Literature

The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology
Edited by Gary Noy and Rick Heide; Illustrations by Joe Medeiros

The essays, poetry, and stories presented in The Illuminated Landscape encompass the entire Sierra Nevada experience: an ancient creation myth involving an unlikely contest between Hawk and Crow, vignettes of life in mining camps, a curious deer taking a stroll...

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts
Edited by Ruth Nolan

Feared and romanticized throughout the ages, the desert has a hold on our imagination that is never more evident than in the literature it has inspired. From Mary Austin's meditations in The Land of Little Rain to Joan Didion's acerbic...

Riverbig: A Novel
Aris Janigian

This broad-shouldered work of fiction—the follow-up to Bloodvine, Aris Janigian's acclaimed first novel—continues the tale of Andy Demerjian. Having finished college, returned to farming, and undergone a chain of disasters, he is now landless. Desperate to support his wife and...

The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures
Selected and introduced by Lee Stetson; 
Illustrated by Fiona King

Here is an entertaining collection of John Muir's most exciting adventures, representing some of his finest writing. From the famous avalanche ride off the rim of Yosemite Valley to his night spent weathering a windstorm at the top of a...

Wallace Stegner's West
Edited with an introduction by Page Stegner

This collection of Wallace Stegner's fiction and essays is as broad as the Great Basin and as dynamic as California's coastline. Considered one of the foremost writers of the West, Stegner ranges with ease from Utah to California, and from...

Woman of Ill Fame
Erika Mailman

Looking for a better life, Nora Simms sails from the East Coast to gold rush San Francisco with a plan for success: to strike it rich by trading on her good looks. But when a string of murders claims several...

Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea: A California Notebook
James D. Houston;
 Foreword by Alan Cheuse

Taking inspiration from California's breathtaking landscapes, history, and distinctive ways of life, Where Light Take Its Color from the Sea reveals a writer's keen appreciation of place. This selection of James D. Houston's essays and short stories illuminates the themes...

Unfolding Beauty: Celebrating California's Landscapes
Edited by Terry Beers

California, the Golden State, conjures up visions of mountains, water, vistas, and vast landscapes. The astounding beauty of California is reflected not only in the works of authors like John Muir, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, Robinson Jeffers, Gretel Ehrlich, and...

Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori
Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada

Born in Oakland, California, in 1910, the young Toshio Mori dreamed of being an artist, a Buddhist missionary, and a baseball player. Instead, he grew flowers in the family nursery business, and—influenced by contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest...

Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
Edited by Rick Heide; Foreword by Juan Velasco

Under the Fifth Sun collects stories of love, family, work, exploration, politics, history, culture, and survival—fiction, poetry, memoirs, commentary, and drama—covering more than two centuries of Latino presence in California, from missionaries and soldiers to gold miners, farmworkers, and political...

Tales of the Fish Patrol
Jack London; Introduction by Jerry George

Not many folks know about this long-lost gem from Jack London. Now, one hundred years after its initial publication, Santa Clara University and Heyday Books are pleased to bring you this rollicking collection of tales from the San Francisco Bay....

Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me!: The Seasons of Native California
Edited by Margaret Dubin and Kim Hogeland

Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me! offers a literary calendar at once ancient and yet in some ways more relevant than the markers of time we are accustomed to. Combining old-time stories and sacred myths with contemporary poems and short stories,...

A Separate Star: 
Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson
Edited by Michelle Burnham

Best known for the books A Century of Dishonor and Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson was revered for her depictions of social issues facing the West at the end of the nineteenth century. At a time when women writers struggled to...

November Grass
Judy Van der Veer; Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

In the light of the declining sun, amid the muffled sounds of grazing cattle, a Southern California cowgirl considers her life. The language of November Grass, concise yet evocative, transports readers to the coastal hills of San Diego County, where...

No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California, 1849-1869
Edited by Ida Rae Egli

In the wild, isolated Western frontier, where laws, traditions, and living conditions were like nowhere else in America, it was a bold act for a woman to write and to seek publication. Dame Shirley, Ina Coolbrith, and Mary Hallock Foote...

Mark Twain's San Francisco: Being a Generous and Uninhibited Cornucopia of Reports, Speculations, Satires, Brickbats, Musings, Topical Verse, and Other Observations by Mark Twain on "The Liveliest Heartiest Community on Our Continent"
Edited with a new Introduction by Bernard Taper; Illustrations by Edward Jump

Jumping frogs, high society, beloved San Francisco characters Emperor Norton and the stray dogs Bummer and Lazarus who followed on his heels—nothing escaped Mark Twain's scrutiny or his acerbic wit. Editor Bernard Taper has gathered together a heady selection of...

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...

The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California
Edited by Lauren Coodley

Novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair will forever be associated with The Jungle, however, Sinclair deserves equal accolades for his entertaining critiques of Southern California's oil industry, movie studios, and urban sprawl—most of which still apply today. The Land of Orange...

The Journey of the Flame
Walter Nordhoff; Foreword by Rebecca Solnit

On the night of his 104th birthday, Don Juan Obrigón—tall and straight, with hair still flaming red—prepares to tell his life story to assembled relatives and guests. The story he will tell describes his travels as a boy of twelve...

Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California's Inland Empire
Edited by Gayle Wattawa; Introduction by Susan Straight

Showcasing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and other literature by such luminaries as Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, M.F.K. Fisher, and others, Inlandia puts a new literary region on the map. A land of dramatic landscapes and increasingly dynamic human developments, the...

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...

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....

Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration
Edited by Michael Kowalewski

The news of gold in California beckoned people from every continent on earth. This astonishing and instant migration would leave its mark forever on California and, indeed, the entire world. Taking a comprehensive look at the excitement, unrest, exploitation, and...

Gables and Fables: A Portrait of San Francisco's Pacific Heights
Anne Bloomfield and Arthur Bloomfield; Illustrated by Kit Haskell

Charming and deeply informed, part historical detective work and part gossip column, this storied tour of 110 of Pacific Heights' grand old edifices offers an architectural and social history of one of San Francisco's most fabled neighborhoods. The neighborhood of...

Forgotten Bread: First-Generation Armenian American Writers
Edited by David Kherdian

This outstanding collection of literature from seventeen first-generation Armenian American authors, each introduced by a member of the second generation, is intense, magical, and filled with the love of life. It is also characterized by the unspeakable sadness that accompanies...

Fast Cars and Frybread: 
Reports from the Rez
Gordon Johnson

These essays are about fiestas with frybread and beans, storytelling, dancing, snow cones, dogfights, and sometimes human fights. They are about sweat lodges and funerals and the dangers of "commod bod" (obesity caused by eating government surplus food). They are...

Farmworker's Daughter: 
Growing Up Mexican in America
Rose Castillo Guilbault

When Rose Castillo Guilbault was five years old, she and her recently divorced mother crossed the border from Nogales, Sonora, to Nogales, Arizona, and boarded a Greyhound bus that would carry them to California's Salinas Valley and a new life....

Essential Saroyan
Edited by William E. Justice

His name was on the lips of two generations, and countries around the world clamored for his work. An Armenian who grew up in the fields of Fresno, California, he traveled the globe, living in Paris, London, New York, and...

Essential Muir
Edited by Fred White

Preservationist. Inventor. Lobbyist. John Muir was many things at once, and he is California's best-known icon-so much so that his image was chosen to appear on the new state quarter. But the best way to know the man who founded...

Essential Mary Austin
Edited and with an introduction by Kevin Hearle

Opinionated and widely regarded as a genius, Mary Austin was a member of the literary elite, counting presidents and famous writers as friends, and yet her writings are most often down to earth. Whether chronicling the unforgiving, yet inspiring desert...

Essential Bierce
Edited and with an Introduction by John R. Dunlap

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was an American satirist, critic, poet, short story writer, editor, and journalist. He eventually became the literary despot of the West Coast, so admired and feared that his review could make or break an aspiring author's career....

Ecotopia Emerging
Ernest Callenbach

This prequel to Callenbach's classic Ecotopia is a multi-stranded novel that dramatizes the rise and triumph of a powerful American movement to preserve the earth as a safe, sustainable environment. The story springs from harsh realities: Toxic contamination of air,...

Ecotopia: 30th Anniversary Edition
Ernest Callenbach

Ecotopia embodies in concrete, practical form the new biology-conscious philosophy that has been evolving in recent years, especially on the West Coast. The setting is the early 21st century. Ecotopia, made up of what was once Northern California, Oregon, and...

Califauna: A Literary Field Guide
Edited by Terry Beers and Emily Elrod

From Native American tales and explorers' accounts to fiction and poetry by established and emerging writers, this new anthology is a playful exploration of how animals excite our imagination and compassion. Each piece in the anthology is a snapshot of...

California Uncovered:
 Stories for the 21st Century
Edited by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,
 William E. Justice, and James Quay

As the centerpiece of the California Stories Uncovered program of the California Council for the Humanities, this literary anthology blends the fresh new voices of this state with established California writers like Joan Didion and John Steinbeck. In poems, excerpts...

Bret Harte's Gold Rush: "Outcasts of Poker Flat," "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Tennessee's Partner," and Other Favorites
Bret Harte

These fifteen stories bring the California Gold Rush to life with their boisterous assemblage of rough-clad miners, pistol-packing preachers, iron-willed women, and philosophical gamblers. Theirs was an unpredictable world, filled with gold strikes and freak tragedies, when the wisdom of...

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...

AutoBioDiversity:
 True Stories from ZYZZYVA
Edited by Howard Junker

This collection of true stories celebrates the 20th anniversary of ZYZZYVA, the journal of West Coast writers and artists. Founding editor Howard Junker selects his fifth anthology from the pages of ZYZZYVA, and includes voices from across the full spectrum...