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.