We’re thrilled to welcome Myriam Gurba back to the California Book Club, as the special guest to talk about Venita Blackburn’s original novel Dead in Long Beach, California, the July CBC selection, with Blackburn and host John Freeman.
If you’ve been a CBC member since the first year, you may remember that Gurba’s memoir, Mean, was the April 2021 CBC choice. Gustavo Arellano, an Alta Journal contributing editor and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, served as the guest host for the lively gathering, noting that Gurba was one of his favorite writers. He called the book “badass,” and we couldn’t agree more.
Gurba is also the author of a phenomenal and provocative work of cultural criticism and memoir, Creep: Accusations and Confessions, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In my review for Alta, I commented on the “intoxicating, lived quality to Gurba’s style of analysis, her willingness to expose the funny and the cruel and the grotesque in a single breath,” and this sort of motley approach to contemporary California is kin to what Blackburn does in her work, from Dead in Long Beach, California to her two superb short story collections, How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories and Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories.
Other books by Gurba include Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories. Her chapbooks include River Candy, Sweatsuits of the Damned, and Wish You Were Me. She is editor in chief of the online magazine Tasteful Rude, and she cofounded the grassroots organization Dignidad Literaria. Her work has also appeared in Time, the Paris Review, and the Believer. In case you missed it, Gurba wrote a stunning essay, “In the Cemetery Where Jenni Rivera Is Buried,” on Long Beach, California, which we published a few weeks ago.
Don’t miss this conversation—two smart, daring writers and your host, Freeman, talking about a unique debut novel that calls up significant social scenes in the Golden State, ones that rarely make it into what’s designated literature. It’s bound to be fantastic.•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Gurba to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
DEFLECTIVE SHIMMER
CBC host John Freeman writes about Blackburn’s novel, which “moves like life—speedily, knowingly, metafictionally, and, still, devastatingly.” —Alta
REALITY AND RATIONALE
Poet and critic Steffan Triplett writes about Blackburn’s brilliant contemplation of expectation, the self, and gender in the internet age. —Alta
ELUSIVE STAR
Critic Mark Athitakis reviews veteran music critic Ann Powers’s Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. He shares Powers’s insight, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mitchell never stopped working as a confessional songwriter.” —Alta
CATACLYSMIC EVENT
Journalist and author Tom Teicholz writes the story of how the devastating Woolsey Fire destroyed all of Malibu artist Lita Albuquerque’s tangible artifacts. Albuquerque’s otherworldly installation Stellar Axis: Antarctica is showing at Stanford University’s Anderson Collection through August 18. —Alta
PARABLE YEAR
Octavia E. Butler’s prescient, dystopian novel Parable of the Sower begins on July 20, 2024. To mark this, author and CBC selection panelist Lynell George (A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky) kept a daybook of entries about what crossed her path in 2024. —Alta
DEATH SQUADS
Read journalist and Alta researcher Alessandra Bergamin’s important investigation of harrowing extrajudicial killings of environmental defenders in the Philippines. She previously wrote about forced disappearances there in connection with Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love. —In These Times
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