We are delighted to announce that Lisa See will be joining Greg Sarris and John Freeman to talk about Sarris’s Grand Avenue. See was recently the featured author at the California Book Club, and you can watch the video of her discussing On Gold Mountain with Freeman and her special guest, Michael Luo (Strangers in the Land), or read a recap here.
See is the author of nine works of historical fiction. The most recent, Daughters of the Sun and Moon, is forthcoming on June 9 and can be preordered here.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon tells the story of three Chinese women—Moon, Dove, and Petal—trying to survive in a period of intense anti-Chinese racism and hostility in 1870s Los Angeles, known to them as Lo Sang, then a very small city of just around 5,000. As the novel begins, Dove is an innocent, bound-footed woman in China who becomes a second wife in an arranged marriage with a man who lives in Lo Sang. Meanwhile, Petal is a peasant whose father sells her into what amounts to sexual slavery conducted by a tong; tongs were Chinese fraternal secret societies that, in some instances, operated as gangs in the later part of the 19th century. As Moon later explains, slavery had been outlawed at the end of the Civil War, but California officials tended not to apply the new rule to the purchase or ownership of Chinese women. Despite their markedly different circumstances, Dove and Petal notice each other while on the boat traveling to the West Coast from China and then are drawn to each other again on the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Moon, from Hong Kong, is about 10 years older than Petal. She’s married to a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, and her section of the story is told in 1926, as she looks back on her friendship with the two other women. It’s a friendship that starts shortly before a pivotal period in 1871, when the Chinese Massacre occurred—targeting Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, it was one of the largest mass lynchings in the United States.
Moon meets Dove when Dove’s husband, Old Man Sing, brings her to be gynecologically examined by Moon’s husband. While Moon greets Dove, they witness Petal being taken out of the crate where she had been kept and beaten, and they come to help her recover.
This novel is one of See’s most gripping narratives so far. The characters are compelling and sympathetic, and their deeply researched circumstances are harrowing. Daughters of the Sun and Moon reveals a critical and underexplored juncture in California history.
We hope you’re looking forward to the conversation between two important storytellers, Sarris and See. This is bound to be a lively and fascinating conversation.•
Join us on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Sarris will sit down with See and host John Freeman to discuss Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
NATIVE LITERATURE
Read John Freeman’s essay about Grand Avenue. —Alta
Q&A
Read Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin’s interview with David St. John, editor of Larry Levis’s posthumously published Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems. —Alta
DEBUT POET
Los Angeles author Jia-Rui Cook won the 2025 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of her debut poetry collection, Soft Beasts. Alta published her poem “May Gray.” —Fresno State Today
RARE BOOKS
More than 100 rare-book dealers from around the world will converge at the 57th California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco from February 27 to March 1. —Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America
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