Like spaces in the real world, the place that a book’s sentences generate can be refracted through many lenses. Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, June’s California Book Club pick, for instance, takes us into an environment some of us know but reveals it to us anew. As readers, we come to the work’s sentences, its screenplay form, and interpret them with our own perceptions of the neighborhood.
The CBC’s contributors see the selected books and, perhaps by extension, the fluctuations of a stunningly various state through different lenses as well. Curious how a heterogeneous landscape, incapable of being within any single set of sentences, influences conversations about the Golden State that take place not only here in our mountains and deserts and suburbs and cities but around the world, I asked five contributors—with books of their own out this year—what their favorite California literary institution is.
Southern California–based writer Katharine Coldiron has written two sharp-eyed pieces of cultural criticism for us, one centered on Rebecca Solnit’s nonfiction book about disasters, A Paradise Built in Hell, and the other on Michael Connelly’s crime novel The Dark Hours. Her new book is Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter. In it, Coldiron delivers a cogent argument that it is only by studying and appreciating Plan 9 from Outer Space, Cop Rock, and other “bad” movies that we understand the techniques of what makes a good film.
In response to my question about her favorite literary institution, Coldiron referenced the Poetic Research Bureau in Los Angeles. She remarked, “The PRB demonstrates handily that L.A. literary culture is thriving in an entirely different way than NYC literary culture. It’s odd and experimental but friendly and openhearted. I’ve never been bored there, never felt anything but fascination and gratitude that it gathers such a unique set of artists and perspectives.” She also mentioned her love for the literary history and atmosphere of Big Sur, saying, “No other place in the state is so fertile with inspiration.”
Lisa Teasley, the Los Angeles–based author of multiple books and also a painter who is working on an opera libretto, penned essays for us on Natalia Molina’s A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and also mentioned Big Sur. Her collagist short story collection Fluid, set in California and other places, featuring characters navigating contemporary challenges, and praised by prior CBC author Myriam Gurba as “strange, sensual, and smart,” will be published in September but can be preordered now.
Teasley emailed, “While I deeply mourn the loss of L.A.’s treasure Eso Won Books, where owners James Fugate and Tom Hamilton supported Black writers and held great community for over three decades, and I also appreciate Beyond Baroque’s over five decades of commitment to literary Los Angeles, I must say my heart sings in breathtaking Big Sur at the Henry Miller Library, where I’ve had events for every book (as I’ve had at beloved Eso Won) and Magnus Torén has been the director there at the library for 30 years and has even hosted me at his off-grid home, and I so appreciate all of the memories, as well as the spirit of Miller himself, which haunts…my favorite of his books, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.”
Last week, CBC contributor and book critic Bethanne Patrick’s memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, was published. Patrick has written essays for us on Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Likes and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Although I’ve read many memoirs on mental illness, I hadn’t read one about double depression before. Double depression is a subtype of depression in which the person suffering from it cycles through lows and then lower lows. This memoir is a brave one that Patrick has worked on for years and is an especially timely book, given the recent wave of conversations in California and around the country about mandated mental healthcare. Like her essays for the California Book Club, Patrick’s memoir considers the traps that women start to face in childhood and continue to face when building their lives in our society.
Patrick named the Huntington Library, in San Marino, as her favorite California institution for “its commitment to different kinds of texts, manuscripts, books, and language-based art of all types.” She noted, “I studied medieval literature in graduate school, so that collection specifically delights me—but the Huntington’s treasures include many other collections, including Pacific Rim, early printing, maps and atlases.… Combine the high levels of research archives with a stunning location and beautiful, supremely Californian gardens and you have a trip worth making many times.”
Author Vanessa Hua’s immersive historical novel Forbidden City, her third book, is now available in paperback. Told from the perspective of a determined teenager who goes from her village to dance with Mao Zedong and turns into his lover, Hua’s fiction brings to life vivid personal struggles against broader, globally significant events. For the CBC, she wrote about Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and next month, she will share her thoughts on Hua Hsu’s Stay True, the July CBC book.
Hua, who grew up in the East Bay, nominated Orinda Books, which opened in 1976, as her favorite literary institution in the state. She explained how fortunate the Bay Area is to have so many independent bookstores and commented, “When I was in high school, then-owner Janet Boreta and the Friends of the Orinda Library sponsored a writing contest that I won two years in a row. That early encouragement for my fiction meant everything to me, and years later, I have cherished reuniting with Janet and other contest organizers at my book launches. The current owner, Pat Rudebusch, supports emerging and established authors.”
One of the most thoughtful and intimate essay collections I read last year was contributor, critic, and novelist Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year, recently published in paperback. Initially conceived of as a diary for the Los Angeles Times, the book chronicles, in confiding prose that reads like a letter from a close friend, the first year of the pandemic, which Finch went through with his family in Los Angeles. The collection unspools personal revelations, imbued with soulfulness, alongside lacerating social and political commentary. For the CBC, he profiled fellow crime novelist Michael Connelly in connection with The Dark Hours and meditated on Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast.
For his favorite Golden State literary institution, Finch happened to choose the one I love the most as well, saying, “For better or worse, L.A. is a driving city, and my favorite literary institution here is the Pacific Coast Highway. When I get truly stuck on a plot, I usually drive up to the far beaches of Malibu—along that oceanside ribbon of asphalt described so memorably in [books by] Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler and The Last Tycoon. By the time I’m home, the plot problem has always solved itself.”•
Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Charles Yu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Interior Chinatown. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read the opening pages of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the CBC event during which author Percival Everett, special guest Aimee Bender, and I talked about Telephone, you can watch a video or read a recap of it. —Alta
STORYTELLING AS PRAXIS
Poet, editor, and CBC host John Freeman writes about Telephone and the making of stories from the material of a disorderly world. —Alta
LIVING HISTORY
Music journalist and editor RJ Smith (Chuck Berry: An American Life) reviews Santi Elijah Holley’s multigenerational biography, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. —Alta
A DOG’S LIFE
Alta Journal editor Matt Haber talks with Dave Eggers, author of, most recently, The Eyes & the Impossible, about writing. —Alta
GOLD AND SILVER MEDALS
The 92nd annual Commonwealth Club California Book Award winners were announced. —Commonwealth Club
ADOLESCENT CRISIS
For his stunning new novel, Shy, Max Porter will appear for an in-person launch event in conversation with Bay Area novelist Susan Steinberg (Machine) on Thursday, May 25, at 6 p.m. Pacific in Kerouac Alley in San Francisco. —City Lights
OSAGE MURDERS
Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s critically acclaimed work of nonfiction Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at Cannes to a standing ovation. The emotional core of the movie is the performance of actor Lily Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. —Hollywood Reporter
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