What goes into writing a second novel, especially after the first has been critically lauded? Lydia Kiesling and C Pam Zhang both found their distinct voices in debut novels set in California, The Golden State and How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Now, the authors are in the midst of whirlwind book-release tours for their second novels, Mobility and Land of Milk and Honey, respectively. In these new titles, both writers have achieved yet another feat of gorgeous, driven, sensory writing. They join Alta Live for an intimate conversation, author to author, about how to start again after success, building all-new worlds, and the women who drive their most recent stories. Tune in for the final installment of our Writers on Writers series, a four-part Alta Live collection in celebration of Alta Journal’s Issue 25, The Writers Issue.
About the guests
Lydia Kiesling, the author of The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Uunder 35 Honoree and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel, Mobility, was published by Crooked Media Reads in August 2023. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker online, and the Cut.
Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, nominated for the Booker Prize, and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, the Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.
About their books
Mobility: The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes, we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age—from Azerbaijan to America—as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.
Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.
Land of Milk and Honey: A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
About Alta’s Writers on Writers series
Celebrating writers and their work is one of the core missions of Alta Journal, and we’re proud to work with some of the West Coast’s best. But how do writers like C Pam Zhang, Forrest Gander, and Lydia Kiesling make the magic that results in our inevitable need to read one more chapter, turn one more page, and devour one more poem? Alta’s Issue 25, The Writer’s Issue not only examines the practice and art of writing but also includes a special pull-out guide to 126 books written by Alta contributors over the past two years. Alta Live, our Wednesday Zoom interview series, takes this focus on authors one step further with our Writers on Writers series that will feature noted authors and Alta contributors in conversation with one another. Throughout the month of October, Alta Live will exclusively offer intimate, eye-opening, and hopefully extremely fun discussions between two writers working in the same genre.•
