John Freeman

In Susan Straight’s dazzling novel Mecca, the predicaments of three principal characters, juxtaposed against one another, come into sharp focus.

Dagoberto Gilb’s novel The Flowers is a portrait of a young man coming to know the city around him.

Bay Area poet Robert Hass’s second collection, Praise, forged in an age aware of endings, attends closely to the natural world.

How my mother’s exasperation with her three boys ignited a devotion to literature and the questions it poses.

California Book Club host John Freeman revisits Janet Fitch’s Los Angeles novel White Oleander and its memorable protagonist, Astrid Magnussen.

Greg Sarris’s novel in stories maps the hidden forces facing Indigenous people in Santa Rosa.

CBC host John Freeman’s essay about Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World examines what happens when the domestic, the familial, and the child are brought back into the frame of art.

Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain tells a clear-eyed story of how her ancestors overcame harsh conditions and found success in 19th- and 20th-century California.

Ada Limón’s Startlement: New and Selected Poems demonstrates the poet’s progression from ballads of desire to those of connection with the natural world.

Denis Johnson’s novella survives the leap to the screen.

Read a portion of the introduction to John Freeman’s new book of literary essays, the October selection of the California Book Club.

From family letters to poetry and journalism, John Freeman traces the origins of his writing life and the call to share extraordinary journeys through words.

In The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan opens our eyes to the wonders of bird-watching, of “being the bird.”

Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings centers on a protagonist who may not be as perceptive as he believes himself to be.

John Freeman reflects on the environmental costs of modern living. The poem also meditates on concerns raised in Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea and Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, both California Book Club selections.

Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea, the California Book Club’s July selection, asks us to reimagine our approach to ocean rise and shift to more-sustainable paths.

CBC host John Freeman writes about wildfires, crisis, and tending to living things in Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, the California Book Club’s June selection.

In this newsletter, California Book Club host John Freeman writes about landscape, echoes of the past, and Claire Vaye Watkins’s radical debut novel, the May selection.

CBC host John Freeman looks at the resonances that Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, the April California Book Club selection, carries again today.

No list is a match for the state’s astonishing geography, history, and diversity.

In Headshot, the California Book Club’s March selection, novelist Rita Bullwinkel brilliantly captures the consciousness of athletes engaged in sports.

Manuel Muñoz’s most recent collection, the California Book Club’s February selection, is a masterpiece of close-focus stories.

When writing his magnificent debut novel, The Sympathizer, the January California Book Club selection, and other books, author Viet Thanh Nguyen refused to capitulate to the fate colonial forces laid out for him.

Rachel Khong’s debut novel about caring for an elderly, demented parent excavates memories lost and recovered.

A detective’s puzzling out of group interests and division among a wide range of Angelenos is a central and striking element of Gary Phillips’s first novel, the California Book Club’s November selection.

Tobias Wolff’s memoir, the California Book Club’s October selection, entwines the mythologies of boyhood with Wolff’s westward journey and the complex people he observed on the path to becoming a writer.

By taking us deeply into its protagonist’s longings, Danzy Senna’s Colored Television makes the case for fiction.

Helena María Viramontes’s lyrical novel Under the Feet of Jesus, the August California Book Club selection, excavates anguished ground to delve into faith and kindness.

Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, the California Book Club’s selection for July, attends to what it’s like to live in the present moment as we attempt to predict through storytelling

Javier Zamora’s Solito builds upon the aching tenderness contained in his debut poetry collection.

CBC host John Freeman meditates on California Book Club author Gary Snyder’s distinctive voice and use of language across his poems, essays, and translations.

John Freeman writes about the vivid characters who populate the April California Book Club selection, Jessica Hagedorn’s novel of queer love and family.

The author’s books and lectures liberate challenging perspectives from the confines of genre, expectation, and academia.

California Book Club host John Freeman considers the happenstance involved in the occurrences that delineate the lives of characters in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans.

Dave Eggers’s fiction, including the February California Book Club selection, The Every, explores utopian arrangements in which attempts to live up to ideals collide with people and their limitations.

California Book Club host John Freeman writes about the history of the Lakewood suburb in D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, the January CBC selection, and its mirrors.

Carribean Fragoza’s gothic short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, allows us to think about darkness.

California Book Club host John Freeman meditates on author Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians, which retrieves her family’s stories and places them within the frame of broader California Indian history.

Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, the October California Book Club selection, probes the devastating consequences of trusting a technology that outsources memory on the inner lives of the novel’s characters and embraces beauty.

Morning jogs offer surprising ways to interact with nature, the built environment, and oneself.

In Bad Mexicans, the September CBC selection, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández brings Mexican and Mexican American revolutionaries to vivid life.

Author Naomi Hirahara produces tension in Clark and Division, the August CBC selection, by asking the reader to join protagonist Aki Ito in reconstructing the truth from a tumult of perceptions, chatter, and public facts.

In Stay True, author Hua Hsu chronicles the melodies and harmonies of the time before a close friend’s death.

Author Charles Yu expands on his earlier books to describe the way fantasy becomes reality in his satirical novel Interior Chinatown, the June CBC selection.

Poet, critic, and CBC host John Freeman explores the human need to make stories out of disorder in author Percival Everett’s novel Telephone, the May CBC selection.

CBC host John Freeman writes about Claudia Rankine’s positioning of the reader in Citizen, the April California Book Club selection, and what this placement in history and experience reveals about race in our society.

CBC host John Freeman writes about the stunning multiplicity of tales assembled by author Isabel Allende within The House of the Spirits, the March selection.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, the February California Book Club selection, charms readers while slipping in insights about mortality.

Jaime Cortez’s Gordo, the December California Book Club selection, evokes the senses in telling stories about tiny acts of decency.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Gold Coast, the CBC selection for November, portrays the destructive estrangement generated by a society’s invisible systems.

Author Natalia Molina spotlights her grandmother in A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, the October California Book Club selection.

Julie Otsuka’s third novel, the California Book Club selection for September, performs a rescue of what might otherwise be forgotten.

Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, the August California Book Club selection, gives us a new vantage from which to see our own response to refugees.

The beauty of Steph Cha’s symphonic crime novel Your House Will Pay, the June CBC selection, is its portrayal of two families over time.

Maggie Nelson’s book-length essay, the CBC May selection, soups up an age-old genre.

Michael Connelly’s novels revolutionized and reshaped the procedural genre. His latest, The Dark Hours, the California Book Club pick for April, goes further yet in reconfiguring the myth of the knight-errant.

Ada Limón’s new collection, The Hurting Kind, brims with sensory richness and shows her to be a lover of many things: animals, people, and love itself.

Trees, baseball, and summer memories converge in this poem by John Freeman.

In I Hotel, the California Book Club pick for March, Karen Tei Yamashita calls up local and global history but works like a poet.

Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, the California Book Club selection for February, amplifies our lexicon of love and desire.

Tracy K. Smith’s new and selected poems show her gracefully pivoting between light and dark and channeling grief into joy.

Héctor Tobar’s story of a domestic worker reveals fault lines of race and class across Southern California’s planned communities.

His debut novel, There There, contains songs of wonder, grief, and the search for identity.

The author of A Paradise Built in Hell finds utopian possibilities during times of great crisis.