A Californian's Guide to the Trees among Us features over 150 of California's most commonly grown trees. Whether native or cultivated, these are the trees that muffle noise, create wildlife habitats, mitigate pollution, conserve energy, and make urban living healthier and more peaceful. Used as a field guide or read with pleasure for the liveliness of the prose, this book will allow readers to learn the stories behind the trees that shade our parks, grace our yards, and line our streets. Rich in photographs and illustrations, overflowing with anecdote and information, A Californian's Guide to the Trees among Us opens our eyes to a world of beauty just outside our front doors.

Filled with fascinating detail and intriguing characters, Rancho Los Alamitos begins over two thousand years ago, when the land was known as Povuu'ngna, an important ancestral village of the Tongva people. By the early twentieth century, Rancho Los Alamitos had become the home and working ranch of Fred and Florence Bixby, whose idyllic way of life was supported by a newly discovered cache of crude oil buried deep within the ground.

Letters, diaries, ledgers, and historic photos paired with lively text explore in detail the living dreams, triumphs, and travails of not only the owners and the workers but also the Tongva people who continue to revere this sacred ground today. The resilience of Rancho Los Alamitos comes from the depth of its cultural and natural diversity, a ready well of renewal, but its legacy echoes the enduring meaning of Povuu'ngna. This is a place of new beginning, a place of value--ever changing and always the same.

Told from the alternating points of view of Don and Sarah, Entangled is an honest and moving memoir in two voices about the devastating consequences of a love affair gone wrong. When Sarah returned to Don, he discovered that she had kept a journal of her affair, and he agreed to join her in reconstructing, through writing, what had happened to them. Entangled is the culmination of this courageous undertaking in the face of pain and betrayal. Their willingness to confront difficult truths led to a relationship that, while changed and injured by circumstance, was still a rich and vibrant source of friendship and acceptance.

How Do I Begin? is the struggle to preserve on paper the Hmong American experience. In this anthology, readers will find elaborate soul-calling ceremonies, a woman questioning the seeming tyranny of her parents and future in-laws, the temptation of gangs and drugs, and the shame and embarrassment of being different in a culture that obsessively values homogeneity. Some pieces revisit the ghosts of war. Others lament the loss of a country. Many offer glimpses into intergenerational tensions exacerbated by the differences in Hmong and American culture.

How Do I Begin? signifies a turning point for the Hmong community, a group of people who have persevered through war, persecution, and exile. Transcending ethnic and geographic boundaries, it poignantly speaks of survival instead of defeat.

Jesse's Ghost is a powerful novel about a man haunted by the crime he committed decades ago and the realization that the ghosts of his past will always haunt him. These are the sons and daughters of the people portrayed in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath—Dust Bowl descendants who came of age when toughness, hard work, and loyalty defined what it meant to be a man in America.

Through the chaos that surrounded him, the risks he took, and despite the mistakes he made, Jesse pursued the American Dream. His friend Sonny, in the moving, funny, and tragic story he narrates in Jesse's Ghost, seeks a new life and redemption.

Rise of the Ranges of Light combines captivating first-person narrative with science writing to tell the story of the ever-changing landscapes of California. Picking up where John Muir left off in the classic The Mountains of California, Gilligan takes the reader on a tour of California's mountains to show how forces of expansion and contraction have manifested themselves for over five hundred million years to create everything we know.

From plate tectonics and devastating glaciers to mass extinction and species competition, the formation of the world is a dramatic and dynamic process. Rise of the Ranges of Light allows readers to witness a world ever in the throes of creation.

Paris Portraits is a short masterpiece. This sparkling manuscript, long hidden in the archives of the University of California's Bancroft Library, brings to life a vibrant and mythic time and place. Through Harriet's eyes, we circulate among the artists and patrons in the salons of Gertrude and Sarah Stein, overhear conversations between the up-and-coming Matisse and his students, and see Gertrude Stein's reaction when she learns of Picasso putting his hand on Toklas's knee. We're present when, while reading the poetry of Tagore, Harriet looks up and for the first time, sees—really sees and understands with the heart—what Matisse is doing.

Paris Portraits enables us to visit, however briefly, a world that has left its mark on our imaginations—and will inspire those generations of writers, poets, and artists to come.

In sparkling prose and with full-color photography, Cityscapes looks at fifty buildings that convey a distinct slice of San Francisco. These are the buildings that are defined by bold visual moves and the ones that offer tactile delight. These are the structures you notice every time you pass by, and the ones that escape notice until the light hits them a certain way. Included are some of San Francisco's most familiar buildings and works by some of architecture's biggest names--but also plenty of buildings that are often ignored yet add a unique texture to this fabled place.

An outgrowth of "Cityscape," a weekly column that debuted in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, Cityscapes is part history, part guidebook, and part architectural primer. And the points it makes about specific buildings convey something true to all great cities--that every building shines in its own way as a distinctive piece in a much larger puzzle, one still being assembled before our eyes.

Stimulated by what we see on the horizon, Heyday issued an open call for the freshest and most thought-provoking submissions, to be included in a new annual series. Publishers, small presses, literary magazines, specialty journals, and bloggers eagerly responded. Sifting through this response, we discovered articles, fiction, poetry, and even excerpts from memoirs. The variety of voices is dazzling, the range of topics broad, but they all have one thing in common: they all address the California experience with courage, vitality, and intelligence.

Every piece in New California Writing 2011 was selected to engage and challenge the reader--to move beyond the stale repetition of the daily news into the realm of literature that can ignite the imagination and enlarge the vision. Included among the contributors are well-known writers such as Rebecca Solnit, Mark Arax, Susan Straight, Mike Davis, William T. Vollmann, and Michael Chabon as well as emerging voices. New California Writing 2011 isn't just the start of a visionary new series, it marks the beginning of a new decade for California.

Early works include a letter written by Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of California; an excerpt from mountain man, freed slave, and honorary Crow Indian James Beckwourth; and a poem written by James Madison Bell and recited to a public gathering of black people commemorating the death of President Lincoln. More recent contributions include pieces from beat poet Bob Kaufman, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, comedian Brian Copeland, and feminists Lucille Clifton and June Jordan.

When the Tree of Time is only a seedling, Hannibal and his elephants are crossing the Alps. While the sequoia grows, humankind progresses from wooden-wheeled chariots and rock paintings to space ships on the moon and computers.

Children will be captivated by the parade of events illustrated here, and there's an informative time-line of world history that runs throughout the book. The reader is left with a real appreciation for the remarkable age of the Tree of Time and giant sequoias generally.

When all hope seemed gone and the last search party had left the Minarets, mountaineering legend Norman Clyde refused to give up. Climbing alone, he persevered in the face of failure, resolved that he would learn the fate of the lost man.

Clyde's discovery and the events that followed make for compelling reading. Recently reissued with a new afterword, this re-creation of a famous episode in the annals of the Sierra Nevada is mountaineering literature at its best.

Visit the website at www.newsfromnativecalifornia.com.

This pamphlet, produced in conjunction with the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, provides an overview of these remarkable families, describes their backgrounds, and investigates the ways in which they reshaped early California. It also provides us with an image of a society in which the relationships between races, and racism itself, were far different, and perhaps less rigidly understood, than they are today.