In trying times, we hope you’re finding a measure of beauty and grace in February’s California Book Club selection, Manuel Muñoz’s collection of 10 stories, The Consequences. Some of his memorable characters are migrant workers. In the story “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” for instance, we meet two women with differing perspectives on how freely they can move in the world. Muñoz is brilliantly attentive to how personal history and relationships to others, to the government, inform one’s sense of choice in every present moment.
Some of you may remember that Muñoz was the special guest for the event to discuss prior CBC author Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. During that conversation, he remarked on how much happens in small physical spaces for Viramontes’s characters who are migrant workers. Muñoz, whose parents were also migrant workers, commented that when two teenage characters in Viramontes’s novel “do their initial dance around each other, they make what they can when they’re sharing a bottle of Coke.” He elaborated, “Both of us grew up in places where we didn’t have the privacy to be our intimate selves.… There’s so much that comes into play when we think about the limited spaces that we have.” Later in the conversation, he considered the relationship between that upbringing and the economy and compression that the short story form demands. Each of Muñoz’s stories allows us to feel the characters’ lives off the page—what remains on the page is elegantly distilled.
This spring, we have three astonishing and timely selections for your nightstand: an avant-garde classic published by an Oakland novelist; a surreal, dystopian novel of drought set in and near Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert of the near future; and a Northern California memoir of recent personal and environmental damage blended with a natural history of fire.
MUMBO JUMBO, BY ISHMAEL REED
Imagine that a virus that causes people to be happy and dance spreads across the country, and suppose, in turn, that it is spreading through Black communities, causing social upheaval. That’s the premise of legendary Oakland author Ishmael Reed’s most celebrated (and comic) avant-garde novel, 1972’s Mumbo Jumbo. “Some plagues caused the body to waste away; Jes Grew enlivened the host.… Some plagues arise from decomposing animals, but Jes Grew is electric as life.” This fictional spirit seeks its text: “For what good is a liturgy without a text?” So does Harlem Voodoo priest PaPa LaBas. Meanwhile, the Wallflower Order, the military arm of a secret society that purports to defend Western traditions, tries to squash the virus.
Set in New York City, this satirical thriller collages together conspiracy, ragtime, white supremacy, radicalism, and Black nationalism. The famed literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom named the novel one of the top 500 books of the Western canon. We agree: There’s nothing quite like this freewheeling masterpiece, which borrows what is exhilarating in jazz and plays it on the page.
GOLD FAME CITRUS, BY CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS
What if California were afflicted by extreme drought? As Gold Fame Citrus begins, Luz, who had been the poster child for the Bureau of Conservation in her childhood, stays with her army-deserter boyfriend, Ray, in the abandoned Laurel Canyon mansion of a former starlet. Without water, some have been evacuated, and only the dispossessed remain in the area, as the Amargosa Dune Sea, a vast, growing expanse of sand, has begun to approach the city. The Amargosa has “been categorized as a wasteland.… Nearly every species that once inhabited the Mojave Desert has purportedly been erased from this area.” Luz and Ray happen upon a mysterious toddler, whom they kidnap (or rescue) from the neglectful adults she’s with. They travel into the Amargosa Dune Sea; when they run out of gasoline, Ray goes for help.
Alone with the toddler and no water, Luz passes out and wakes to find that they have been brought into the fold of a cult led by a charismatic and sinister dowser capable of finding water that the officials say is gone. The desert, strangely full of life that authorities have ignored, vibrates throughout this beautiful, surreal, and bleak novel.
THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A PERSONAL AND PYRONATURAL HISTORY, BY MANJULA MARTIN
These past few weeks of wildfires and a subsequent rainstorm in Southern California have been harrowing for many. Many people wonder what can be done, if anything, about the conditions that gave rise to these recent, catastrophic extremes of weather. In 2020, when a dry-lightning storm set off wildfires in Northern California, the sky went an eerie red or orange, depending on your proximity to the fire. “It seemed that everyone who lived beneath the sky without a sky was trying to capture it,” author Manjula Martin writes in her memoir and natural history, The Last Fire Season, about the proliferation of photos that appeared to show an apocalypse.
Martin had moved to the woods in Sonoma County, in part because she suffered pain from botched reproductive medical procedures but also to be closer to a landscape like that of her childhood in Santa Cruz. In the midst of the pandemic, when the LNU Lightning Complex Fire broke out, Martin and her neighbors had to evacuate. In this perceptive and questioning work, Martin comes to nuanced and surprising understandings about “cycles of damage and renewal” and caring for the Golden State.•
Please join us on Thursday, February 20, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Manuel Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
WHY READ THIS
Alta contributing editor David L. Ulin recommends the “works of quiet stature, of perseverance, and of aftermath” in The Consequences. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
In a powerful essay, author Manuel Muñoz writes about “the dignity that comes when we are allowed to write in ways that confound, complicate, or contradict.” —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the January CBC gathering with Viet Thanh Nguyen, watch it or read the recap. —Alta
FEBRUARY RELEASES
Read about books by authors on the West that we’re most anticipating this month. Titles include Fernando A. Flores’s Brother Brontë, Lauren Markham’s Immemorial, and Corinna Vallianatos’s Origin Stories. —Alta
DREAM LOGIC
Critic Jackie DesForges meets with author Sara Gran to discuss Gran’s short story collection, Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight, published by the author’s independent Dreamland Books. DesForges calls the stories “philosophical, blunt, sardonic, feminist.” —Alta
END-OF-WORLD LESSONS
Essayist and critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes about the L.A. fires and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. —New Yorker
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free today.
