We Never Called It Frisco

A candid novel about the 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 a modern dance performance in San Francisco, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Lang 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 roommate-slash-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 His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco.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 first 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.

Author: Jed Perl
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781566897648


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026

About the Author
Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. The poet John Ashbery has called him "an almost solitary, essential voice," and a reviewer in The Atlantic observed of his most recent essay collection, Magicians and Charlatans, that he "may be the finest American critic at work today in any field." Perl was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade. Writing about his two-volume biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder--Calder: The Conquest of Time and Calder: The Conquest of Space--the novelist Fran Lebowitz observed that "all artists are critics, but very few critics are artists. Jed Perl is one of those few."

Among Jed Perl's many books are Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I, Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, which was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. He is also the editor of Art in America: 1945-1970, a 900-page anthology published by the Library of America. He has written for Harper's, The New Criterion, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He lives in New York City.