City Guides

Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the cofounder of 100 Word Story, leads a literary tour of San Francisco, a city of rollicking rogues and home of the Beats.

In this tour of the Mile High City, novelist Jenny Shank visits the sites, writing groups, organizations, and presses that keep her hometown’s literary spirit alive in the bootstrapping tradition of those “roaring drunken miners” who founded it.

From the long-standing tradition of the Texas Book Festival to the offbeat O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, acclaimed author Oscar Casares highlights a range of literary happenings and haunts in Austin, a city that pledges to keep it weird.

Adam Ross, author of the New York Times Notable Book Mr. Peanut, takes us on a tour of his beloved Nashville, "a great secret, cool as all get-out but never self-consciously hip or competitive," with a literary life as vibrant as its musical one.

Before heading to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, held throughout June and July, get acquainted with the reading series, bars, landmarks, and people—including our guide Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of indie bookseller Prairie Lights Books—of designated City of Literature Iowa City. 

Native New Orleanian John Biguenet, author of seven books and many prizewinning plays, highlights postflood literary New Orleans—"a palimpsest" on which "the past bleeds through the fresh culture now being inscribed over the submerged text, centuries old."

New York Times best-selling author Carolyn Parkhurst shares the bookstores, reading series, and other literary landmarks of Washington, D.C., that make it “a beautiful, vibrant, creative city.”

From F. Scott Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, Joan Didion to Raymond Chandler, many writers have been inspired by Los Angeles. In this installment of City Guides, Carolyn Kellogg, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and Jacket Copy blogger, visits her favorite haunts made famous by writers of both past and present.