Kevin Tom, a regular, looks through a vinyl collection at Amoeba Music on the in San Francisco, Calif. Monday, October 30, 2017. Kevin Tom, a regular, looks through a vinyl collection at Amoeba Music on the in San Francisco, Calif. Monday, October 30, 2017. James Robinson of Newcastle looks through the vinyl section at Amoeba. Vinyl records merit a bigger section of the store; the CD area has shrunk. James Robinson of Newcastle looks through the vinyl section at Amoeba.

Many of the narrators in novelist Samantha Hunt’s debut story collection, “The Dark Dark,” are unreliable. Whether they speak in the first person or the omniscient third, they are not to be trusted. Unreliable narrators are in fashion in contemporary fiction, but their use is especially fitting in Hunt’s stories: The author of “Mr. Splitfoot” and “The Invention of Everything Else” writes about people living lives of uncertainty in an unreliable world.

U.S. premiere of “Picasso Ricercar” will be at Berkeley Piano Club Ensemble for These Times, featuring pianist Dale Tsang (left), cellist Anne Lerner-Wright and soprano Nanette McGuinness, perform music by David Garner, Elinor Armer and other contemporary composers at the .

My wife and I were on a road trip last weekend and it was time for lunch. As usual, that was a problem. “What do you feel like eating?” I asked, cringing, knowing the same answer as always was coming. “Something healthy,” she replied. Here we go. We were on the freeway in the middle of nowhere. “Something healthy” didn’t exist. Every exit was an invitation to fast-food heaven, or hell, depending on your tastes. She preferred to call it hell.

Over the years, Rupy C. Tut gradually pieced together details of her grandparents’ past lives. The older the Oakland painter got, the more she asked them — of their home in what was then British India, and of what would come to drag them from it. This year marks the 70th anniversary of what is broadly remembered as the year of Indian independence from British rule.

It’s 2144, and synthetic biologist/pharmaceutical pirate Jack Chen is beginning to think she has made a terrible mistake. Workers across the globe are becoming dangerously obsessed with mundane tasks after dosing themselves with a productivity enhancer known as Zacuity.

The biggest shakeup of radio stations in recent Bay Area history is about to take place.With the anticipated merger of Entercom and CBS by year’s end, the new company will have to divest four of its FM stations in the Bay Area to meet the FCC’s regulations on how many stations an owner can have in a market. That means selling or trading several high-profile and successful stations. CBS and Entercom have nine FM properties.

For all those who are upset and frustrated by the ridiculous traffic that has clogged Bay Area freeways for years (and is getting worse by the day), I have miraculously come up with a solution.For instance, take the stretch of the Interstate 80 Eastshore Freeway that runs past Berkeley to and from the Bay Bridge. For the first time in years, I managed to fly through that miserable patch of pavement at the speed limit.

In 1999, when Brian and I first moved into the blue bungalow, there were no more than a dozen trees in the outer, outer, outer Excelsior. So we got involved with the Friends of the Urban Forest, who organized a planting. My father was still alive at the time and said, “If you get the chance, pick an olive tree.”“Olive, Pop?” Pop had fought in the 3rd Armored Division (“the Third Herd”) under Patton during World War II.

Talking with Jill Soloway means to look at old words with a new lens.Consider, “Patriarchy: A social system in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.” Or, “Consent: Permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.” Or even, “Woman: an adult human female.