Alta Online

4 days ago | altaonline.com | Rebecca Solnit

Is it possible to make peace with uncertainty? Rebecca Solnit hopes so, and she’s pleading with us to embrace it. In her latest bouquet of essays from Haymarket Books, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, the author elegantly argues that human yearning for assurance is what gets in the way of true progress. Belief in absolutes—whether those absolutes be optimism or an assurance that we’re doomed—is an obstacle to humanistic growth and community.

1 week ago | altaonline.com | Elizabeth Casillas |Maisie Hurwitz |John Birdsall

1WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? HOW WE SERVED A REVOLUTION, BY JOHN BIRDSALLW.W. Norton and CompanyCritic Birdsall’s most recent endeavor into food culture enlivens the history of dishes like quiche, potlucks, and rainbow icebox cake with narratives about the people who created them and the culture that they were liberating themselves from in the process.

1 week ago | altaonline.com | Elizabeth Casillas

AltaWith reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending May 25, 2025. California Book Club alumni are making waves this week. Rebecca Solnit’s new release, No Straight Road Takes You There, is a powerful new essay collection.

2 weeks ago | altaonline.com | Elizabeth Casillas

AltaWith reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending May 18, 2025. Use the long weekend to dive into some bestselling titles. Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, opens in Connecticut, where Grazina, an elderly widow, talks Hai, a stranger to her, down from a suicide attempt.

2 weeks ago | altaonline.com | Anita Felicelli

It’s been a grim, chaotic, and difficult year for many, and we’re not quite to the halfway mark. The weather has been strange, too, at least where I’m writing from in the Bay Area—warm and clear one moment and cloudy the next. The dogwoods are in bloom, and the all-too-brief lilac season is still underway in some places. But the elements are showing the first signs of summer—public school closures and nights of theater and music in the park are just around the corner.