For Alta Journal’s Issue 31, the editors decided to take a big swing: identifying the 25 novels that define California. To help us, we tapped authors, critics, and booksellers to suggest titles across genres as well as submit longer answers to help refine our understanding of the essential California novel and California writer. We were astonished by our contributors’ insights.
For this week’s newsletter, Alta’s giving a behind-the-scenes look at the survey responses that shaped Issue 31, which is now available for purchase at your local retailer and online. Enjoy.
José Vadi, author of Inter State: Essays from California
“A California book should have a highway or interstate at some point in its journey; the characters’ way of traveling on it could vary—by bus, hitchhike, small plane. Even mopeds could probably make it across the Grapevine. Which is to say, a California novel is a journey—of space, ideas, identity, topography—toward something beyond its current state. I feel like California books are always looking toward a future or longing for a past, with the present tense stuck between these two dreams.”
Carolina A. Miranda, independent culture writer
“For me, a California book is one written for people in California, not a bunch of judgy eggheads on the East Coast. As Eve Babitz once wrote of Nathanael West, ‘People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them it’s not all blue skies and pink sunsets, so they don’t have to worry: It’s shallow, corrupt and ugly.’”
Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein, director of communications for the California Native Vote Project
“The best California books deeply mystify their surroundings in ways we could never imagine, entrancing even those readers who’ve been in those surroundings their entire lives and forever altering their perception of those places. Even the seemingly banal becomes heavy: ‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,’ writes Bret Easton Ellis in Less Than Zero. Once you read the line, it becomes truth in real life. Similarly, in Stealing Home, Eric Nusbaum lets us feel the corruption of 1950s L.A. while painting a vivid picture of the communities of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop, in Chavez Ravine pre–Dodger Stadium. Dare you to drive Stadium Way and not think about the racist, greed-driven displacement of entire communities.”
Tod Goldberg, author of The Low Desert and Gangsterland
“[Being a California writer] means that you never use the word bodega in your fiction. That you’d rather be shot into the sun than abbreviate the state as ‘Cali’ or San Francisco as ‘Frisco’ or call Los Angeles ‘Tinseltown.’ It means that there’s a good chance the books you like to read and the books you like to write at some point have a character opining on the best burritos or just eating one. It means that scenes that take place in cars don’t need to move quickly. It means that you know the last gunslinger of the West became a laconic private detective. It means that you don’t ever, ever, ever need to care about what happens in Brooklyn, ever.”
Edan Lepucki, author of Time’s Mouth
“A California writer has lived in California long enough to have all of its contradictory elements—lightness and darkness, natural and unnatural—seeped into their bones, their voice, their style. A California writer is uninhibited, daring, a little uncouth, new. We come from a powerful state, but we’re also far from the publishing industry and their parties. Maybe that frees us. Maybe that gives us chips on our shoulders. A bit of both, probably.”
Mark Haskell Smith, author of Blown
“An openness, a freedom to collage and shape-shift and polyglot everything and anything. There’s something fresh and nervy about California writing: It’s not parochial, not tied to form or academia or any hidebound New England traditions; it’s freewheeling, weird, and breezy, an acid trip, a new tattoo.”
Anita Felicelli, Alta’s California Book Club editor and the author of Love Songs for a Lost Continent
“A California book is one that addresses some aspect of California as it exists, whether historically or in contemporary terms, or that looks into the California imaginary, past and future. Perhaps on a more instinctual level, I feel like California books operate on values that are more lateral, less hierarchical, more unconventional, more diverse, and more daring than fiction from other places.”
Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
“A ‘California Book’ doesn’t have to adhere to the surf-and-sand stereotype (though those books have their place). Instead, the best California books complicate the narrative, bringing to light the state’s immense cultural, historical, and geographic diversity. They tell stories about the people who call this place home—farmworkers, Dreamers, immigrants, transplants, and everyone in between—and explore the dynamic, messy realities that lie beyond the Golden State’s glittering image.”•
Have thoughts about our list of 25 novels? Join the chorus! Please tell us what picks you agree with—and what books we missed. Send emails to letters@altaonline.com.
