We Never Called It Frisco

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 His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco.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.

Publication date: September 8, 2026

Format: Trade Paperback

Dimensions: 5.5x8

Page Count: 136

ISBN: 9781566897648

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.

“In his delectably wry and canny first novel, esteemed art critic Perl revels in his quixotic, complicated characters and their conflicts while created a finely distilled and picturesque portrait of postwar San Francisco's kaleidoscopic enclave of artists and outsiders.” —Booklist

“We Never Called It Frisco is a mesmerising imaginative recreation of a lost time and a lost world—this really must be what it was like to be on the West Coast ‘art scene’ in what we now realise was an age of innocence. Among the many pleasures the novel offers is the narrator’s lavish and mischievous name-dropping. Smart, shrewd and vastly entertaining.” —John Banville

“In a poignant attempt to hold a time, a place, a world all but vanished, Jed Perl writes an elegant, intimate novel of love and affection—a tribute, a retrieval, a resuscitation and reunion.” —Carole Maso

“Art done with passion, saved from materialism, and redemptive of life: this is what matters most to Jed Perl, both in his criticism and in this, his first novel—a beautifully besotted portrait of the American avant-garde. Perl’s metafictional and even metacritical novel is a wised up and poignant paean to the Bay Area bohemia of the 1940s and 50s, with ambitions realized and thwarted, loves lost and regained, art, dance, and youth’s ineluctable drift.” —Joshua Cohen

“This novel evokes wonderfully the middle-class bohemia of San Francisco in the 1950s when a significant group of people assumed attitudes which, in the words of one of its characters, were ‘in almost equal parts authentic, artificial, and absurd.’ The result is smart, thoughtful, and affectionate.” —Vivian Gornick