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Oakland Review of Books, ORB to those in the orbit, is an exercise in counterprogramming. Like Oakland itself, we’re doomed to define ourselves by what we are not, but with a chip or two on our shoulders, we make that into a virtue. What is ORB? As an answer, “What’s the opposite of Nextdoor" will do, if all we have is a sentence. But for a fuller introduction, just look to each word of our name.
“Oakland…”: ORB is not San Francisco, just like the vast majority of the Oakland Bay Area isn’t San Francisco. ORB is for the rest of us in this magnificent world-shaking global megacity at the heart of the Pacific circuit. From Richmond down to Fremont, at least, the East Bay is what the Spanish named contra costa, the opposite coast (or really the against coast), as they squinted across the bay from The City they were settling. But from The Town, we can see that Oakland is the core around which the cultural, political, commercial, even spiritual life of the region is organized. San Francisco is just the West Bay; the rest of it is Greater Oakland.
We’re in love with what’s here. When Gertrude Stein said there was no there here, she was both saying less and more than most people realize—and ORB will take on that phrase and its legacy directly, so stay tuned—but in that phrase’s popular usage today, we can see how Oakland is always beset by racist, political, and moral panics of one kind or another: Oakland is the absence, the over there, the forbidding un-place that gives other places meaning.
ORB says fuck that, not only is there a here here, we care deeply about it, in its abundant and plentiful sufficiency. If capital emanates from the financial district and Big Tech lurks in the valley, Oakland is where people live.
"...Review…”: ORB is about the local common sense, seen and known from here. We’re not a news publication; we’re an ongoing critical engagement with the story of Oakland, both the official and unofficial narratives. We have no pretense of viewpoint neutrality. We’re a child of last year’s recall elections, when tech fascists, international capital, and Piedmont told stories about who we are, about crime and corruption—and about the cops and capitalism that were needed to save us from ourselves. Those stories urgently need to be reviewed, revised, and replaced.
Not long ago a local cohort of critical geographers took up a phrase we’ve adopted: “thinking from Oakland.” A particular place demands a particular mode of thinking, alert to specific histories, a specific political economy, the specific ways that people have acted and been acted upon. And as we turn our gaze on books, movies, politics, food, sports, and everything else, we will think about them from Oakland, from the Oakland we know and love that isn’t reducible to a place to consume or to capitalize on. Oakland is a place that sees, and that loves to be seen. Capital might tell you how to be hungry, and tech might tell you where to eat; here in Oakland, we know how to cook.
"...of Books”: Running through everything we do will be a sense of books, of bookness, of slow and deep engagement with stories and art, as a bulwark against the technofascist turn in the West Bay and beyond. We’re an online publication, for now—because nothing is as Oakland as doing the best you can with the master’s own tools—but we are not “tech,” not tech-funded, tech-adjacent, and not optimized for this or that platform. Our heart is our literary calendar of IRL events, and the vibe reports that come after, a collective map and memoir of the analog, tactile, and rooted—a word much cheapened here of late—life of The Town.
We read, in short, because books aren’t software that we download into our brains, Matrix-style, and they aren’t intellectual property, either, to be absorbed into large language models. Books are material things we read with our hands and our eyes, in time and in space, and in community. They move through space and commerce with their own patterns and agendas, because books are information that wants to be free. We’re as interested in the web and weave of that literary ecology—and how it underpins ours—as we are in what happens between the covers.
Say hi to us: orb@oaklandreviewofbooks.org, @oaklandreviewofbooks.org on Bluesky