Spirits of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya

Spirits of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya

The bestselling book from two prizewinning, critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco-a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city-now in paperback.

In Spirits of San Francisco, #1 bestselling Cool Gray City of Love author Gary Kamiya joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya's illuminating narratives accompany Madonna's masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure.

Paul Madonna's atmospheric images will awe: his wide-angle drawings offer a new perspective on the "crookedest street in the world" and vistas across the city. And Kamiya's engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers striking vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of "Dumpville," the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump.

Handsome and irresistible-much like the city it chronicles-Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, which won the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and is widely regarded as one of the best books ever written about the city. At the San Francisco Chronicle, he publishes a popular history column. Kamiya has been a mainstay on the Bay Area literary scene for more than 30 years, as a co-founder of Salon.com and the former executive editor of San Francisco magazine. He currently resides in San Francisco. Paul Madonna is a well-known artist and novelist who has won numerous awards.

His popular series All Over Coffee ran for twelve years in the San Francisco Chronicle and was combined into two one-of-a-kind bestsellers, All Over Coffee and Everything is its Own Reward. Paul is the author of the Emit Hopper Mystery Series, and his distinct style of merging images and stories has been hailed as a groundbreaking new art form, acclaimed in galleries and museums throughout the world as well as in print.