JULY
British-born Bay Area writer David Thomson digs deep into his cinematic knowledge with A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. Providing close readings of films ranging from 1927’s Metropolis to 2024’s Anora, Thomson traces how our indulgence in passively vicarious experience and romantic myths factors into the current political dystopia.
In his smart, tart fiction debut, False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi weaves together two tangled tales. After the death of his mother, Rita, who grew up in Guyana, actor Jal Persad tries to resurrect his career by concocting a story about her involvement with Jonestown cult leader Jim Jones. The only problem: They never met.
The late, luminously great Kate Braverman is overdue for a reappraisal (see “My Mentor, My Muse”). A new edition of her 1990 story collection, Squandering the Blue, introduced by Marisa Silver, does right by the Los Angeles–based author.
Alicia Upano’s first novel, Everything to the Sea, is set in Hawai‘i, where a summer romance between Jane, a striving architecture student, and Kenji, a taciturn townie, turns much more complicated when a tsunami hits, wreaking unimaginable damage and loss.
Polemics and poetry converge in Tree of Knowledge, the new collection from Victoria Chang, who has a gift for anthropomorphizing the natural world in unforced lines (see “Red Stitches”).
Miss your Anne Rice fix? Check out Chloe Lauter’s The Flayed Man, the story of a Las Vegas triage nurse, Ellis, entrusted with the care of her aging mother, who needs a regular blood fix to stop from turning into a grotty predator. And there’s more: A monster waits in the wings—the eponymous Flayed Man, whom Ellis tracks down in the Mojave Desert. Buckle up.
Claire Vaye Watkins marks new terrain in Yellow Pine, which handles environmental issues with the panache of Joy Williams. This focus is interwoven with the tale of Rose, a single mother trying to make things work in the Mojave. She allies herself with a band of rowdy misfits attempting to stop a corporate solar farm, but her interrogation of the struggle is complicated by the arrival of an ex-boyfriend.
This roundup appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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AUGUST
Moving on from her American lyric trilogy with Triage, Claudia Rankine tells the story of two longtime friends seeking to make sense of their shared but separate lives, amid the “collapse” of many hopes and dreams. “No matter our posture, we are all among the rubble,” Rankine writes.
In ace Los Angeles Times crime reporter James Queally’s new novel, Surviving the Lie, private investigator Russell Avery returns to the fray. After being bounced from his job at a New Jersey newspaper, Avery is drawn into the search for a former colleague who’s gone missing. But he gets more than he bargained for when he meets a group of violent conspiracy theorists.
Changing Gender, a history by trans scholar Susan Stryker, explores the antecedents of the culture wars. Drawing on Stryker’s own experiences as a filmmaker, historian, and activist, this account moves beyond reductionist tropes to imagine a limitless, liminal world in which change is accepted, not feared.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Chang-rae Lee’s A Tender Age, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of American masculinity, is about a Korean American boy, Jeon-Gi, who turns 11 one summer in the 1970s.
SEPTEMBER
Class and crime collide in Acid Green Velvet, from Grace Krilanovich. Two late-19th-century hobos, Paulette and Kenneth, are out for revenge when they arrive in Anzar, a mythical Central Coast town. But there’s more—a lot more—afoot here in Krilanovich’s exuberantly surreal telling.
The Occidental Book of the Dead, by former Berkeleyite and Stegner Fellow T. Geronimo Johnson, explores the conflicts of a Black cop patrolling the mean Atlanta streets he grew up on. When his rookie partner kills a white teenager, the subsequent cover-up of the killing—and the drug bust of a former girlfriend—creates an intolerable burden.
American Flash Fiction, edited by Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin, gathers 100 brilliant bite-size stories by authors from Mark Twain to Lydia Davis, written over 160 years in a wide range of genres.
EDITOR’S PICK
Exit Party
By Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel’s unique, glittering, and intricate mind bender, Exit Party, kicks off in Los Angeles in 2031. After the collapse of the United States, the withdrawal of peacekeeping troops, and the establishment of the Republic of California, Ari, a steely, middle-aged woman emerging from almost two decades in prison and prone to premonitions, finds herself at a party in Silver Lake, only to learn that something strange is happening: A doppelgänger appears, and the host disappears. The story slides not only across continents but also across the futures of two worlds—in the other one, the country hasn’t collapsed but has become a surveillance state. —Anita Felicelli
Paul Wilner is a longtime journalist, poet, and critic who lives in Monterey County. He is the former editor of the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Style section, and managing editor of the Hollywood Reporter. His work has been published in the Paris Review, New York Times, Zyzzyva magazine, Barnes and Noble Review, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.
