John Freeman at Elliott Bay Book Company
Join John Freeman and legendary Seattle bookseller Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Book Company for a conversation around Freeman’s new book, California Rewritten.
Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, “Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now.” Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California’s literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal‘s popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state’s most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.
John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015-2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
John Freeman at Pegasus Books Downtown
Join John Freeman and Andrew Sean Greer (author of Less) for an in-person celebrating California Rewritten at Pegasus Books Downtown.
John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015–2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of eight works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Less and its companion Less Is Lost. He lives in San Francisco and Venice, Italy.
Heyday Presents: John Freeman and Tommy Orange
Join us for another installment of our Heyday Presents conversation series, featuring John Freeman and Tommy Orange, discussing Freeman's California Rewritten and the new literature of California. This event is in partnership with Clio's Books in Oakland, CA.
Heyday Members get free tickets to all Heyday Presents events, as well a host of other perks (including a copy of California Rewritten). Click here to learn more.
Groundbreaking authors John Freeman and Tommy Orange have both worked to expand and renew the idea of "Californian Literature." Freeman's new book CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN is a collection of essays on recent generations of writers from the Golden State and how their work—across novels, poetry, bookselling, and beyond—speaks to an enlargement of the kind of voices that are discussed as canonical. Orange's bestselling novels, THERE, THERE (2018) and WANDERING STARS (2024), explore a cast of Indigenous characters living in Oakland as they contend, or refuse to, with the brutal histories of of settlement, displacement, and genocide that have led up to the present day.
The title of Orange's first book responds to the infamous quote by Gertrude Stein, who upon returning to her hometown of Oakland wrote "There is no there there." Both Freeman and Orange are engaged with the work of place-making, asserting the presence of voices and traditions that are otherwise erased, dismissed, or improperly credited. How might we uplift these voices? What do we mean when we talk about "California" when it comes to art and literature?
In this Heyday Presents event at Clio's Books, Freeman and Orange explore themes of resiliency, canonization, and art as one step among many in the needful work of speaking back to history and asserting there has always been a there there.
John Freeman at Kepler's Books
Joins us to dive into the revelatory worlds of California’s most exciting writers, and discover how their books uncover our history and can help us imagine our shared future with John Freeman and Elaine Castillo.
John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015–2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelistand Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Elaine Castillo, named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library.
John Freeman at Alta California Book Club (Virtual)
Join Heyday author John Freeman in celebrating 5 years of the Alta California Book Club, with a virtual talk around his new book California Rewritten. John will be joined in conversation by a guest to be announced.
This year is the fifth anniversary of the California Book Club, which coalesced around ideas about the need for a new California canon put forward by editor, critic, and poet John Freeman and published in Alta Journal. Starting in October 2020 with C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Freeman wrote a monthly piece of literary criticism about a featured book during the lead-up to the club’s Zoom gathering. Many of these essays, some slightly expanded, now appear in the pages of his book California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature, which leads us through his humane and erudite reflections on the state’s literature. Organized by theme into conversations about “Early Myths” and “Exploding Fantasias” in the Golden State, the book discusses contemporary classics by Deborah A. Miranda, Karen Tei Yamashita, Walter Mosley, Helena María Viramontes, Michael Connelly, Claudia Rankine, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Laila Lalami. To read Freeman’s essays is to feel oneself enlarged, in the presence of something a bit transcendent—and the feeling is exponentially increased by reading the collection as a whole.
John Freeman at Bart's Books
Join Heyday author John Freeman and Steph Cha (Your House Will Pay) for a conversation about California literature(s).
In California Rewritten Freeman offers probing critical engagement with the writers whose works are defining this new West Coast sensibility. Across 50 essays collected from his writings for Alta, he features 49 authors and one keystone literary powerhouse that together comprise a 21st-century California canon. He spotlights the poets—Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Gary Snyder—whose voices defy the boundaries of the genre. He delves into the watershed works of the novelists—Percival Everett, Rachel Khong, Viet Thanh Nguyen—at the vanguard of a new firmament of American classics. And he explores the memoirists—Deborah Miranda, Javier Zamora, Maxine Hong Kingston—whose worlds offer a gripping, if sobering mirror, for our society.
Collectively these works address pressing concerns for our era: What is the meaning of a place, and how do we belong to it? How does the past imprison our present? What fears hobble our imaginations, and what kind of tomorrow could we possibly build if we liberated them? In short, Freeman, in this savvy and perceptive volume, shows why Californians deserve to be read the world over.
John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020 and is the author, most recently, of California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015–2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.
John Freeman at Skylight Books
Join John Freeman and Héctor Tobar in celebrating the release of California Rewritten at Skylight Books in LA.
Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, "Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people--at the highest level--has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now." Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California's literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal's popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state's most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.
John Freeman has hosted Alta's California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman's (2015-2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-born author of six books, including, most recently, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino," winner of the Kirkus Prize and other honors. His nonfiction Deep Down Dark was a New York Times bestseller, and his novel The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award. Tobar’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, and he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine, where he is currently a professor. At the Los Angeles Times he was a foreign correspondent and won a Pulitzer Prize. Tobar has been a Guggenheim fellow, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, and a contributor to The New Yorker. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
Debuts October 2025 — California Rewritten
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Book Charts California’s 21st-Century Literary Canon
Knopf Editor John Freeman proposes the contours of a contemporary California canon, encompassing 49 West Coast writers and an iconic 70-year-old literary institution.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — For a state that has projected its studio-lot image across the globe, California has remained largely undersung in the world of letters, too often left to languish in the shadow of the East Coast’s literary hegemony. To rectify this peculiar imbalance, Knopf Editor John Freeman offers a thoroughgoing survey of the major voices and modern-day classics burgeoning out of the West Coast in his latest collection California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature.
“Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now,” says Freeman. In the last ten years alone, Californians have won more Pulitzers in literature than writers from any other region of the United States, he points out. Moreover, readers have a real appetite for these perspectives: Freeman, in his role as host for Alta Journal’s California Book Club, commands an audience of 20,000 members and counting, and California authors like Amy Tan and Tommy Orange perch on the New York Times bestseller lists for weeks and sometimes months on end.
In California Rewritten Freeman offers probing critical engagement with the writers whose works are defining this new West Coast sensibility. Across 50 essays collected from his writings for Alta, he features 49 authors and one keystone literary powerhouse that together comprise a 21st-century California canon. He spotlights the poets—Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Gary Snyder—whose voices defy the boundaries of the genre. He delves into the watershed works of the novelists—Percival Everett, Rachel Khong, Viet Thanh Nguyen—at the vanguard of a new firmament of American classics. And he explores the memoirists—Deborah Miranda, Javier Zamora, Maxine Hong Kingston—whose worlds offer a gripping, if sobering mirror, for our society.
Collectively these works address pressing concerns for our era: What is the meaning of a place, and how do we belong to it? How does the past imprison our present? What fears hobble our imaginations, and what kind of tomorrow could we possibly build if we liberated them? In short, Freeman, in this savvy and perceptive volume, shows why Californians deserve to be read the world over.
Praise for California Rewritten
“In California Rewritten, Freeman writes with singular precision and intelligence about new California literature, animating that mysterious relationship that unfolds when a writer’s imagination engages with place. In Freeman’s hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation.”
—INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds
“John Freeman’s crisp, incisive essays cast a wonderfully sensitive eye on a wide-ranging collection of people who’ve written about this state in novels, reportage, memoir, history, and more. Step aside, New York; the center of the American literary universe has moved here.”
—ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of American Midnight
“Here is vindication of all that I have argued the last fifty years—that California has had and currently has the richest, the most literary tradition in the country, the most recent of which is so beautifully chronicled in this book. I know I’m not the only California writer to say, Thank you, John Freeman.”
—GREG SARRIS, author of The Forgetters and Grand Avenue
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John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020 and is the author, most recently, of California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015–2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.
