Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages through the Unknown City

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.

About the Author

Gary Kamiya is the author of the #1 San Francisco bestseller Cool Gray City of Love, which won the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. He writes a very popular history column for the San Francisco Chronicle. A co-founder of Salon.com and the former executive editor of San Francisco magazine, Kamiya has been a fixture on the Bay Area literary scene for more than 30 years. He lives in San Francisco.

Paul Madonna is an award-winning artist and author. His popular series "All Over Coffee" ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for twelve years and has been collected into two sui generis bestsellers, All Over Coffee and Everything is Its Own Reward. Paul is the creator of the Emit Hopper Mystery Series, and his unique brand of combining images and stories has been heralded as “an all new art form,” celebrated in galleries, museums, and print.