by pollution and warming waters and can extinguish life from vast marine zones. Weir wasn’t particularly inspired by such real-life concerns; he was more interested in structuring a book around a nifty, hypothetical space fuel. “I’m just a dork who for some reason gets to write about science stuff, and people like it,” he says. “For me, it’s just like, ‘Look at this cool science-y thing! Isn’t that cool? This is so cool.’”

Indeed, the novel has gotten the stamp of approval from science-y types the likes of Bill Gates who, in his typical expression of enthusiasm, dubbed it a “fun diversion.” Of course, not all speculative fiction offers such a romp. “The Confession of Copeland Cane” by Keenan Norris presents a near-future Oakland that’s a little too close to today’s urban dystopia.

“What I wanted to do is imagine forward some trend lines that are already present,” says Norris, who lives in San Leandro, “and think about their logical conclusions, particularly for those who are not so privileged, aren’t receiving the best education and who live in places with environmental harms.”

On his first birthday, the Black protagonist of “Confession” is automatically entered into California’s gang database. He spends time in the exclusive city-within-a-city known as Piedmont – sorry, “Piedmontagne” – which has its own private police force. After trying to sterilize black mold in his home with chemicals, he’s imprisoned for attempted arson and goes on the run. Tracking his movements is a powerful media corporation called the Sinclair Broadcast Group – whoops again, that’s “Soclear” – that was founded by Stephen Miller and signs off with “Sieg Heil.”

At one point, the hero falls into a sinkhole on Treasure Island and believes he’s irradiated. “It is left up to the reader to decide whether these are simply the maturations that a young man, given his circumstances, would go through,” says Norris, “or whether there’s something deeper related to the environment of Treasure Island, which both in the book and actual fact is a hazardous-waste site.”

“Confession” won the 2022 Northern California Book Award for fiction, putting it in a crowd of dystopian novels that have garnered critical acclaim this year — “Babel” by RF Kuang and “The City Inside” by Samit Basu among them. These works build upon a long literary tradition of imagining how much worse things could get. It’s a tradition some would argue dates back to the Bible or at least to Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” and George Orwell’s “1984.” So why the genre’s enduring popularity?

There’s evidence that dystopian content triggers something powerful in the human brain. In a study published in 2018, researchers exposed people to “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” two YA series that feature heroes who rebel against totalitarian regimes. Afterward, those people were “more likely to believe that radical and even violent political action against a government perceived as unjust would be justified,” says Calvert Jones, one of the authors at the University of Maryland.

Young people connected especially vigorously with dystopian narratives. “A strong attraction here may be a need for agency against powerful forces, which characters like Katniss in the ‘Hunger Games’ or Tris in the ‘Divergent’ series showed,” says Jones. “When people feel relatively helpless against forces beyond their control – wars, economic distress, natural disasters, for example – that feeling of efficacy can be very compelling.”

Charlie Jane Anders is a sci-fi author in San Francisco who’s won the Hugo, Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards. Her latest trilogy is geared directly at this demographic. It’s a space opera about exploring far reaches and fighting quasi-fascists. (It’s been picked up for TV by Amazon and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.) The middle book, 2022’s “Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak,” opens in the “Age of Despair,” something kids today can probably relate to.

“I think young people are painfully aware at this point we’re living in a slow-motion compound apocalypse in which climate change, the collapse of unsustainable systems and our political dysfunction are leading to problems that will eventually cause damage on a scale that’s hard to comprehend,” Anders says.

The series’ universe has many clever technologies you can imagine breaking into our own world. Because it’s an advanced space community, home to many LGBTQ characters, people use an automatic translator to ensure they use correct gender pronouns. There’s a popular game called “WorstBestFriend” that pits the player against a virtual frenemy who passive-aggressively bullies them – self-destructive fun at its best.

The bad guys are called the Compassion, cynical doublespeak that could have been torn from today’s political playbook. They believe in the innate superiority of humanoids with two arms and legs over, say, a species with tentacles or a head in a different place.

“They don’t just go around trying to motivate people on anger. They really play on fear and uncertainty and chaos,” says Anders. “I think for a story for kids and teens about saving the galaxy, it’s good to explore the fact that the adults around you don’t always know what they’re doing.”

Anders hopes her books might inspire action for a future not so far, far away.

“People who grew up on stories like ‘The Hunger Games,’ we’re starting to see them believe they can fight against unfair regimes in real life,” she says. “And I really hope that they do. I hope everyone who grew up reading those books – and that’s a lot of people – all become adults who want to tear down oppressive systems.”

“It’s hard to make a book and let it go, because you feel like it’s unfinished. Not this one,” the San Francisco-based author says of his 2017 novel. “It was a book that I loved writing that then, the reviewers loved. And I was like, ‘Done.’ And I was moving on to the next book.”

But a funny thing happened on his way to his next project.

“Nine months later, I win a Pulitzer Prize for (‘Less’),” Greer says. “I had not thought about the book. It was long gone.”

Winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was, of course, a game changer for Greer, whose previous novels were 2001’s “The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel,” 2004’s “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” 2008’s “The Story of a Marriage” and 2013’s “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.”

So, what did Greer do for a follow-up? Something he never expected: Giving the reading world more of “Less.”

“I was not going to write a sequel,” Greer says. “That was not in my mind, because ‘Less’ very definitely has an ending. It’s a complete book — I worked hard for that.

“But I kept sort of fiddling, just for fun, with the things I cut out of ‘Less’ or other fun ideas.”

The result is the just-published “Less Is Lost,” which finds the author expanding upon the storyline of protagonist Arthur Less.

“My agent told me not to write a sequel to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,” Greer says. “But if there is anything you get to do after you win a prize like that, it’s sort of write whatever you want and try to pretend no one is paying attention.”

Greer can pretend all he wants, but the fact is that “Less Is Lost” has created sizable buzz in the book world and earned some very favorable reviews.

“It’s a huge relief,” Greer says of the strong reviews. “You should have seen me the week before this published. I was just a nervous wreck, because I thought, ‘No one needs a sequel.’”

Then again, not every character is as fun to read about as Arthur Less, a San Francisco-based writer who many readers assume is based upon Greer himself. Indeed, they share many traits, but there are also important differences.

“I have a little better sense of humor than (Less) does,” Greer says.

The author certainly has “wait a sec, which one is which?” experience. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., with an identical twin brother.

“Our loved ones will say that we sound the same — the way we talk,” he says of being a twin. “Our ideas are very similar. We are both very geeky. He’s married to a woman. And I have a boyfriend. And that is the main difference.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, followed by an MFA from the  University of Montana, Greer moved to Seattle, where he scored a cool gig writing about video games for Nintendo.

“That was a dream job,” he says. “They would pay me to play the games.”

In the mid-‘90s, Greer relocated to San Francisco, where he wrote for Esquire, The New Yorker and other publications — and eventually released his debut novel, “The Path of Minor Planets,” in 2001.

More novels followed, but it was “Less” that made him famous. Oddly enough, the novel that ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was not the one Greer initially set out to write.

“It was (originally) a serious novel about a middle-aged gay man in San Francisco,” he remembers. “It was so mopey and pitiful — I could not stand to be near it. I just threw it all away — almost all of it — and started over.

“I was swimming in the bay one day, and I just thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ And I thought, ‘I could try making fun of him. I mean, it’s a disaster anyway — why not try that?’ I had never tried that before. And it was such great fun.”

Greer wrote much of the sequel, “Less Is Lost,” in Milan, where he has a second home with his Italian boyfriend. He moved there about three years ago – and yes, the pandemic lockdown made Italian life significantly less glamorous or sweepingly cinematic as one might have hoped.

“It was good for getting my writing done,” he says, “because I didn’t go to the cinema or opera. We did get a lot of gelato and pizza.”

Now that “Less Is Lost” is earning raves, might Arthur Less turn out to be Greer’s version of James Bond?

“That would be great fun,” he says. “I am actually not writing another one at the moment, to my agent’s great relief. But I bet I’ll write another one in the future.”

The books: Frantic to avoid both his upcoming 50th birthday and his ex’s impending nuptials, Arthur Less rushes off – often disastrously – to literary gigs halfway round the world in the original novel. The delightful sequel, “Less Is Lost” (Little, Brown and Company, $29), finds our hapless protagonist more settled but still grappling with various woes by – yes, of course, he’s hitting the road again, this time bouncing across the U.S. in a rusty camper dubbed Rosina.

What’s on Andrew Sean Greer’s bookshelves:

“Booth,” Karen Joy Fowler: “She’s a fantastic Santa Cruz writer, known for ‘The Jane Austen Book Club.’ Every book of hers is different and brilliant. This one is about John Wilkes Booth and the Booth family.”

“The Luminous Novel,” Mario Levrero: “It’s one of these gigantic 800-page books that’s just like someone going on and on in a hilarious way. It’s basically, he gets a Guggenheim grant, and he just obsesses over what he is going to do with it — for 800 pages. That’s either your thing, or it isn’t. I was totally charmed by it.”

“Acting Class,” Nick Drnaso: “It’s a sort of dark and fascinating graphic novel about this group of people who take this mysterious acting class and the way they transform in their imaginations. I found it really riveting. I’m not always a graphic novel reader. It was like some show on Netflix that no one else is talking about. Then you launch its first episodes, and you’re like, ‘That was amazing. Why is no one watching this?’ That’s how I felt.”

This trio of Bay Area bookstores may be just the spot for that.

Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts

That eye-catching name was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, which opens with the charming line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” No wonder, then, that this cozy Berkeley neighborhood bookstore lined with well-curated shelves offering fiction, poetry and children’s books, includes an expansive Garden Arts section of books that combine literature with lifestyle.

Founded by Marion Abbott and Ann Leyhe in 2004, the store was purchased by longtime customers Eric and Jessica Green in 2021. Eric spent years in sales for Publishers Group West — and he has ideas for what you should be reading on these cozy winter evenings.

Book recommendations from Mrs. Dalloway’s 

“The Marriage Portrait” by Maggie O’Farrell: “Set against the backdrop of Florence during the mid-16th century, this novels brings the world of Renaissance Italy and the House of Medici to life with a brilliant reimagining of the short and unhappy life of Lucrezia de’ Medici,” Eric says. “It’s a tragic story, but one beautifully rendered in a time and place known for its sumptuous art and power-hungry deceit.”

“The Philosophy of Modern Song” by Bob Dylan: “A master class on the art and craft of songwriting, this work by iconic musician Bob Dylan presents over 60 personal essays on a range of musical artists, from Stephen Foster and Elvis Costello to Hank Williams and Nina Simone. Dylan analyzes what he calls ‘the trap of easy rhymes,’ breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal.”

“Five Laterals and a Trombone” by Tyler Bridges: “The 85th Big Game between Cal and Stanford is still famous for the wackiest finish ever to a college football game, with 21 seconds that featured five laterals on the final kickoff and a sprint through the Stanford marching band for the winning touchdown. Journalist Tyler Bridges has reconstructed the pivotal moments and resulting lore of the game, offering a nostalgic play-by-play trip down memory lane, especially for Cal faithfuls.”

“The Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen: “A fabulously creative spin on the all-time children’s cult-classic, this is Billy Goats Gruff like he’s never been seen before. This risky read will have readers burning through pages with eager anticipation and anxious giddiness as they await the high-stakes meeting of beloved goat and hungry bridge troll. With arresting writing and mesmerizing illustrations, the book more than lives up to its legacy.”

“Inciting Joy” by Ross Gay: “In a collection of personal essays, author Ross Gay prompts readers to find joy in their daily experiences, the small moments in life and notably, the times when we care for others. Gay’s thoughtful, explorative reflections of his own experiences are the framework for his ideas on compassion, sharing and community. Written in a meandering, easily palatable conversational style, it’s a gorgeous and provocative must-read.”

Bookstore events

Mrs. Dalloway’s is known for its author events. Catch these authors in early 2023 for readings, book talks and signings:

7 p.m. Jan. 24: Peggy Orenstein, “Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater”

6 p.m. Feb. 9: Grace Lin and Kate Messner, “Once Upon a Book”

3 p.m. Feb. 26: Monica Wesolowska, “Elbert In the Air.”

Details: Open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays at 2904 College Ave. in Berkeley; mrsdalloways.com.

Kepler’s Books

Founded in 1955 by peace activist Roy Kepler, this famous Menlo Park bookstore has deep roots in the Bay Area literary scene, drawing everyone from Beat poets to Stanford students, the Grateful Dead and Joan Baez. In 2005, financial conditions saw Kepler’s teetering on the brink of insolvency, but the community wouldn’t let it go under. The outpouring of support allowed the shop to reopen. Today, it’s a hybrid business that includes a community-supported bookstore and a nonprofit events foundation.

Kepler’s buyer Aggie Zivaljevic has some thoughts about what you should be reading this winter.

Book recommendations from Kepler’s 

“Foster” by Claire Keegan: “Foster is a majestically beautiful tale set in rural Ireland, centered around the story of a young girl’s transformation within a loving home,” Zivaljevic says. “Written with purposeful economy and strict precision, Claire Keegan’s words remain chiseled in the minds and hearts of readers. Don’t miss this unforgettably spiritual story that reconciles the heartbreak of childhood with the power of kindness.”

“If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escoffery: “This novel-in-stories brilliantly captures the complicated life of a young man’s Jamaican heritage family as they go about their days in Miami, Florida. A fiercely authentic challenge to the typical immigration success story, the book surprises and arrests readers with its genuinely raw, exuberant voice of humor, warmth and compassion.”

“Rabbit Hutch” by Tess Gunty: “In this debut novel, author Tess Gunty masterfully channels the mystical powers of the novel’s young main heroine, Blandine Watkins, and her uncanny insights. Blandine’s otherworldly beauty and an astute awareness of other people’s struggles make for an unapologetically unforgettable character. Beautifully dark yet charmingly humorous, it’s impossible not to laugh through the tears of this cathartic fiction.”

“Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy: “There is nothing that is not offered by this breathtaking, nomadic book centered on the travels of a plane crash survivor. Within its pages, you’ll encounter a never-ending flood of forbidden love, profound sorrow, cosmic loneliness, tormented minds, dreadful futility, empty religion, scientific theory and lingering mystery.”

“Last White Man” by Mohsin Hamid: “This fablelike, thought-provoking story greets readers with a shocking premise: What if you woke up one day, and your skin had drastically changed tones? The book’s main character takes readers on a tour of love, loss and rediscovery as he deals with the fact that he is darker than he was the day before. A masterly examination of personal and societal metamorphosis, race and mortality, the sheer force of these pages is absolutely haunting.”

Bookstore events: 

Kepler’s “This Is Now with Angie Coiro” series features journalist Coiro in conversation with authors and luminaries. These ticketed events are typically held at 7 p.m.

Jan. 17: In Conversation with Pico Iyer, “The Half-Known Life”

March 8: In Conversation with Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Lucy Jane Bledsoe, “Tell The Rest”

Details: Open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and until 6 p.m. Sunday-Monday at 1010 El Camino Real, Suite 100 in Menlo Park; keplers.com.

Rakestraw Books

Founded in 1973, this charming Danville bookshop has a devoted Bay Area following, with book lovers from as far away as San Jose and Pleasant Hill detouring off Highway 680 for a browse. The bookshelves brim with books of all sorts, from biographies to children’s books, but what sets it apart is the store’s curated contemporary fiction collection, its profusion of live and virtual author events, and owner Michael Barnard’s impressive ability to not only pair reader and book, but remember a book lover’s favorites even years later.

Naturally, he has some thoughts about what you should read next.

Book recommendations from Rakestraw 

“Portrait of a Thief” by Grace D. Li: “This mind-bending crime novel centers on themes of colonization and reparation, following a Chinese-American college student who finds himself wrapped up in a museum heist,” Barnard says. “History is told by its conquerors, and the spoils of war often go with them. Artifacts are uprooted from their land and placed behind glass by those who looted them, but this straight-A student turned heist leader has a plan to steal them back and finally restore some justice to his heritage.”

“The Dog of the North” by Elizabeth McKenzie: “This smart, funny, heart-strong novel features Penny Rush, a woman leaving her Santa Cruz life behind — including her job and cheating husband — to go help her grandmother in Santa Barbara. There begins a madcap adventure, reminiscent of a Coen brothers movie, which includes a cast of quirky characters, each more eccentric than the next. But it’s Penny’s humor, outlook and compassion that’s the real heart of the story, and we root for her every step of the way.” (Publishes March 14)

“The White Lady” by Jacqueline Winspear: “This charming historical fiction tells the story of a former wartime operative and trained killer who is desperate to leave the past behind her. She hopes to live an unremarkable life in the quiet Kentish village of Shacklehurst, occupying a ‘grace and favor’ property granted to distinguished servants of the Crown. However, adventure soon comes calling, and she’s reluctantly dragged back into the world of deceit and violence she barely managed to escape the first time around.” (March 21)

“Unraveling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater” by Peggy Orenstein: “This humorous personal memoir begins with a woman who sets out to learn how to make a sweater from scratch, but her innocent interest soon blossoms into a journey of serious contemplation. She thought she was just picking up a hobby but winds up grappling with major modern issues, including climate anxiety, racial justice, women’s rights, the impact of technology, sustainability and ultimately, the meaning of home.” (Jan. 24)

“The Return of Faraz Ali” by Aamina Ahmad: “In this thrilling and enigmatic novel, a man is placed as head of the Mohalla police station in India and charged with the task of covering up the murder of a young call girl (while) hailing from Lahore’s notorious red-light district himself. This morally deplorable mission forces him to reckon with his past, uncovering not only the secrets of the city’s seedy labyrinth alleys, but those of his own hazy history as well.”

Bookstore events:

Rebecca Makkai, JoJo Moyes, Peggy Orenstein and Jacqueline Winspear are among the authors headed to Rakestraw in early 2023. This spring, Rakestraw Books will be celebrating its 50th anniversary with a season of special events, author appearances and parties. Look for details at rakestrawbooks.com.

Details: Open from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays at 3 Railroad Ave. in Danville.

The Bay Area is known internationally as a hub for these handmade, architectural artist books. In addition to the region’s long history of printmaking and its thriving academic book arts programs, we are home to CODEX, one of the world’s largest biennial exhibitions of artists’ books, fine press books and other handmade publications.

Each spring, book artists from Santa Cruz to Sebastopol and around the world gather at the  Craneway Pavilion in Richmond to display their work for the public. CODEX may appear like endless aisle upon aisle of exhibitor tables — a whopping 203 in 2022 — but once you stop, chat with a book artist and spend some time with their work, a whole world will open up.

We caught up with three Bay Area book artists who exhibited at the most recent CODEX to talk about their materials, inspiration and often fascinating processes. Here are their stories.

Bryan Kring, Oakland

Bugs. Warts. An all-seeing eye. East Bay book artist Bryan Kring starts with a simple object or idea and unleashes stories and pictures that are at once playful and profound, often with moving parts, windows and other surprises.

Kring, a printmaker and graphic designer, found his way to paper art-making via painting and drawing — he holds a BFA in both from the San Francisco Art Institute — and creative writing.

“I had a hard time parting with my paintings,” says Kring, who lives in Alameda and works in a studio in West Oakland, where he has been tinkering with laser-printed text for nearly 20 years. “With paper you don’t have that problem. You can always have multiples. And there is a certain intimacy that is created with the object when you can hold it in your hand.”

Darkly humorous stories about transformation are his specialty. “Peephole” is a Twilight Zone-like tale told from the vantage point of a door’s peephole, about how simple obsessions can have horrible consequences. In “Wart,” a 4- by 4-inch compressed booklet, Kring befriends a wart on his finger which turns into an eye, becomes his drinking buddy and then his mortal enemy. And battery-operated “Lunae Secutor” is about a fictional caterpillar, which upon realizing it can’t metamorphose into a butterfly, becomes depressed and seeks solace in the moon.

“I like giving personalities to everything,” says Kring, who hand-painted the box-like book’s fuzzy purple caterpillar. Turn a wooden handle, and the caterpillar walks toward a paper moon illuminated by a hidden LED light.

“Peephole” and “Wart” are among his best sellers — Kring’s book sell on Etsy for $10 and up. Along with “Bug,” which is as much about an internal change as it is “the natural desire to kill anything with six legs,” these books connect with people, he says.

Currently, he’s working on a series about a research scientist stranded in the Arctic Circle. By story’s end, he’ll discover his role in the universe and maybe the meaning of life. “Or he’s going to make peace with the fact that there is none,” Kring says. “By doing these books, I sort of answer these questions for myself, too.”

Paloma Lucas, San Francisco

Ever held a micro book in your hand? There is a whole society of book artists dedicated to making these teeny, 1½-inch books. Paloma Lucas of San Francisco is among them.

After a career in finance, the Spanish-born artist found her medium while taking a bookbinding class at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. She discovered micro books and miniature books — those can be a tad larger — not long after. The process for making these minute readers is tedious: Lucas wears magnifying glasses, uses a miniature book press and sews the little pages together by hand.

“I like it, because it’s something you can bring in your pocket and share with people,” she says. “It’s kind of sculptural.”

Her first microbook, “Goodnight Menopause,” is a parodic adaptation of the Margaret Wise Brown classic, “Goodnight Moon.” Instead of bidding goodnight to the moon and mittens, this narrator addresses a fan, a scale and “a little nip of wine.” The poem is by Barbara Younger; the illustrations and bookbinding are Lucas’ work.

“I try to find topics that make me happy and make me laugh,” she says.

Her larger pieces are playful, too. “Let’s Play Pool,” an experiment in triangular box making, is billiards in a box. Inside a green felt-lined triangular box that resembles a billiards rack, there are nine 2-inch mini books, each colored like billiard balls. Those accordion-style books are inscribed with facts about the game and can be read by turning the pages and rotating their sides. The project was inspired by Lucas’ memories of playing pool in Spain.

“Artist books represent a bridge back to the past when books were unique items cherished by their owners,” she says. “They also represent a connection to the future where common books are gradually phased out, and these unique creations again become cherished keepsakes.”

Nanette Wylde, Redwood City

Retired art professor and interdisciplinary artist Nanette Wylde always included artist books in her coursework — even for students in her digital media courses.

“People like to have something in their hands,” says Wylde, an educator for 26 years. “There’s so much screen, and it’s ephemeral. Digital doesn’t have the same richness as something that’s handbound.”

Wylde should know. The Redwood City book artist-writer has been combining the two into socially reflective pieces for 30 years. “Redacted Babar: ABC Free” is a meditation on the endangered populations of African and Asian elephants. The 13 landscape images in “From This Earth,” a collaboration with her husband and book artist Kent Manske, are photographs of a tree stump-like paper-pulp sculpture the duo created from local craft industry byproducts such as glass, flower petals, hair, denim, grape skins and oyster shells.

They conceived and created the project during the 2020 shelter-in-place, when wildfires were raging across California.

“It’s about a person moving through a decimated landscape to find a place that is livable again,” Wylde says. “You Are the Tree,” the 7 foot-diameter replica of an old growth, coast redwood stump, is on display at the glass-encased Redwood City Art Kiosk on Broadway.

And “Over It,” a relief-printed folder-like book, features 13 ways to help actualize one’s agency in turbulent times. Wylde created the book as a response to the political events following the 2016 election. It includes a button that says “create,” poems by Rumi and Rilke and reminders to read, eat healthy and make someone laugh.

“It’s something to help people remember how to take care of themselves,” says Wylde, whose artist books and electronic works are included in collections from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to the University of Oxford.

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary with a new edition, Wylde’s most successful artist book to date, “Gray Matter Gardening: How to Weed Your Mind,” is also a self-help. Letterpress printed on Kozo paper, which has fuzzy, weed-like embellishments, and handsewn with a French link stitch, the self-reflection how-to invites readers to create an environment conducive to weeding, determine what is and is not a weed, understand and remove the weeds and repeat as needed.

“I’m a gardener and I’m a thinker,” Wylde says. “The reason I make books is because books have made me who I am. I really appreciate the exploratory experience of them.”

Robinson later described that whale-boned corset with a mix of humor and horror: “Armored like a war tank, reaching from armpit nearly to knee, to be laced until your tonsils cracked. I had a 19-inch waist. Where did I put my insides?”

Robinson shed those restrictive garments after she escaped an oppressive marriage to a rich but puritanical Vermont widower. Returning to California in 1912 and forced by circumstances to support herself and her young son by mucking in a gold mine, she donned a loose skirt fashioned from tent canvas, a man’s flannel shirt, boots and sombrero.

After World War I, the newly divorced mom hunted for writing jobs at San Francisco newspapers, joining the throngs of other women on Market Street, who now moved freely in loose-fitting frocks and bobbed hair, “so swift, so sleek, so competent,” as she wrote in her 1934 memoir, “I Wanted Out!”

For biographers Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert, Robinson’s evolving fashion sense becomes a metaphor for her lifelong resistance to the restrictions placed on women in the first half of the 20th century. Breaking out against these restraints, the future 20th century icon forged a highly successful career as a fiction writer, children’s author, illustrator, poet, reporter and nationally syndicated columnist for William Randolph Hearst.

Beloved by generations of children for her “Aunt Elsie” children’s pages, which she began at the Oakland Tribune, Robinson became the highest-paid female writer in Hearst’s newspaper empire and America’s “most-read woman,” as the subtitle for “Listen, World!” attests. The book’s title comes from Robinson’s most influential column. Every day, 20 million Americans opened the paper to read what she had to say about current events and culture in her “Listen, World” column.

What’s startling is that Robinson’s groundbreaking legacy has largely been forgotten.

During an authors’ talk at the Oakland Public Library this fall, moderator Liam O’Donoghue, who hosts the East Bay Yesterday history podcast, said he’s familiar with most of the major figures in Oakland history but had never heard of Robinson. Scheeres and Gilbert say she fell prey to the forces that often relegate women’s lives to the bin of “lost history.”

Quoting at length from Robinson’s memoir and other writing in their book, they show that the syndicated columnist wasn’t just a beautiful, thoughtful writer about her own life. She also was ahead of the curve in addressing issues that still occupy us today: racism, antisemitism, the death penalty, labor rights and economic inequality.

More than anything, Robinson challenged her era’s views on women. Decades before Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists explored the drudgeries of domestic life and wrote frankly about sexuality, Robinson described her sexual curiosity as a teen girl  – once peering into a shack along Benicia’s wharf to see a prostitute servicing a client. She recounted her confusion about her wedding night and the terror of childbirth, when Victorian ladies were given next to no information about the mechanics of reproduction. Throughout her life, she encouraged women to seek personal fulfillment outside the traditional confines of marriage and motherhood.

She had the attention of 20 million Americans a day, yet no one ever collected her works into an official archive. Scheeres and Gilbert painstakingly built a paper trail by hunting through microfiche copies in libraries and the archives of prominent men she worked for, including Hearst.

That search began more than 10 years ago after Gilbert’s mother died. When Gilbert was going through her mother’s books, a typewritten copy of a breathtakingly honest poem about grief and loss fell out. It was attributed to a writer named Elsie Robinson. Curious, the New York-based Gilbert began looking for more information.

What Gilbert and Bay Area writer Scheeres discovered as they teamed up on the project was the story of a woman who seized on the promise of the California dream. Robinson’s parents were settlers, and her independent spirit was nurtured by the bohemian, frontier-town culture of Benicia and a working class family who valued education, including for their daughters.

Unfortunately, financial hard times made it impossible for her parents to send Robinson to UC Berkeley. At 17, she saw no future for herself unless she married. That’s when she crossed paths with Christie Cowell, a 27-year-old widower visiting from Vermont. Like Jane Eyre, Robinson fell for this sad, handsome man, writing, “Sickly and a widower: Was there ever a girl who didn’t adore tragedy?”

But in Vermont, neither Crowell nor his parents warmed to Robinson’s “uncouth” California ways, and they made her life as a young wife miserable. As much as Robinson later downplayed “the maternal instinct,” she found a purpose when she gave birth in 1907. She adored her blond-haired boy, George. It was for him that she first took up a pen to write and illustrate stories, though she also wanted, she said, “to understand people, to grasp life, to make some ordered pattern out of all this seeming waste and confusion.”

George gave Robinson another reason to leave her marriage: He was diagnosed with severe, debilitating asthma, and she wanted to raise him in California’s warmer climate. But she fled at a time when only one percent of marriages ended in divorce, thereby “taking ownership of her life in a way that few women of the era dared to contemplate,” Scheeres and Gilbert wrote.

Robinson and George were accompanied to the West by Robert Wallace, a darkly handsome writer and former mental patient, for whom she illustrated some children’s books. They likely were lovers, according to Scheeres and Gilbert, although Robinson never copped to it, probably because she feared losing her son if her husband proved adultery.

The three ended up in Hornitos, a once-thriving mining town in the dry, rolling foothills west of Yosemite National Park. Wallace hoped to strike gold and become rich. That never happened, and at some point, he evaporated from Robinson’s life. Left alone to support George, she went to work in a mine, taking up dangerous and backbreaking work that was usually reserved for men.

But the labor and the company of cowboys, gamblers, miners, hobos and others “who traveled fast and light,” was liberating for the writer. At the end of each day, after putting George to bed, she wrote stories by candlelight, using an old typewriter borrowed from a friend, the town’s Black postmistress. Robinson’s stories, which she sold to national magazines, featured free-spirited protagonists, like the socialite who debated whether to tell her new rancher husband she wasn’t a virgin.

When the Hornitos mine closed at the end of World War I, freelancing couldn’t offer Robinson a steady income. Facing starvation, she returned to the Bay Area in the fall of 1918 to find work. After San Francisco’s three main newspapers turned her down, she took the ferry across to Oakland, where she walked into the newsroom of the Oakland Tribune to pitch her services. The editor saw something he liked and offered her $12 a week to write a children’s column.

“I had my first newspaper job!” she proclaimed. “I would not have to go on the streets. And my boy and I could eat!”

Robinson’s column became popular so swiftly, the Tribune soon expanded it into an eight-page section called Aunt Elsie’s Magazine. The magazine soon spawned “Aunt Elsie” clubs in 65 California towns whose members held parades and competed to publish their stories and illustrations in the paper.

Aunt Elsie is the only part of Robinson’s legacy that endured past her 1956 death, when her column was continued by another writer. And Aunt Elsie is still remembered fondly in some quarters today. At the Oakland library event, 76-year-old Diana Sychr stood up to say she grew up reading Aunt Elsie’s columns in the 1950s and delighted in once getting a letter back from the author.

But from that start with the Oakland Tribune, Robinson branched out into homemaking and relationship columns, and became a national figure when she launched “Listen, World!” in 1921. Soon, an editor at San Francisco’s Call and Post, a Hearst paper, lured her away, paying her $95 a week. A year later, Arthur Brisbane, the legendary editor of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, vastly upped her salary to write for him – her $20,000 a year salary would be equivalent to $350,000 a year in today’s dollars.

But just as Robinson reached the pinnacle of success, George, then a 21-year-old student at Sacramento Junior College, died during an influenza epidemic. Elsie wrote about the “heart-breaking sorrow — fresh-rending pain” in losing her only child and “loneliness beyond all measure of imagining.”

Yet, she kept writing. Through the Depression, Hearst sent her to cover major national news stories, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and she scripted a popular NBC radio show that depicted fictional couples looking to save their marriages. After securing permission from her editor to work remotely, she wrote from a cabin she bought outside Sonora. She also penned her memoir, which was critically acclaimed by major U.S. newspapers for its frankness and courage and serialized by Cosmopolitan magazine.

“She turned to narrative storytelling as a grief-stricken 46-year-old columnist for the same reason she turned to it as a lonely, 26-year-old wife: ‘To save my life,’” Scheeres and Gilbert wrote.

Robinson concluded her memoir by writing: “Was there ever an adventurer really born ‘brave?’ Was there ever an adventure that was not bought at the price of fear and agony? Are not the bravest also the terrified? I know it was so with me.”

BOOK TALK

“Listen, World!” co-author Julia Scheeres will read from the book and talk about Elsie Robinson’s life and legacy with Bay Area News Group writer Martha Ross at 4 p.m. Jan. 21 at the Book Passage in Corte Madera; www.bookpassage.com/corte-madera-events.

The age-old practice of gathering together to discuss literature, often over a beverage and some tasty snacks, is taking off as people recovering from the isolation of pandemic quarantines seek out human connection. But these aren’t your grandma’s book clubs. Bay Area readers are meeting at local breweries, discussing books in their living rooms via Zoom and debating plots and character development on Instagram, TikTok and book club apps. There are silent book clubs, where people meet up to read quietly together, and musical ones, where musicians perform pieces inspired by the same book. And there are clubs dedicated to nearly every niche interest you can imagine, from bicycling to Taylor Swift.

“A few years ago, if you talked about book clubs, you’d think about elderly women getting together and drinking tea,” said Oakland librarian Erin Sanders, who co-hosts the library’s “We Bike” book club, where readers meet online to discuss cycling memoirs and books about urban planning. “But it definitely has more cachet with younger readers, I think.”

Searches for book clubs on Meetup.com, the global event platform, have skyrocketed in the past few years — jumping from 465 in 2019 to 1.7 million this year, according to the company. In the Bay Area, there are 65 active book groups on the platform.

“Book club popularity is definitely growing,” said Anna Ford, co-founder of Bookclubs.com. “I think COVID … and the fact that we all have learned to live virtually and do more things online is fueling some of that growth. But I think the bigger thing is that COVID isolated a lot of us, and people are looking for authentic, meaningful connections.”

Ford launched her platform in 2019 as a tool to help people manage their book clubs. As the host of a large book club herself, she found herself drowning in emails from members asking what they were reading or when the next meeting was scheduled. Bookclubs.com, which is free, lets clubs manage their reading and membership lists, poll people on what to read next, add meetings to members’ calendars and post questions and discussions on a message board. There are more than 300 Bay Area clubs on the platform and 25,000 world-wide.

Demand for the service spiked during the pandemic — they now have more than 10 times as many clubs as they did pre-COVID.

And while book club members generally share a love of reading, many aren’t really doing it for the literary discussions. More than a quarter of Bookclubs.com users say they joined a club primarily to meet people and socialize, Ford said. Among younger users — ages 18 to 34 — that number jumps to more than half.

Jabril Rollins can relate. The 32-year-old moved to Oakland from Los Angeles in the middle of the pandemic, while everything was shut down, and was at a loss for how to make friends. So he logged onto Meetup.com and started “Books and Brew,” with the idea that people could join him at a different East Bay brewery each month to talk about a book.

“Really, this book club is just a way to trick people into coming to hang out with me,” Rollins said.

And it worked. Now, about 20 people come to each meeting, and some of the members have turned into friends. They even started a second off-shoot club where they read the entire Harry Potter series.

It’s the same with Giovanna Baldassarre’s San Jose-based book club, which has been meeting every six weeks for the last 15 years.

“We have developed a friendship and camaraderie that is hard to describe,” she said in an email.

In other book clubs, the point isn’t to socialize. Adobe Books, a used book store in San Francisco, hosts one of the Bay Area’s several “silent book clubs.” People meet there once a month, briefly introduce themselves and share the book they’re reading, and then shut up and read in each other’s company.

“It’s nice to just be around people without having to interact with them so much,” said Prasant Nukalapati, who runs the club. “Not everyone is so extroverted.”

Nukalapati started the club to encourage people to get together in-person. He also runs a more traditional book club, but it moved online during the pandemic and stayed there — leaving him hungry to see people in real life. Online meetings can get weird, he said, especially when new people join and don’t turn on their cameras or don’t read the book.

Oakland’s Bushwick Book Club is the polar opposite of a silent book club. The organizers pick a book and invite musicians to read it and then write and perform a piece inspired by the reading. November’s book was Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” as a belated celebration of Banned Books Week.

“It makes it really enjoyable to be part of the event, because you never know what someone else is going to have taken away from that book,” said organizer Claire Calderon. “The musical conversation that comes out of it is so rich and so varied.”

Book clubs have become so popular that several apps, websites and subscription services have popped up in recent years with the sole purpose of helping people talk about what they’re reading. When Padmasree Warrior launched the Fable app two and a half years ago, she was hoping to promote reading as a way to ease anxiety, stress and loneliness.

“People are looking for fun solutions to take care of themselves. Meditation is hard,” said Palo Alto-based Warrior. “Reading is a lot easier.”

The app provides curated book recommendations and a range of virtual book clubs hosted by regular people, social media influencers and celebrities. Sean Astin, who played Samwise Gamgee in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, hosts a club — they’re reading J.R.R. Tolkien. The “Bookish Swifties” club reads books that relate to Taylor Swift songs. The app’s largest club — dedicated to “spicy romance” books — has 17,000 members.

“They completely wiped us out super quickly, and that book was out of stock for months,” said Grant Kerber, publicity and marketing manager.

But the upside is, essentially the whole world is now a book club.

“Books are getting cool again,” Rollins said. “With TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, they have BookTok and BookTube and Bookstagram. It’s easy to learn about books, and you just see them everywhere. And it’s easier to read more.”

Little Free Libraries have sprung up across the Bay Area in recent years in curbside boxes that are as unique as their stewards, from a Victorian steampunk-style version in San Jose to a midcentury mod in Pinole. They’re not outliers, either. The nonprofit that promotes these little book-filled houses has registered more than 150,000 throughout the world.

The idea began in 2009, when Todd H. Bol erected a book-sharing box outside his home in Hudson, Wisconsin. Word spread. Soon, other book lovers began making their own curbside libraries. By 2012, the Little Free Library had incorporated as a nonprofit to promote and inspire neighborhood book exchanges.

The goal is simple: Encourage literacy and the joy of reading by providing free access to books of all kinds. Stewards of the curbside libraries implore their visitors to take a book and to leave one, too. You can keep a book for as long as you like, then pass it along to a friend, return it to the library or replace it with a different one. No one is standing guard or levying late fines.

The Bay Area has hundreds of Little Free Libraries scattered through neighborhoods in every city. You can find a Little Free Library — or the inspiration to create one yourself — via littlefreelibrary.org. Meanwhile, let us introduce you to some of the stewards in Bay Area neighborhoods.

The Victorian steampunk library

Michael and Lori Tierney, 368 N. 64th St., San Jose

Established: 2014

Michael and Lori are both chemists, although Michael is semi-retired. Their Little Free Library, built by Michael with a nod to steampunk and San Jose’s Hensley Historic District, was one of the first 2,000 libraries registered. It’s officially No. 1,878.

“My wife and I both love libraries and books,” Michael says, “and we thought it would be a neat thing to do.”

The couple put stickers in each book that passes through the library, and have so far seen more than 7,000 books come and go.

A few years ago, the library was vandalized — twice — and Michael considered taking it down. When neighbors heard, they rallied behind the little library, encouraging him to continue it and donating money for repairs and books to restock. Michael needed no other convincing.

What’s in the library: At the moment, options include “Hey Ranger 2: More True Tales of Humor & Misadventure from the Great Outdoors” by Jim Burnett, “Red Storm Rising” by Tom Clancy and “CMOS VLSI Design” by M.S. Suma.

A cottage of books

Gillianna Diaz, 430 Boulder Drive, Antioch

Established: 2020

Gillianna’s Blessing Library, contained in a cottage-style box, is the work of 13-year-old Gillianna Diaz, a seventh grader at Antioch’s Holy Rosary Catholic school. Gillianna has always wanted to help others in her community. When she learned about the Little Free Libraries, she told her mother she wanted to open one.

To raise funds for the library, Gillianna used the money she’d earned doing chores to buy chocolates that she sold outside her house, lemonade stand-style. When word got out about what she was trying to do, people from all over Antioch began contributing. She raised $500 in three days.

Sticks and Stones Creations, a local company that does custom carpentry, offered to make Gillianna’s library box on two conditions: that she help build it and that she donate the money she would have paid for the box to charity. No problem. Gillianna enjoyed learning how to build the box. Already a volunteer for Hijas Del Campo, a group that assists migrant farm workers, she used the money to purchase Christmas baskets for the workers and their families.

Although Gillianna has struggled with her own reading, she recognizes the importance of books and literacy, says her proud mother, Nereida Sarat.

What’s in the library: “Dune” by Frank Herbert, “A Feast for Crows” by George R.R. Martin, “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville

The Miniature House

Rynn Liana Boyden, 263 Sullivan Court, Pleasanton

Established: February 2022

When COVID shut down communities, many people found themselves with a lot of free time. Rynn, a barista who attends Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, began taking walks around their neighborhood, which boasts several Little Free Libraries.

An avid reader, Rynn decided to open their own library. Embarking on a little research beforehand, Rynn checked out all the libraries they could find, taking note of the style of the box, the colors used and the selection of books inside. They borrowed a book from each library to include in theirs, then purchased a custom-made box from Etsy, painting and decorating it to match their own suburban home.

The library is stocked with Rynn’s own favorite books and those they purchased thrifting.

“Reading is very important for our community. I love doing it,” Rynn says. “I think (this) is also a good place for people to donate books and to share what they read.”

What’s in the library: “Richard Scarry’s Best Storybook Ever” by Richard Scarry, “A Light in the Attic” by Shel Silverstein, “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins

The Midcentury Modern Library

Nicole Botha, 960 Barkley Court, Pinole

Established: 2020

Nicole was still a newcomer to Pinole when she came across her first Little Free Library. She thought it was not only a great idea in general, but a good way to get to know her neighbors and become part of the community.

“I’ve lived in areas where I never got to know my neighbors,” she says. The Little Free Library “has been a bright spot for the community.”

Nicole and her husband built the library box themselves, giving it a midcentury modern feel, and keep it well stocked with help from random donations, including boxes of books left alongside the library.

What’s in the library: “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff: Stories of Tough Times and Lessons Learned” by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, “A Time for Mercy” by John Grisham; “Port Mortuary” by Patricia Cornwell

The Eagle Project

Brian Coons, 557 Kahrs Ave., Pleasant Hill

Established: 2018

The Little Free Library outside Pleasant Hill’s Episcopal Church of the Resurrection is one of the larger libraries in the area, with six shelves packed with a variety of books. The library box was an Eagle Scout project done by then College Park High student Brian, who did all the planning, fundraising, construction and initial stocking of the library.

Now that Brian is at UC Davis, his dad, Richard Coons, has taken over stewardship of the library. He says it is organic and pretty much takes care of itself. People take books and drop off books. The shelves always are filled, and Richard just keeps an eye on it to make sure nothing is amiss.

What’s in the library: “Treasure Island” by Robert Lewis Stevenson, “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, “Dancing in the Light” by Shirley MacLaine

Little Free Libraries by the numbers

Some 250 million books have been shared through registered Little Free Libraries, profoundly increasing book access for readers of all ages and backgrounds.

More than 1,500 Little Free Libraries have been opened at no cost in communities where they are needed most, through the organization’s Impact Library Program.

Eleven cities have adopted the Read in Color initiative, which has distributed more than 30,000 diverse books celebrating BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized voices, and other communities have joined the Native American initiative to provide books on reservations.

Worldwide, 115 countries have joined the Little Free Library network.

Bay Area authors of color, led by Oakland’s Leila Mottley, whose powerful first novel is being translated into 15 languages, made splashy debuts we’re still talking about. Here are four Bay Area authors to watch.

Leila Mottley, “Nightcrawling”

“Nightcrawling,” Leila Mottley’s book about a Black girl in East Oakland who gets caught in a storm of poverty, sex trafficking and corrupt cops, blew the literary world away when it came out in June.

Dave Eggers called it “an electrifying debut.” Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, making it an instant best-seller. And the book was long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, making Mottley the youngest author ever to receive that honor.

Making Oprah’s Book Club “was the shock of a lifetime,” says the 20-year-old Oakland native. “It took months for the reality to set in.”

Despite the media frenzy, which included appearances on late night talk shows with Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers, the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate remains grounded in the day-to-day of her “real life.” Most young adults her age are working or going to college. She writes.

“It’s really not different than any other passion or pursuit,” she says.

Before becoming a famous novelist, Mottley worked as a preschool substitute teacher. After graduating from high school, she spent the summer of 2019 writing “Nightcrawling.” Following a 13-way bidding war, the book was sold at auction to Knopf. Mottley was 18, midway through her second semester at Smith College, when she inked the deal.

The book follows Kiara, a 17-year-old high school dropout who falls into sex work while struggling to pay rising rent for herself and her older brother, who clings to visions of rap stardom. Their father is dead; their mother, absent.

The book is inspired by Mottley’s research into police sexual violence, including a 2015 high-profile sex abuse case, in which members of the Oakland Police Department were charged with sexually exploiting a minor. Mottley was 13 when the case broke and remembers how the coverage was focused on the officers and not on the implications for the young girl.

“I wanted the story to touch on vulnerability within Black girlhood and link that closely to what it means to be harmed by those who are supposed to protect us,” she says.

“Nightcrawling” will be released in paperback this spring. Mottley is currently working on her second novel and will be publishing her first collection of poetry, also from Knopf, in the next year.

Jane Kuo, “In The Beautiful Country”

In San Carlos author Jane Kuo’s novel, “In the Beautiful Country,” (Quill Tree, $17), a lyrical, moving debut written in verse about family, struggle and belonging, the narrator is a 10-year-old Taiwanese immigrant named Anna. And she’s experiencing a beautiful country — the Chinese name for America — that is difficult, to say the least, and nothing like she dreamed.

“I experienced a lot of the stuff she experienced in school,” says Kuo, who immigrated with her parents to northeastern Los Angeles in 1979. “I was subjected to racist taunts, bullied for wearing highwater pants and teased for my lunch.”

The book, which came out in June, mirrors parts of Kuo’s life. Anna lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her parents and spends her days after school helping out at the flailing fast-food restaurant they poured their savings into. The novel is set in the small town of Duarte in Los Angeles County, where Kuo’s own family settled. Like them, Anna’s family endures overt racism, vandalism and feelings of alienation within their own Asian-American community.

A career nurse, Kuo started writing the middle grade novel in 2016 at the height of the deep racial tensions that surfaced during the presidential election.

“As an Asian-American, I remember asking myself, ‘Do I feel welcome here?’” Kuo says. “From a cultural context, the book is really a family story with a lot of nostalgia.”

A fan of adult memoirs, Kuo didn’t set out to write a middle grade novel in verse. But once she found Anna’s voice — vulnerable, insightful and courageous — the 20,000 words flowed seamlessly from one poetic chapter to the next.

At times heartbreaking and desperate — “I’d like to have friends/but I’ll settle/for being left alone” — the book is ultimately about hope and finding advocates, such as Terry, a grocery store clerk who embraces the family. It’s about making a home.

“There really was a Terry and (her husband) Don, and they really did take me to Disneyland,” she says. “What motivated these people to be so kind to us?”

Find out this summer, when Kuo’s follow-up, “Land of Broken Promises,” is released. It takes place a year later, when a more confident and stable Anna heads to sixth grade.

Joanna Ho, “The Silence that Binds Us”

Palo Alto’s Joanna Ho has always been driven by a passion for equity and representation.

The Taiwanese-Chinese American writer spent years in education, first as an English teacher and later as vice principal of East Palo Alto Academy, a high school where 85 percent of the students are Latinx. She’s developed holistic, alternative-to-prison programs that fuse education with residential living. Even her journey as a children’s book author started from a place of inclusivity.

“I was looking for holiday books with diverse characters for my newborn and couldn’t find anything, so I decided to write one,” recalls Ho, the author of three children’s books, including the New York Times best-selling “Eyes That Kiss in the Corners,” a tender story about self-acceptance. “I believe all kids need to see themselves and others in books.”

So it’s no surprise that Ho’s debut young adult novel is a poignant call to action. Released in June, “The Silence That Binds Us” (Harper Teen, $18) is about a grief-stricken Asian-American teen named May who loses her Princeton-accepted brother to suicide. In the aftermath, she contends with racist accusations hurled against her parents for “putting too much pressure” on him.

“The Silence That Binds Us” was inspired by Ho’s experiences as an educator and her research into the high rate of suicide amid Palo Alto teens, as well as interactions in the community, once at a dinner party of predominantly white guests and another time in a ride-sharing car. Both times, people said the same thing: that because Asian families put too much pressure on their kids, it makes it too difficult for other students to compete.

“I’m literally so invisible, people don’t see me as they’re saying these things,” she says. “The book is timely in the public perspective, but the racism and invisibility is something Asian Americans have been dealing with for a long time.”

Ho is hopeful that change is possible. She is inspired by the “insightful, hopeful, observant” youth around her, similar to May, who goes against her parents’ advice to “keep her head down” amid the hate and instead publishes her opinions about these stereotypes and ultimately mobilizes support and solidarity against the racist accusations.

“She takes back the narrative, and that’s very powerful,” she says.

Ho, who is now a librarian at East Palo Alto Academy, has nine books coming out in the next three years, including her first middle-grade novel and “One Day,” a picture book about a mother’s hope of positive masculinity for her baby boy. “One Day” is due out in March.

Lio Min, “Beating Heart Baby”

In the young adult novel, “Beating Heart Baby” (Flatiron Books, $18), Oakland music journalist and author Lio Min cleverly weaves the worlds of anime and music into a coming-of-age story about queer teen love.

The novel, Min’s first, centers around two Los Angeles boys who find a sense of belonging in their high school marching band. There’s Santi, the artist and new kid who is navigating a world without his internet best friend. And Suwa, the prickly prodigy who is trans and working through a tumultuous relationship with his dad.

Both Asian boys are trying to find themselves when they find each other, and it is a shared history they didn’t know they had that provides the biggest, sweetest reward for readers of this lush, page-turning debut. Along the way, the novel explores issues of grief, abandonment and emotional abuse with hope and tenderness.

Its early seeds go back to a summer Min spent working as a camp counselor in Oakland and the illuminating interactions they had with kids as young as 5. Min, who identifies as trans and uses the pronouns they/them, says they wrote the book for all youth, not just those living in marginalized identities.

“I want all kids to live in a world that is a little more tender and accepting than the one we live in right now,” they say. “You can only push yourself to the future, if you can imagine there is a place for you in there.”

In the novel, which is set up as an album, with track numbers as chapters with an A-side and a B-side, Santi and Suwa find their places among the Sunshower marching band community, which, like the entire book, is filled with a diverse cast. There are trans, biracial and pansexual characters as well as Black female role models, like Santi’s loving guardian, Aya.

Min developed the characters and overall book as a novelization of shōnen anime — their second love, after music — but with an element of inclusivity that they felt has long been missing from the genre, which is marketed to adolescent males.

“Even fans of the shows will agree that girls are often ancillary to the story, their interiority is narrow and they’re not treated as well as the boys,” Min says. “I wanted to build an anime from the ground up and do it in a way that was correct to someone like me.”

Berkeley resident and New York Times best-selling author Peggy Orenstein turned to knitting, grabbing not only needles but a sheep named Martha and electric shearing clippers, tools used to scour raw fleece into cloud-like fluffs, a castle-style ladybug spindle to spin fleece into yarn and mordant leaves, flowers, bugs, bark, mushrooms and countless tubs of water used to dye the yarn.

Along the journey of crafting the materials and designs that eventually became a hand-knit sweater, Orenstein discovered knitting’s larger implications. Woven into the process were realizations about the loss of her mother in 2016, her 94-year-old father’s deepening dementia and the imminent departure of her daughter to college. Other realizations concerned her husband’s upcoming retirement; longstanding denigration and dismissal of “women’s work” throughout history; the dangers of California wildfires; fast fashion’s impact on the environment; her own body dysmorphia and issues around aging; and contemporary society’s disdain for the elderly.

As life slogged along and the sweater was completed, Orenstein continued writing. The result is her new memoir, “Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater” (peggyorenstein.com/unraveling).

Orenstein is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and has written for Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic and New Yorker magazines, among others. She has offered expert commentary on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “The PBS News Hour,” often addressing topics relating to sex, feminism and families. Her award-winning books include “Boys & Sex,” “Girls & Sex,” “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” “Waiting for Daisy,” and others.

In an interview, Orenstein said society in general undervalues knitting; dismissing it as an activity performed only by “a bunch of little old ladies.” While researching the assumptions of who knits and why, her innate, voracious curiosity took off.

She found herself delving into unexpected territory: misconceptions about sheep (they’re highly intelligent and can recognize and remember more than 50 human faces, for example); the immense waste of fast fashion (5,787 pounds of discarded textiles are dumped or burned every second); the organic fleece she wore with pride to a farmers’ market actually shed tiny plastic filaments all over the organic produce (every time it was washed, up to 250,000 threads were rinsed down the drain and into waterways and oceans); and the precise physicality involved in shearing sheep that follows a syllabus of nine positions and 48 cuts or “blows.”

“I was jolted,” she said, about the enormity of the lessons learned. She came to believe that because sheep huddle together or run away when approached, “they get a bad rap.” She noticed she and most people in her circle scrupulously monitor the food they put in their bodies — organic, grown regeneratively, mindful of climate impact — but rarely think about the origins or impact of the clothing bought and worn.

“The amount of clothing people buy and what it’s made of has created a global environmental catastrophe. When I looked at the scope of the global fashion industry, I hit this place where I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my, god. I recycle, I’m composting, drive a Prius, don’t flush when it’s only pee, have solar power, but dang, I just want to buy a pair of pants.’ It’s so overwhelming. You have to take a deep breath and figure it’s better to know. We have to try to buy from places and people whose values align with ours when we can.”

Orenstein said learning wasn’t always grim or anxiety-producing, and her memoir isn’t a recipe book for guilt. She said finding humor or poking fun at herself as she writes helps her — and readers — be brave and get through life’s greatest challenges.

“Humor makes a book entertaining and allows difficult things to land,” Orenstein said.

Among the exhilarating parts of the book are her confidence and pride after imperfectly shearing three sheep and her obvious delight in the science behind color — highly valued nonchemical purple dye once came only from a mucus secreted by the anus of a specific sea snail; bugs make red colors have pop, blue is an optical illusion and has an intriguing history.

“I see the world differently now. Using natural dye makes me go through the world with psychedelic vision. Everything pulsates. I think about redwood buds that turn water Kool-Aid-red, mushrooms that make incredible colors. It’s a slightly witchy thing … like I have a cauldron with marigolds, dahlias, and those yellow flowers that grow everywhere in the Bay Area and make a great neon yellow.”

Most poignant are revelations about her parents. Orenstein admits her relationships with her mother and father, for different reasons, were sometimes difficult. Knitting was an activity she learned from her mother and something they could do together without conflict, but her deep love for her mother gets tangled with lingering body dysmorphia from comparisons her mother would make and frequent encouragement to go on weight-reduction diets. Reduced to FaceTime visits with her father during the pandemic, she found a certain peace with his dwindling mental state.

“He died in August last year. He left with sweetness and was such a little boy when he died,” she said. “I was able to give him unconditional  love I couldn’t give him when he was more himself. That is so precious to me.”

Unraveling also offers a surprisingly rich sweep through textile history and the vital role women have played in commerce, industrial revolutions, labor relations and unions, the military, global security and more. Orenstein insists that knitting is partly political.

“That’s why I put in the parts about Greek mythology and about Sojourner Truth, who in photographs always had yarn and needles in her lap. She was signaling a woman feminist, self-sufficiency and not making things for forced labor but for your own use or sale. It was competence, confidence, agency — and wise.”

Ultimately, Orenstein returns to knitting’s transformative aspect.

“Knitting causes me to love process over product. It turns the vector of anxiety into a tactile, useful statement of love, especially when you give a garment you’ve made to someone else.”

Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Contact her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.