emilysavage@sfbg.com

LIT For the winter holidays many years back, I received a long-arm stapler. It wasn't a surprise, I'd expressly asked for it. And no, I was not a teenage office supply fetishist.

I wanted the stapler because I wrote, cut-and-pasted, and hand-assembled my own zine, and that process was about to get a lot more efficient, thanks to my new long-arm. Those who've crafted their own DIY booklets know the thrill of the further-stretching stapler that meets the paper crease.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

LIT If you're shopping for that special thriller fan on your list, you might want to pop an I.O.U. into his or her stocking: the best thriller of the year doesn't hit bookstores until Dec. 27.Read more »

caitlin@sfbg.com

LIT On a Wednesday night in a Mission basement, a group of new friends has gathered to celebrate a library. Onstage, a man and a woman struggle to maintain their solemnity while reading a passage from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on the fallacy of video phone calls. In the dimness, the rest of the members of Ourshelves sit in chairs and on benches, everyone doubtless reflecting on the power of the written word.Read more »

cheryl@sfbg.com

LIT "As one survivor told me," author Julia Scheeres writes in her introduction to A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown (Free Press, 320 pp., $26), "nobody joins a cult."Read more »

caitlin@sfbg.comRead more »

ROCK AND ROLL ALWAYS FORGETS

By Chuck Eddy

Duke University Press

352 pp., paper, $24.95Read more »

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE The average celebrity autobiography follows an arc of learning and growing. The earnestly-made mistake — whether in the form of childhood shenanigan or adult infidelity — and then the ensuing redemption. But rarely do book-sized treatises emerge from the decision to leave the celebrity fold for the greener fields of bud agriculture. Leave it to the girl from the Blair Witch Project to produce that one.Read more »