Sometimes a novel feels so true to your lived experience it feels pulled from your own life. That was our sensation reading "That Was Something," a new novel by Dan Callahan (Squares & Rebels).

"You are what you wear" might be a colloquial, less scholarly way to frame the premise of "Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress," a new touring show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

"Painting is My Everything," an entrancing new fall exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, is an unmitigated delight. Though not large in scale, the show, featuring 30 modern ink-and-color works on paper, is big and zestful in spirit.

Since the gallery scene began to decentralize in the city, there has been a proliferation of new venues in addition to a plenitude of established ones. Below, find a microcosm of what's in store this fall.

Fall arrives with a bounty of museum exhibitions.

It's a particularly disillusioning time to take America's temperature, an assumption borne out by "This Land," the latest photography exhibition at Pier 24.

We're swinging into the final round of summer, which means it's time for the California Academy of Sciences' annual "BigPicture" show, where a cavalcade of eye-popping color photographs is now on view.

The atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada was brown and smoky last month, a result of the many horrific wildfires raging all over the region. It felt apocalyptic and thus very much of the historical moment.

Any show that has the balls to call itself "Lew the Jew" has a leg up on the competition in my book.

It's remarkable but not altogether surprising that over 3,000 people attended the opening of "The World of Frida," an expansive new exhibition now at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek.

"Pop Trash: The Amazing Art of Jason Mecier," a coffee-table book with full-page pictures of meticulously crafted celebrity portraits, rolled off the presses this month.

Peter Hujar, now considered one of the greatest American photographers of the late 20th century, was living in poverty at the time of his death in 1987 from complications of AIDS.

The 1886 Edwardian-style Italianate home at 500 Capp Street in the Mission District, where the late San Francisco conceptual artist David Ireland lived for three decades until several years before his death in 2009, is possibly his greatest achievement.

Though the cumulative effect of the Legion of Honor's "Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters" can be overwhelming, seeing its assembled paintings at close range is a natural high.