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.
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CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE GOLDEN STATE'S NEW LITERATURE, BY JOHN FREEMAN
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