Great Valley Books

2020: Visions for the Central Valley
Edited by Amy Moffat

California's Central Valley is undergoing immense change. A dramatically expanding population is encroaching on some of the world's richest farmland, putting increasing strain on water, clean air, roadways, and health. What must the Valley do to create a livable, perhaps...

Workin' Man Blues:
 Country Music in California
Gerald Haslam 
with Alexandra Haslam Russell and Richard Chon

California has been fertile ground for country music since the 1920s, nurturing a multitude of talents from Gene Autry to Glen Campbell, Rose Maddox to Barbara Mandrell, Buck Owens to Merle Haggard. In this affectionate homage to California's place in...

Walking the Flatlands:
The Rural Landscape of the Lower Sacramento Valley
Mike Madison

Mike Madison delivers a detailed critique of the farmland around him, the land he walks daily. He is immersed in a sea of intricate and interwoven systems; he sees where the soil shifts from black to red, how the wind...

A Sweetness Rising: 
New and Selected Poems
Roberta Spear; Edited with an Introduction by Philip Levine

The first retrospective of the life's work of Roberta Spear (1948-2003), A Sweetness Rising includes newly published work as well as poems from her previous volumes. Nationally acclaimed and admired by both readers and peers, she wrote poems that touch...

Structures of Utility
David Stark Wilson

Packing sheds, grain silos, wooden tank house outbuildings, and mine elevators have been eloquently captured by David Stark Wilson's keen, appreciative, and knowledgeable eye. Using a large format view camera, Wilson has elevated these architecturally underappreciated structures of pure utility...

Skin Tax
Tim Z. Hernandez; Foreword by Juan Felipe Herrera

Out of California's Great Central Valley comes the bold new poetic voice of Tim Hernandez, already an established performance poet and community activist. Skin Tax is a powerful print debut of a poet with a mature and complex talent immersed...

Picturing California's Other Landscape: The Great Central Valley
Edited by Heath Schenker

This lavish, oversized full-color book features 150 years of paintings, photographs, tourist and advertising art, and maps that depict California's Great Central Valley. Through text and images, Picturing California's Other Landscape examines the portrayal of the Central Valley over the...

Peace Is a Four-Letter Word
Janet Nichols Lynch

Emily Rankin is a normal sixteen-year-old girl in California's rural Central Valley. When a new history teacher, Dr. Connell McKenzie, comes into her life, something in Emily is awakened, challenging her to think for herself. To think, for example, about...

Our Valley, Our Choice: Building a Livable Future for the San Joaquin Valley
Great Valley Center

Inspired by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, this book was rushed to publication in order to face head on the unbridled growth of the nation's most productive agricultural region. Our Valley, Our Choice juxtaposes in dramatic graphic form the changes...

No Time to Nap
Mike Madison; 
Illustrated by Mary Peterson

Farmer Mike is a very busy man. He raises chickens and grows tulips, nectarines, tomatoes, and plenty more. There's always something to do, including outwitting those pesky gophers! Adapted from real to-do lists of author and farmer Mike Madison, No...

Magpies and Mayflies:
An Introduction to Plants and Animals of the Central Valley and Sierra Foothills
Derek Madden, Ken Charters, and Cathy Snyder

Follow biologist Derek Madden as he explores some of California's most diverse ecosystems. Most often associated with rich farmland, bountiful orchards, spreading cities, irrigation channels, and well-traveled highways, California's Great Central Valley and nearby Sierra Nevada Foothills have long hosted...

Lion Singer
Written and Illustrated by Sylvia Ross

There was once a time when there was no metal in the Chukchansi people's world... So begins this story set in the old days—before there were cars or television sets, in a time when much of California was covered in...

Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories
David Mas Masumoto; Illustrations by Doug Hansen

In Letters to the Valley, David Mas Masumoto explores his personal memories of food and place, stories about how our food is grown, who grows it, and the suddenly changing context of family farms. These essays—in the form of letters...

Indian Summer: Traditional Life among the Choinumne Indians of California's San Joaquin Valley
Thomas Jefferson Mayfield;
 Introduction by Malcolm Margolin

With accuracy, zest, and insight, Indian Summer portrays the nearly lost and unspeakably beautiful world of the Choinumne Yokuts and the valley in which they lived....

Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley
Edited by Stan Yogi, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida; Foreword by Mark Arax

This is American literature at its best—literature as authentic and powerful as the land that inspired it. From the myths of the Yokuts Indians to stories and poems by famous contemporary writers, this anthology showcases the best literature of California's...

Henry Sugimoto: Painting an American Experience
Kristine Kim with an introduction by Karin Higa; Foreword by Lawrence M. Small; Epilogue by Madeleine Sugimoto; Translations by Emily Anderson

Henry Sugimoto began life as the grandson of a displaced samurai and died in 1990 an American painter. From his early years in California, Paris, and Mexico to the transformative impact of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans,...

Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer
David Mas Masumoto; 
Illustrations by Doug Hansen

As suburbs swallow more and more rich farmland and reforms change the farming industry, the voices of farmers have never been more important. In his latest collection of essays, David Mas Masumoto reminds us that food remains the cornerstone of...

He Flies through the Air with the Greatest of Ease: A William Saroyan Reader
Edited by William E. Justice;
 Foreword by Herbert Gold

"Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with...

Haslam's Valley
Gerald Haslam

Gerald Haslam picks up where Mark Twain left off in this career-spanning collection brimming with life and humor—but this is Kern County instead of Calaveras, Oildale instead of Nevada City, a great alligator hunt instead of a celebrated jumping frog....

Dream Songs and Ceremony: Reflections on Traditional California Indian Dance
Frank LaPena

This collection of paintings by acclaimed artist Frank LaPena draws upon the symbols of California Indian dances—sacred events that cannot be photographed or videotaped. Himself a Nomtipom Wintu dancer, singer, and ceremonial leader, LaPena complements his vibrant paintings with an...

Bloodvine: A Novel
Aris Janigian

Bloodvine is the dramatic tale of a man's struggle to come to terms with the inexplicable episodes, gaps, and secrets that plague his family. Set in the 1950s against the backdrop of the three-thousand-year-old Armenian culture, Bloodvine is a gripping...

Blithe Tomato
Mike Madison; Foreword by Deborah Madison; Drawings by Patrick McFarlin

Across America, people are escaping fluorescent-lit grocery store aisles to rediscover the fresh, seasonal offerings of the farmers' market. A new and thriving culture has sprung up as thousands gather each weekend to pinch, poke, smell, and probe the produce—and...

Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town
Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow; Introduction by Sucheng Chan

At the turn of the century, Locke, located in the Sacramento Delta, was the only village in the United States built and inhabited exclusively by Chinese immigrants. This collection of moving oral histories and stunning photographs offers an unforgettable glimpse...