We asked authors, critics, and booksellers: What is your favorite California novel? We received more than 200 nominees and tallied the results to arrive at the top 25. Whether you are looking to build a California library from scratch or revisit some old favorites, we’ve got the list for you.
A Novel Challenge
No list is a match for the state’s astonishing geography, history, and diversity. By John Freeman
The Methodology
Get to know the process and the panelists behind the selection of these 25 titles.
The Books
The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
“There are those who believe Los Angeles is a city where dreams come to die. They run out of space as the continent butts against the Pacific. There is nowhere else to go.” —Ivy Pochoda
Devil in a Blue Dress
By Walter Mosley
“In Mosley’s work, tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction exist to be turned upside down—they’re made deeper by the author’s understanding of history and racial tension.” —Heather Scott Partington
Golden Days
By Carolyn See
“Even (or especially) in the face of catastrophe, See writes about the city as it is. ‘They say L.A. is large,’ she tells us.”—David L. Ulin
The Joy Luck Club
By Amy Tan
“Amy Tan’s blockbuster novel understands the Bay Area as a threshold to new identities, depicting not only the deep international roots of many of California’s residents but also the chasm between younger generations and their immigrant parents.” —Heather Scott Partington
Ask the Dust
By John Fante
“The strength of Fante’s novel is that it is not rhapsodic so much as realistic, portraying Bandini, as well as the city itself, in complicated ways.” —David L. Ulin
Play It As It Lays
By Joan Didion
“There’s menace in the way those raw mountains hang over the brightness, the players utterly uninterested, by all appearances, in what lies beyond.” —Anna E. Clark
There There
By Tommy Orange
“Orange’s novel holds sacred those spaces where security, even in tragedy, is found through community, within a city whose headlines often depict neither.” —José Vadi
East of Eden
By John Steinbeck
“In this sweeping California epic, Steinbeck retells nothing less than a portion of the book of Genesis, reworking the story of Cain and Abel.” —Blaise Zerega
Angle of Repose
By Wallace Stegner
“Stegner lifts scenes from Mary Hallock Foote and enhances them. While this is within the purview of a novelist, more problematic is that he incorporates, verbatim, enormous chunks of her writing.” —Sands Hall
The Dharma Bums
By Jack Kerouac
“Kerouac’s breakthrough may have been his 1957 novel, On the Road, but I’ve always preferred his follow-up, The Dharma Bums.” —David L. Ulin
Fat City
By Leonard Gardner
“This is a California where ‘catastrophes seemed to whisper just beyond hearing.’ ” —Heather Scott Partington
Mecca
By Susan Straight
“There is no California without natural beauty and risk, and yet people have long sought opportunity in its apocalyptic landscape.” —Heather Scott Partington
City of Night
By John Rechy
“What makes the novel so arresting is its bluntness, which may have to do with its development; the first chapter was composed as a letter.” —David L. Ulin
Parable of the Sower
By Octavia E. Butler
“Parable of the Sower resonates because of the historical chords it strikes, all its echoes of Los Angeles and California history.” —William Deverell
The Sympathizer
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Their lives also embody the dizzying nature of the refugee experience, which involves leaving your homeland not in pursuit of abstract ideas about a better life but because one day you find yourself on the wrong end of a war and it’s time to run.” —Carolina A. Miranda
The Barbarian Nurseries
By Héctor Tobar
“Tobar turns this meaning on its head, asking, Who are the real barbarians?” —Anita Felicelli
The Maltese Falcon
By Dashiell Hammett
“The granddaddy of San Francisco noir, with its dark streets and moody fog and cynics, is surely Dashiell Hammett’s masterpiece.” —Anita Felicelli
If He Hollers Let Him Go
By Chester Himes
“We feel the pinpricks and absorb the slights, his simmer-to-roilingboil escalations. We sense, too, the capacity for his fury, in a moment, to deescalate.” —Lynell George
The Tortilla Curtain
By T.C. Boyle
“The lacuna between California’s humanistic political reputation and the grim reality of the state’s treatment of immigrants, the unsheltered, and those without means is illustrated to great effect.” —Heather Scott Partington
Less Than Zero
By Bret Easton Ellis
“In light of Less Than Zero’s influence, it’s hard to believe that Ellis was merely 21 years old when the novel was published.” —Anita Felicelli
Interior Chinatown
By Charles Yu
“This is a brilliant allegory for Asian American life in California that manages to be wildly entertaining and sympathetic but also distinctively intelligent at the level of metaphor.” —Anita Felicelli
The Sellout
By Paul Beatty
“The book deals with gentrification, police violence, and racism. But Beatty didn’t need a crystal ball for his biting satire.” —Michael Schaub
Under the Feet of Jesus
By Helena María Viramontes
“Viramontes’s pointillistic style paints fetid living conditions with the same vivid colors as rows of ripe, colorful vegetables waiting for brown, cracked hands to pick them.” —Gustavo Arellano
The Mars Room
By Rachel Kushner
“This eagle-eyed, unsparing novel is an astute consideration of a birthright of hardship.” —Anita Felicelli
The Big Sleep
By Raymond Chandler
“Raymond Chandler may not have invented noir, but he gave the form a Southern California edge.” —David L. Ulin
Also
- Kim Stanley Robinson: Overlooked Evocations
- Paradise Lost: The Tragedy of James Dean
- Ask a Bookseller: Their Favorite Books
- Tod Goldberg: What Makes a California Writer?
- Writers’ Haunts: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco
- Natalia Molina: What Makes a California Novel?
- Booktail: The California Novel
- Great Minds Think Alike: The California Book Club
- Break the Bank: First Editions
