California Fiction – serie

Available again in paperback, Golden Days is a major novel from one of the most provocative voices on the American literary scene. Linking the recent past with an imagined future, Carolyn See captures life in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. This marvelously imaginative, hilarious, and original work offers fresh insights into the way we were, the way we are, and the way we could end up.

Cynthia Kadohata explores human relationships in a Los Angeles of the future, where rich and poor are deeply polarized and where water, food, and gas, not to mention education, cannot be taken for granted. There is an intimate, understated, even gentle quality to Kadohata's writing--this is not an apocalyptic dystopia--that makes it difficult to shrug off the version of the future embodied in her book.

Mary Austin's 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history--the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and feminist organizing of the time, exemplified in the successful efforts of an independent young woman to buy back her family's Owens Valley ranch.

The narrator of Skin Deep is David Loya, a second generation Chicano from the East L.A. barrio. With a degree from Harvard Law School he is a rising star in a major New York law firm. He returns to L.A. in response to an urgent request from a Harvard friend to find a missing illegal Mexican named Josefina Juarez. David's search for Juarez takes him deep into the barrio where the mystery of her fate upends his world and forces him to confront long-buried questions about family, love, friendship, and his own identity. Skin Deep is a novel about coming of age in the new America, a place in which races and cultures have not so much melded as collided and in which no identity is secure. Garcia chronicles this new urban landscape with acuity and informed sympathy.

A freak accident has left young Frank Eastman a paraplegic--a "wild card" who needs to "pair up with someone or something or he won't pass back into existence." Los Angeles, the scene of his accident, is where he imagines this existence to be. He settles into a rundown motel near Disneyland, his neighbors a wild assortment of eccentrics who, though more able-bodied than Frank, have learned the effectiveness of willful inability. What Frank learns from them, in magnificently odd and mesmerizing conversations, will leave him as transformed emotionally as he has been physically with a narrative at once ironic, hilarious, and poignant.

Set in the Napa Valley at the turn of the century, this novel beautifully evokes the characters' love of the land and the rhythms of life lived close to the earth and its seasons. Spirited Alda Pendle is the daughter of a viticulturist who has taught her his craft. When he dies, leaving her without property, her skills make her indispensable to the solitary owner of one of the old vineyards in the valley. The novel provides a vivid history of winemaking in California to the Prohibition era.

Spanning the 100-day Persian Gulf War and a small California town's girls' basketball season, Home and Away is the story of Hedy Gallagher Castle, a woman who has reached a crossroads in her life. A straddler by nature, Hedy finds herself doing a balancing act on all fronts as her daughter approaches womanhood, her father enters a no-man's-land of bewilderment after a stroke, and her husband departs in search of the lost athletic glory of his youth. At the same time, the divisive political issues of the greater world--the Gulf War, abortion, gay rights, and fundamentalism--encroach on Hedy's increasingly fragile private one. As the tensions mount, Hedy learns to take a side--her own side--for the first time in her life, reawakening to a sense of love and loss.

Set in a small town south of San Francisco during World War II, Words of My Roaring is a compelling picture of the confusions, the dislocations, and the brutality of war as they affect the home front. The novel recreates a neighborhood in San Bruno and connects it to San Francisco and the larger stage of the war. Tanforan racetrack, first an assembly camp for Japanese Americans awaiting internment, becomes a naval training base for Pacific-bound recruits. The elementary school becomes a USO, and air-raid drills and blackouts are routine as California prepares for an expected Japanese invasion. We see these events through the eyes of a novice teacher, an abandoned boy, two young girls whose mother works in the shipyards and whose father enlists in the Army, and a sailor scarred by his months in the war zone. Words of My Roaring is a richly textured, emotionally charged novel about the unlikely sources of human redemption.

A road novel fifty years before Kerouac, "The Valley of the Moon" traces the odyssey of Billy and Saxon Roberts from the labor strife of Oakland at the turn of the century through Central and Northern California in search of land they can farm independently - a journey that echoes Jack London's own escape from urban poverty. As London lost hope in the prospects of the socialist party and organized labor, he began researching a scientific and environmentally sound approach to farming. In his novel, it is Saxon, London's most fully realized heroine, who embodies these concerns. The Valley of the Moon is London's paean to his second wife Charmian and to the pastoral life and his ranch in Glen Ellen, the Valley of the Moon.

Based on a chilling historical event, Ghost Woman is a tale of the arrogance of colonizers, rape, guilt, punishment and retribution. It is set on the Southern California coast during the early nineteenth century, when Catholic missionaries rounded up all the local Indians except those still living on San Nicolas Island. When this group is finally captured, one woman jumps from the boat and returns to the island for her missing child. The novel is that woman's story, and the story of the white family with whom her life becomes entangled after she too is taken from her island home.

A dark, fast-paced proletarian novel originally published in 1949, Thieves' Market was written out of the author's youthful experiences as a trucker carrying produce to the packing houses of California's Central Valley. Immigrant Nick Garcos, like his father before him, becomes an independent trucker, soon landing in the brutal and crooked underworld of the produce markets of San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, and Los Angeles. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1949.