653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood

1-415-586-3733
[email protected]

Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six

 

Live Streams every weekend!

Refresh your browser to catch a show in progress!
Visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel!
But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!

Black Mountain College
a talk by Walker Brents III

Sunday, September 30 – 2:30 pm In the hills of North Carolina from the 1930s into the 1950s, a unique succession of intellectual and artistic developments occurred in the rather ramshackle environment of Black Mountain College, as if it were a sort of farm tended by a succession of agronomists, field hands and dabblers. Some,…

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New on the shelves this weekend

Hotly anticipated new books on the shelves at Bird & Beckett include novels by Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue), T.C. Boyle (San Miguel), Zadie Smith (NW), Irvine Welsh (Skagboys); short stories by Junot Diaz (This is How You Lose Her); nonfiction by Salman Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir), David Byrne (How Music Works), the late Christopher…

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Birds of a Feather
Writers read their work

Sunday, September 23rd — 2:00 p.m. PAWA (Philippine American Writers & Artists) co-presents with Bird & Beckett “Birds of a Feather” — a reading featuring Bay Area writers Rabih Alameddine, Laura Goode and Barbara Jane Reyes. RABIH ALAMEDDINE is the author of three novels, The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and Koolaids, as well as The…

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New Monsters
Jazz live in the store

Sunday, September 23rd – 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. which way west? Sunday concert series. no cover – but your donations are crucial to help us pay the musicians. What to make of this booking?  Bird & Beckett invites you to come down to the shop and find out this Sunday.  Call it jazz, but bargain…

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Between Heaven and Here
by Susan Straight

What I’m reading now… an occasional post by the proprietor… Susan Straight has long been on the short list of English-language fiction writers dear to my heart– along with Michael Ondaatje, Jayne Anne Phillips, Breece D’J Pancake, Denis Johnson– admittedly, the writers I stumbled on back in the 1980s and ’90s, mostly from browsing the…

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David Solbach Trio

Sunday, September 16 – 4:30-6:30 p.m. “which way west” Sunday afternoon concert series. All ages welcome.  Never a cover charge, but your generous donations help us pay the musicians. David Solbach, jazz clarinet player & composer, brings in two of the musicians with whom he recorded his recent CD of original tunes, “Dinosaur Dreams” —…

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Sunday Poets:
Jennifer Arin & Meg Schoerke

Sunday, September 16 – 2 p.m. A special reading by two SFSU English Dept. professors and poets.  Jennifer Arin has just published a new collection entitled Ways We Hold, while Meg Schoerke has won wide acclaim for her book, Anatomical Venus. Arin brings an awareness of time’s ineluctable passage and poetry’s power to stop it,…

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POETS!
Virginia Barrett & Bobby Coleman
+ open mic

Monday, Sept. 17 — 7 p.m. Featured poets plus an open mic 1st & 3rd Monday of each month hosted by Jerry Ferraz. Virginia Barrett is a poet inspired by her surroundings, her writing tied to her eye as a visual artist as well as the sense of spirit she gathers from a place. While…

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live jazz at Bird & Beckett…
Happy birthday, Dorothy!

Friday, Sept. 14, from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m., it’s drummer Jimmy Ryan’s quintet swinging through another bop-drenched session of our weekly “jazz in the bookshop” series… and Sunday, Sept. 16, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., clarinetist/composer David Solbach brings in a trio with Jason Martineau on piano/vocals and Aaron Germain on bass in our weekly “which…

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PAWA presents: Birds of a Feather

Sunday, Sept. 23 – 2 p.m. Rabih Alameddine, Laura Goode, Barbara Jane Reyes, hosted by G. Justin Hulog Rabih Alameddine is the author of three novels, The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and Koolaids, as well as The Perv, a book of short stories. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut. Laura Goode is a novelist,…

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