Two writers bring new work. Jan Sollish has published a memoir about her years from 1977 to 1982 at the Club Fugazi tending bar at Beach Blanket Babylon; Jackie Martin Davis has brought out a book of short stories that verge on memoir, fictively brushing up against the chronology and experiences of the author’s life.

Jan Sollish worked at Beach Blanket Babylon in the 1970s while she taught Catholic school as a kindergarten teacher. She wrote whenever she had an extra minute and a scrap of paper. She has been featured in the Noe Valley Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and City Lights bookstore. In her free time, Jan has studied with some of San Francisco’s most noted writers, including Leslie Kirk Campbell, poet Janell Moon, and former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara.

Jackie Martin Davis has written a memoir, a novel, another memoir and now this short story collection, which deals with experiences both individual to the writer and universal. Her short stories in this volume draw their approach from an observation of the poet Wallace Stevens that “Fictive things wink as they will.” Davis’s stories, she asserts, “…’wink’ to the reader, because they are fiction that are also a little bit true.” Their concerns range from the awkwardness of youth and early romance to the unstable situations of divorce, dating, betrayal, and death. Conflicts involve mothers and children, teachers and students, husbands and wives, and lovers at cross purposes.