We Never Called It Frisco

Novel by Jed Perl September 8, 2026 • 5.5 x 8 • 136 Pages • 978-1-56689-764-8 A candid novel about art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in the countercultural movement of the 50’s and 60’s, by one of America's most celebrated art critics. During intermission at the San Francisco Opera, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Falk collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. It’s soon discovered that Marcia willed her entire estate to Burt—her on-again, off-again lover. His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco. As he processes Marcia’s death alongside their cadre of Berkeley bohemians, Burt begins to reconstruct Marcia’s work-in-progress as an elegiac collage for the friend he’s lost and the city that found her. In his debut novel, renowned art critic Jed Perl, guides his reader down the back alleys of a mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and the writers like Marcia who determined their positions in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, We Never Called It Frisco tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.