Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have unders

Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."

“A coming-of-age tale for both the gay community at large and a nation coming to terms with that community’s place in American society” (The Boston Globe). Part memoir, part extended essay, Visions and Revisions is a foray into the period between 1987, when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded, and 1996, when medical advances transformed AIDS from a virtual death sentence into a chronic manageable illness. Offering a sweeping, collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era, this book takes readers from the serial killings of gay men in New York, London, and Milwaukee, through Dale Peck’s first loves upon coming out of the closet, to the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance. Named as one of 2015’s best nonfiction books by Flavorwire, the narrative pays particular attention to the words and deeds of AIDS activists, offering a street-level portrait of ACT UP and considerations of AIDS-centered fiction and criticism of the time—as well as intimate, sometimes elegiac portraits of artists, activists, and HIV-positive people Peck knew. Peck’s fiery rhetoric against a government that sat on its hands for the first several years of the epidemic is tinged with the idealism of a young gay man discovering his political, artistic, and sexual identity. The result is “a flinty-eyed look into the heart of the H.I.V. epidemic, from the late 1980s until the development of protease inhibitors and combination therapies in the mid-1990s [and] a compelling snapshot of the social activism that defined the era” (The New York Times Book Review).

''The most beautiful volume ever done [on Marin] is Point Reyes Visions.''

Satty began work on a series of San Francisco collages in 1975. From reading historical accounts of the early city, he realized that most of the existing pictorial record, photos and paintings didn't match the colorful literary descriptions of that chaotic era. He decided to graphically re-create the era, to evoke the visual and emotional experiences of the early city in combination with relevant eyewitness accounts. He researched the writings of early immigrants, later residents, and many other writers who visited the famous spectacle of the developing city. Satty created collages until his death in early 1982. As an interested historian, and a friend for ten years, Walter Medeiros had often been closely involved with him, and especially during the last year of his life. Satty discussed the project with him and took pleasure in showing him work in progress. Satty's will left the project to Medeiros.