After reporting on the publishing experiments turning up around San Francisco, we asked the city’s writers what they’re reading these days, and they were happy to share. Look for Required Reading every week. 

Sasha Wizansky is a founding editor of Meatpaper, the print quarterly about all things meat and carnivorous culture. She is author of Your New Glass Eye.

Magazines: I've always been interested in periodicals, especially the quirky and independent ones, and it seems my subscription list keeps growing: Cabinet, Esopus, Bidoun, Gastronomica, Print, Diner Journal, The Believer, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. My life would be pretty different if the New Yorker ceased to exist. An ideal rainy day activity is curling up on the couch with a pile of print, which, it turns out, is nowhere near dead.

Novels: I haven't really caught on to micro-blogging or other short-form communication, and too much onscreen reading makes me dizzy. A good chunky novel still has the power to seduce me, especially when it spins an old-fashioned yarn. I keep up with Jonathan Lethem's novels for his vivid and offbeat storytelling. I loved the characters and slippery satire of Chronic City.

Now that baseball season is over, we're going to need another reason to drink beer. Luckily, there's a big one this weekend (Nov. 13 and 14) at Fort Mason. Bay Area Brew Festival gathers dozens of domestic and international brewers under one roof and, for $50, you can try them all for three hours straight (1–4 p.m.). In addition to local favorites like Lagunitas, Speakeasy, and Big Daddy, look for a wide range of brews, from the traditional (Colt45, brewed with pride in Woodridge, Illinois by the Pabst Brewing Co.) to the European (Spaten from Munich) to the karmic (Lhasa from Tibet) to the downright experimental (MateVeza, a "naturally caffeinated yerba mate beer" from Ukiah).