By now, you may be thoroughly in the grips of Gary Phillips’s landmark hard-boiled mystery novel Violent Spring (and if you haven’t started yet, make sure to check out the opening pages). The book was Phillips’s debut, and in it, we’re introduced to a smart and tough private investigator, Ivan Monk, investigating the murder of a Korean merchant and also to the host of fictional Angelenos who surround him. Phillips’s social justice work as a community organizer provides particular insights into the society portrayed. Violent Spring is a South Central Los Angeles book that combines the renegade energy and action sequences of PI novels with deep social awareness of the roles played by officials, businesspeople, and journalists, each of them bringing to bear, in their work, their individual personalities and life experiences. It’s also a sensuous love story between two people whose efforts toward justice are sometimes diametrically opposite.
It’s Election Day (go vote!), and winter is coming soon enough—you’ve asked that we let you know the next quarter’s picks as early as possible, and we’re eager to share them with you now. For the first three months of 2025, we have these outstanding books by gifted California authors for you to read.•
THE SYMPATHIZER, By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Narrated by an unnamed biracial Communist sympathizer and spy—a man of two faces—who has been imprisoned in a detention camp, this novel burst onto the literary scene in 2015. It demanded with stunning imagination and satirical incisiveness that readers consider the Vietnam War (or, as the Vietnamese know it, the American War) from the Vietnamese American perspective, all while delivering up an entertaining novel that uses various literary approaches, including those of metafiction and the picaresque. Addressing a Commandant in a coerced confession, the narrator tells of his path toward becoming a North Vietnamese mole who infiltrates the South Vietnamese army—he is educated in and later works in Southern California. Cursed or blessed with the ability to see multiple points of view, he is able to become intimate with people whose beliefs are different from his own. If this richly allusive, intellectually fierce novel is not already an indisputable classic of American literature, that is no doubt its fate.
THE CONSEQUENCES, BY Manuel Muñoz
It’s sometimes taught that literary short stories are about the moment when things change for a character such that nothing is the same afterward. In this profound collection, the emotional repercussions of decisions made at crucial moments can have quietly devastating consequences, much as they might in real life. The finely crafted stories are achingly aware of the difficulties our world places in front of migrants, but the characters’ psychological movements toward realizations are delicate. These are aquatints about Mexican Americans in small towns near Fresno who venture into Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Texas. A sister forever trying to save her adult brother, a man who realizes too late what he’s lost by treating a lover cruelly, and farmworkers witnessing their compatriots being rounded up by la migra come to life on these essential pages. They are, as a collective, caught up in their place and time, yet each is also finely drawn as an individual full of longing. Prepare to be moved.
HEADSHOT, By Rita Bullwinkel
This stunning sports novel by a Bay Area author is electric and muscular. It follows the best female boxers in the country under the age of 18 as they compete in a two-day tournament at some point in the future. Each suspenseful chapter focuses on a single bout in which one of two girls is knocked out of the tourney. These fights are narrated with godlike omniscience; the narrator slips in and out of each of the fighters’ psyches—their joys, traumas, fears, mistakes, superstitions, worldviews, and narratives—as well as into their pasts and their futures as older women. While these girls sometimes feel themselves to be killers and in some cases find themselves crushed in defeat, there’s a collaborative energy between them in each bout, too. They are making something together, even as they strive for their own victories. This is a highly original novel—it may very well be one of the most beautiful books you read this year.
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and Naomi Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
LANDMARK DEPICTION OF L.A.
Critic and editor Colette Bancroft explores how Phillips broke ground within the hard-boiled mystery genre in Violent Spring. —Alta
FATES AND FURIES
CBC editor Anita Felicelli profiles Lilliam Rivera in connection with the “scary and engrossing” Tiny Threads, which skillfully blends horror with haute couture. —Alta
NOVEMBER BOOKS
Here are 10 new books by authors of and on the West, including Lucy Ives’s An Image of My Name Enters America and Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz. —Alta
SIN CITY COLUMNS
Join Alta Live on Zoom tomorrow, November 6, at 12:30 p.m., when Alta editorial director Blaise Zerega will talk to author Nick Hornby about Hornby’s new collection of Believer columns, Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas. —Alta
EAST BAY NOIR
Arts and culture writer Zack Ruskin writes a feature about novelist Joshua Mohr and his latest novel, Saint the Terrifying, about a “modern-day punk Viking.” It’s the first book in a 1,000-page trilogy that will be released over the course of a year. —San Francisco Chronicle
FUTURE OF SMALL PRESSES
Following the devastating closure of SPD earlier this year, scrappy Bay Area independent publishers developed a camaraderie that was apparent at this year’s Litquake Book Fair. —KQED
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