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Monday 10am - 6pm Tuesday 10am - 6pm Wednesday 10am - 6pm Thursday 10am - 6pm Friday 10am - 7pm Saturday 10am - 7pm Sunday 10am - 5pm

The Book Catapult

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The Book Catapult

The Book Catapult is an independent bookstore in San Diego's South Park neighborhood. Let us put a real book in your hand, friend.

09/03/2026

Sometimes I wonder if anyone wants to know what our bestselling books are. Do you? If you do, here are the top sellers from August. If you don’t want to know, just look away.

• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (the current Catapult Book Club selection. Book Club meets on 9/10!)
• Under the Perfect Sun by Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, & Jim Miller
• Never Whistle at Night, Part II: Back for Blood, edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore Van Alst, Jr (Shane was here for an event on 8/18 so all our copies are signed!)
• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinninan
• The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (August’s Catapult Subscription Pick, aka: Catapult Book of the Month. You should subscribe too!)
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. (Natch.)
• Fruit Fly by Josh Silver (out of stock AGAIN, sorry)
• Chancla by Leslie Priscilla (Leslie appeared at the SD Book Fest & we were her lucky booksellers)
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (74 years later, TikTok discovers Steinbeck)
• Never Whistle at Night, edited by Shane & Ted
• Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
• How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr (I LOVE that people are still finding this fascinating history book!)
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

09/02/2026

🔥Thursday Night is Poetry Night at TBC!🔥
Local poets KAZIM ALI (The Man In 119 Kazim Ali) and ADAM O. DAVIS (Pyrrhic Symphony Adam Davis) will be here to read from and discuss their latest poetry collections on Thursday, September 3rd at 7pm!

08/17/2026

Coffee tawkin’ Sunday.

•Trash!: A Garbageman’s Story - Simon Pare-Poupart
•Flesh - David Szalay
•The Race to the Future: - Kassia St. Clair
•The Hounding - Xenobe Purvis
•Seascraper - Benjamin Wood
• Yellow Pine - Claire Vaye Watkins
• The Hill in the Dark Grove - Liam Higginson
• A Tender Age - Chang-Rae Lee
• Etna - Paul Yoon
•Bad Naturalist by: My Ecological Education on a Wild Mountaintop - Paula Whyman
• Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties - Ed Park
•The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness - Cal Flyn
•Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art - Daisy Dixon
•Love Hotel / After Party - François Prost
•Beginning Middle End - Valeria Luiselli
• Sunrise - Téa Obreht
• The Palm House - Gwendoline Riley

07/23/2026

💀📚We are beyond pumped (terrified? Yes.) to be hosting Shane Hawk, local author(!) and co-editor of the mega-bestselling anthology of indigenous horror, NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT on TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 at 7pm for the release of… brace yourself… NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT: PART II: BACK FOR BLOOD!!! 💀💀💀

You can PREORDER NWAN2 to reserve your seat at this spectacular evening event! The link is in our bio, or visit thebookcatapult.com OR stop on by the shop anytime! We’re expecting a pretty full house, so if you want to sit down…

07/22/2026

💥📚⚽️Your pre-World Cup Final Coffee Stack from Sunday:

•The Future of Bananas - James Dale
•Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the Fifa Greed Machine - Jules Boykoff
🔥Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology - edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore Van Alst, Jr (come meet Shane Hawk at TBC on August 18th for NWAN Volume 2!!)🔥
•A Marriage at Sea - Sophie Elmhirst
•A Quiet Place - Seichō Matsumoto
•Cloudthief - Nathaniel Rich
•Bone Horn - Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
•There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland - Steven Hyden
•The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong
•The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones
•Sharing In the Groove: The Untold Story of the ‘90s Jam Band Explosion and the Scene That Followed - Mike Ayers
•Is A River Alive? - Robert Macfarlane
•The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals - Silvana Condemi & François Savatier
•The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life - Helen Whybrow
•Noticing: Intimate Encounters With the Natural World - Richard Louv
•Men Like Ours - Bindu Bansinath
•We Will See You Bleed - Ron Currie
•Country People - Daniel Mason

07/08/2026

Perverts.
Mac (Marisa) Crane 🍉

07/04/2026

💥The Catapult is closed today for the 4th of July. This little gem is worth a read today before your backyard BBQ though. Good to have a little perspective. (This is a rare Exeter broadside discovered in the National Archives in London this spring. http://bit.ly/4vajumY)

This part stood out to me for some reason: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Happy Independence Day! 🇺🇸

06/21/2026

📚🔥Your Father’s Day/Summer Solstice Coffee reading stack:

•The Fifth Year - Marlen Haushofer
•Summer Solstice - Nina Maclaughlin (naturally, always)
•The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting - Robert Irwin
•Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai’i - Sara Kahaulani Goo
•Elledge’s Nontrivial Trivia - Jonn Elledge
•We Were Forbidden - Jacqueline Harpman
•Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See - Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, & Jim Miller
•This Book is a Camera - Kelli Anderson
•The Land and Its People - David Sedaris
•Whistler - Ann Patchett
•Contrapposto - Dave Eggers
•The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris - Andrea Wulf
•How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius - Nick Greene
•The Book of Birds - Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris
• Gizmo: The Retro-Tech We Loved and Lost - Simon Tyler

05/24/2026

🔥📚Long Weekend! Coffee with the Catapult results:

•Self-Worth - Emma Tholozan
•How Things Are Made - Tim Minshall
•The Time of Cherries - Montserrat Roig
•Angel Down - Daniel Kraus
•Kitchen Venom - Philip Hensher
•The Director - Daniel Kehlmann
•Circular Motion - Alex Foster
•Prestige Drama - Séamas O’Reilly
•Death of the Soccer God - Dimitry Elias Legér
•The Hill - Harriet Clark
•Filth Eaters - Ito Romo
•America América - Greg Gandin
•Naming Nature - T.A. Barron
•The Rolling Stones - Bob Spitz
•This Vast Enterprise - Craig Fehrman
•John of John - Douglas Stuart
•American Rambler - Isaac Fitzgerald
•The Calamity Club - Kathryn Stockett

(Plus, not pictured, but discussed: we’ve sold our 999th and 1000th copies of The Dog Stars!!)

05/08/2026

Our beloved Tamara is leaving TBC for the green pastures of the publishing world! We will miss her terribly but are EXTREMELY lucky to have had her as an irreplaceable lynchpin for these last 4 years. She has done SO very much for the Catapult both behind the scenes (you have no idea!) and at the front of the shop that I’m not sure what we will look like once she’s gone. But we are just SO GODDAMN PROUD of her as she heads off on this next gig!! Her last official day as a Catapult Bookseller is this Friday, so come on by to wish her well before she departs. ❤️📚❤️🔥🔥🔥❤️📚❤️

Address

3010-B Juniper Street
San Diego, CA
92104

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 7pm
Saturday	10am - 7pm
Sunday	10am - 5pm

Telephone

+16197953780

Website

http://www.thebookcatapult.com/

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