Long before San Francisco became best known as a center of high finance and high tech, it cemented its reputation as an inspirational place of high culture and high art. Here are three very different books, all recommended by Kirkus Indie, that showcase the best that the city by the Bay has to offer:

In San Francisco Pilgrimage: Memoir of a Lifelong Love Affair With My City (2022), travel writer Tania Romanov offers a wide-ranging and personal survey of the city where she makes her home. During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the usually gregarious author says she “felt rudderless and lost.” Then she read her friend Phil Cousineau’s book The Art of Pilgrimage (1998), which inspired her to go on a voyage of her own: For seven days, she would “walk in San Francisco, my hometown, on a pilgrimage in search of my city and myself.” In these pages, she vividly describes her explorations and the memories they sparked. Among the places she visited were the Haight-Ashbury district, where she recalls the first time she entered the public library on Page Street, Lands End, where she gleefully rode her bike as a youth, Hunters Point, Diamond Heights, Pacific Heights, and many others. Along the way, she poignantly recounts her very early years at the San Sabba refugee camp in Trieste, Italy. The book is a remarkable tribute to San Francisco and, as our reviewer notes, an “eloquent and timely search for meaning.”

At one point, Romanov writes of walking through the city’s Chinatown, “wandering slowly, savoring the small side streets and the architecture.” That famous neighborhood is the focus of Richard Aston’s The Calligraphy of San Francisco Chinatown (2022), which offers a panoply of full-color photos of lavish Chinese writing on street signs, store displays, windows, banners, advertisements, and so on—everywhere that “characters may order…direct, inform, solicit…entice and invite.” The calligraphic art is often striking, and Aston thoughtfully explores the tradition’s rich history while employing a sharp visual sense: “These images captivate both for their aesthetic appeal and for the meaning and structure they bring to the everyday life of bustling Chinatown,” reads Kirkus’ review.

San Francisco, of course, has a deep literary legacy. It’s the home of City Lights Bookstore, with its connection to Beat Generation writers, and it’s the titular locale of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978) and its sequels. It’s also well known as the setting of Dashiell Hammett’s classic private-eye novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), and Peter Kageyama continues that venerable tradition with his latest whodunit, Midnight Climax (2024), set in the city in 1959. Detective Katsuhiro “Kats” Takemoto investigates the murder of sex worker Mai Su Han, which leads him to secret government experiments that call to mind the CIA’s illegal MKUltra program of drug testing. One of the people who helps Kats is none other than real-life novelist Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). “This tightly written novel will appeal to those who enjoy tales of Cold War–era intrigue, San Francisco history, and 20th-century Asian American cultural life,” writes our reviewer.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.