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What is the California Book Club?
Every month, Alta Journal’s California Book Club showcases a novel, poetry collection, memoir, or nonfiction book related to the Golden State. We publish a range of essays, literary criticism, Q&As, profiles, roundups, and recipes that keep readers engaged with different aspects of the book and offer fresh perspectives on the state’s literary landscape. Our coverage culminates in a free virtual and live-streaming event at which host John Freeman converses with the author of the book and a special guest, while audience members are invited to pose questions. Events are typically held on the third Thursday of the month at 5 p.m. Pacific time.
Writers we’ve featured include Walter Mosley, Rebecca Solnit, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isabel Allende, Michael Connelly, Natalie Diaz, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, and Gary Snyder, among many others. Some of our authors have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, PEN America awards, and National Book Critics Circle Awards, but we also take care to champion those deserving California books that may not have received as much attention.
Why Join Us?
Maybe you grew up here. Maybe you visited and fell in love with the state. Maybe you just want to learn more about it. This is your online place to discover California’s literature and some of its finest minds, alongside other readers in a book-centric community. You’ll have access to the meaningful insights presented in the virtual conversations as well as in written Q&As and in essays by featured authors and Freeman, an influential and erudite critic, poet, and editor. You will also be able to view any past California Book Club events that interest you.
Additionally, members receive our weekly newsletter, in which we share a wide range of perspectives about the month’s pick by journalists, critics, and other authors. In the newsletter, you can also access insider takes on the literary landscape, noteworthy long-form essays about the state’s fascinating and varied histories, and a roundup of current literary news items about the West from other publications.
The writing Alta focuses on is set in city centers as well as suburbs, rural areas, and small towns across the region, and the same inclusive ethos pervades our programming. Few other public book clubs devote as much attention to fun and thought-provoking commentary on their picks as well as literary history and news.
History of the California Book Club
This club was founded by Blaise Zerega, Alta’s editorial director, and Freeman in spring 2020 to reexamine the literary canon—and the state’s place in it. Zerega and Freeman discussed holding virtual events to feature the best books about the state or by its authors. Freeman, along with six distinguished journalists and scholars, convened as a panel to choose each month’s selection and help shape the nature and direction of the club. The other panelists are Alta books editor David L. Ulin, journalist and author Lynell George, editor and critic Oscar Villalon, author and professor Danzy Senna, professor Marissa López, and City Lights Bookstore lead buyer Paul Yamazaki. Anita Felicelli serves as the club’s editor, weighing in on picks, assigning coverage, and interacting with our thousands of members.
To support the club, Alta partners with these excellent booksellers, libraries, literary publications, and organizations: Book Passage, Book Soup, Books Inc., Bookshop West Portal, Bookshop.org, Camino Books, Green Apple Books, Vroman’s Bookstore, Narrative, Zyzzyva, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. We encourage you to support our bookstore partners by buying your club selections—and other books, too!—from them.
The book club’s first event was held online on October 15, 2020, and featured C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Every quarter, recommendations and original essays by or brief interviews with the authors also appear in Alta’s print quarterly magazine. Since the first event, more than 15,000 members have signed up.
Since 2020, we’ve featured more than 50 important books and authors focused on diverse California experiences and matters pertinent to the state. Each conversation has a different tenor, but all are lively and provide insight. Our first live event was held in autumn 2024. Find out more details of the club’s founding here.
More About Our Partners
Alta’s partners in the California Book Club represent a unique collaboration of great bookstores, libraries, and literary publications across the state. We are honored to be building this community with:
BOOK PASSAGE
One of the nation’s leading independent bookstores, Book Passage has locations in Corte Madera and in the iconic Ferry Building in San Francisco. Over the past four decades, the stores have featured more than 10,000 author events, with guests ranging from prizewinning novelists to world leaders; currently they are continuing the tradition with the online program Conversations with Authors. Book Passage also works closely with schools and community groups and has helped foster many writing careers through its programs of classes, workshops, book groups, writers’ groups, consultations, and conferences.
BOOK SOUP
Located on the world-famous Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, Book Soup was founded by Glenn Goldman and has been serving readers, writers, artists, rock ’n’ rollers, and celebrities since 1975. Known for its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, high-profile author readings, limited-edition books, vinyl record reissues, and celebrity clientele, Book Soup is an essential stop on any tour of Los Angeles.
BOOKS INC.
An independently owned and operated bookseller with 10 locations throughout the Bay Area, Books Inc. can trace its history to the California gold rush days of 1851—making it the West’s oldest independent bookseller.
BOOKSHOP
Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Described as the “Rebel Alliance to Amazon’s Empire,” it was created to help resource-strapped small bookstores with a simple, easy, and free method of competing with Amazon for online sales. Bookshop provides an alternative to Amazon’s affiliate program (which pays a fee for every sale a website or individual refers to it) that more directly supports independent bookstores. Bookshop is a B Corporation, dedicated to the public good of supporting bookshops as sustainable and vital members of the communities they serve.
BOOKSHOP WEST PORTAL
Bookshop West Portal is a locally owned, independent bookstore situated in the heart of the West Portal neighborhood in San Francisco. It has been a meeting place for more than 16 years and is staffed by a group of booksellers with an enthusiasm for books and serving the community.
DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE
Known for its fascinating selection of titles, stunning author events, enthusiastically diverse staff, and urban California aesthetic, DIESEL is the cutting-edge, high octane, community-radiating, independent neighborhood bookstore we all dream of hanging out in, getting imaginally turned on in, and literarily inspired by.
GREEN APPLE BOOKS
Richard Savoy founded Green Apple Books in 1967. He was 25 years old, had done a tour in the Army and worked as a radio technician for United Airlines, but he had little business experience. With a deep love of the written word, some savings, and a credit union loan, he got a lease in a pre-1906 Richmond district building near the corner of Clement Street and Sixth Avenue, next door to a shoe repair business. His stock of used books, comics, and National Geographic magazines attracted a following in the neighborhood, one that has continued to grow for more than 54 years.
HUNTINGTON-USC INSTITUTE ON CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST
Founded in 2004, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West is a center for scholarly investigation of the history and culture of California and the American West. Through sponsorship of innovative scholarship, teaching, and public outreach, ICW draws on the resources of the University of Southern California and the Huntington Library to build a distinctive collaboration between a research university and a research library. Current and ongoing projects include a multiyear, multidisciplinary investigation focused on the past, present, and future of wildfire in the West; a research and oral history initiative examining the aerospace history of Southern California; a research and immersive-augmented-reality experience exploring the now-demolished first Chinatown of Los Angeles; and a yearlong program that teaches high school students about the infrastructural intricacies and history of greater Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY
A recipient of the nation’s highest honor for library service—the National Medal from the Institute of Museum and Library Services—the Los Angeles Public Library serves the largest and most diverse urban population of any library in the nation. Its Central Library, 72 branch libraries, collection of more than six million books, state-of-the-art technology accessible at lapl.org, and more than 25,000 programs a year provide everyone with free and easy access to information and the opportunity for lifelong learning.
NARRATIVE
Founded in 2003, Narrative is dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership across generations, in schools, and around the globe. As a premier digital publisher of first-rank fiction, poetry, essays, and art, Narrative, a nonprofit, publishes hundreds of well-known and emerging writers every year. The annual Narrative Prize helped launch the careers of authors Min Jin Lee, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Anthony Marra, and Javier Zamora, among others. The Narrative in the Schools program supports teachers and students around the world who are too often hampered by limited resources and provides lesson plans, video tutorials, and the annual Tell Me a Story high school writing contest to inspire a new generation of readers and writers. Narrative was founded on the conviction that there should be no socioeconomic barrier to accessing great literature; its ever-expanding, modern library of thousands of stories, poems, and essays is free to all.
SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY
The San Francisco Public Library system is dedicated to free and equal access to information, knowledge, independent learning, and the joys of reading for its diverse community.
VROMAN’S BOOKSTORE
Founded in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman, a photographer who loved giving books to his community, Vroman’s Bookstore is located in Pasadena. Through the years, it has remained an independently owned family business, now consisting of two Vroman’s locations, two Vroman’s boutiques (located at Los Angeles International Airport), and a robust e-commerce site.
ZYZZYVA
Since its founding in 1985 in San Francisco, ZYZZYVA has had the goal of publishing a superb literary journal that shines a spotlight on West Coast poets, writers, and artists from a wide range of backgrounds, providing a much-needed platform to many who would otherwise be overlooked. The journal has evolved into a nationally distributed, widely acclaimed publication showcasing contributors from across the country and around the world. Reflecting the values that have made San Francisco a cultural beacon, ZYZZYVA is defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism and by its focus on inclusivity and excellence.
More About Our Selection Panel
The panel of six distinguished literary figures from across California who join host John Freeman to select titles for the California Book Club are Alta books editor and author David L. Ulin, journalist and author Lynell George, UCLA professor Marissa López, novelist and essayist Danzy Senna, ZYZZYVA managing editor Oscar Villalon, and City Lights Booksellers lead buyer Paul Yamazaki.
John Freeman
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published by Grove Press, the latest theme of which is California. He has written several books of nonfiction, including How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as two collections of poems, Maps and The Park. The former editor of Granta, he is now artist in residence at New York University and the executive editor of Literary Hub. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a series of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the climate crisis and global inequality. Freeman’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and ZYZZYVA. Raised in Sacramento, he lives in New York.
Twitter: @FreemanReads
Lynell George
Lynell George is an award-winning journalist and essayist based in Los Angeles. She has been a staff writer for L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian, Vibe, the Washington Post, Essence, Ms., and other publications. She has also provided arts commentary for KCET’s Artbound and KPCC’s The Frame. She is the author of No Crystal Stair: African-Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday) and After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, a collection of her essays and photographs published by Angel City Press. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky a Go Go and a Los Angeles Press Club prize in 2020 for Feature Writing. Her new book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, will be published by Angel City Press in October 2020.
Twitter: @lynellgeorge
Instagram: @lynellgeorgewriter
Marissa López
Marissa López is a professor of English and Chicana/o studies at UCLA, researching Chicanx literature from the 19th century to the present, with an emphasis on 19th-century Mexican California. She has written two books: Chicano Nations (NYU Press, 2011), about nationalism and Chicanx literature from the early 1800s to post-9/11, and Racial Immanence (NYU Press, 2019), which explores uses of the body and affect in Chicanx cultural production. She recently completed a yearlong residency at the Los Angeles Public Library as a Scholars & Society fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies, during which she worked to collaboratively develop a mobile app, Picturing Mexican America, that uses geodata to display images of Mexican California relevant to a user’s location.
Twitter: @marissaklopez
Instagram: @picturingmexicanamerica
Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Caucasia, Symptomatic, and, most recently, New People, named one of the best books of the year by Time, Vogue, and the New York Times. Senna is a recipient of the Whiting Award and the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
David L. Ulin
David L. Ulin is Alta’s books editor. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, short-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. Most recently, he edited Didion: The 1960s & 70s and the forthcoming Didion: The 1980s & 90s for the Library of America. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for the Atlantic, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation and teaches at the University of Southern California.
Twitter: @davidulin
Oscar Villalon
Oscar Villalon is the editor of Zyzzyva. His writing has appeared in the Believer, Freeman’s, Literary Hub, Alta, Zocalo Public Square, and other publications. A longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle, he has twice served on fiction juries for the Pulitzer Prize. From 2002 to 2008, he was the book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Twitter: @ovillalon
Paul Yamazaki
Paul Yamazaki is the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, where he has been a bookseller since 1970. Yamazaki has served on the board of directors of several literary and community arts organizations; among them are the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, Small Press Distribution, and the Kearny Street Workshop. Yamazaki was a jury member for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2 and was on the jury for the 2014 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He is a recipient of the Litquake Barbary Coast Award.•