By Roman Loranc and Lillian Vallee. Photographer Roman Loranc brings the ancient, still soul of the Great Central Valley into exquisite focus. In his book he lets us into its secret places where California’s heart is reflected back to us: subtle and startling; eternal and ephemeral.

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. California Uncovered is a central component of the California Stories Uncovered campaign — a statewide program sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities designed to inspire people to tell and listen to stories that get at the reality beneath the headlines, statistics, and stereotypes about the state and its people. It includes works by John Steinbeck, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joan Didion, as well as compelling new voices that reveal California in all its complexity. Read from the introduction by Chitra Banerjee here.

By Ernest Marquez.One of the world’s most popular and beloved beaches is documented in never-before-published photographs dating back to 1877. Author Ernest Marquez is a descendant of the family that held the original Mexican land grants to what is now Santa Monica. Read from the introduction here.

by Bob Baker. Bob Baker writes about his thirty-nine year journey to write the book on LA radio personality Magnificent Montague.

By M. Allen Cunningham. Read an excerpt from this novel-styled-as-memoir set in the boom and bust years of an immigrant coal mining town in nineteenth-century California.

By Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett has created “a practical, inspirational guide for fitting serious writing into stolen moments.” And, she says, it is never to late to begin.

By T. Jefferson Parker. Novelist T. Jefferson Parker shares an excerpt of his page turner set in 1960s Orange County.

By Wil Wheaton. This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven: Wil Wheaton feels the love at his first reading.

By Kevin Nelson. For decades California has produced more major league ballplayers than any other state. As impressive as this may be, author Kevin Nelson says it is not the central story of California baseball. Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

By Robert Berger. Photographs from more 300 churches, synagogues and temples, along with text by architectural historian Alfred Willis. Read an excerpt and see some of the images here.

By Danyel Smith. Paige and Pinch and Oakland. Their dreams and destinies are hopelessly knotted in Danyel Smith’s lyrical novel about two young sisters careening through the 1980s violence and crack trade of their changing hometown. Read from the prologue here.

By Mark Bittner. Mark Bittner tells the story of how he found his life’s work caring for a flock of birds. Read from Chapter Four: A Question of Trust.

By Greg LaVoi. Author and photographer Greg LaVoi shows off Barbie in vintage outfits at dozens of Los Angeles-area landmarks, including the new Disney Concert Hall, the Getty, Spago, Pink’s Hot Dogs and PCH in Malibu. A Barbie diary entry accompanies each glamour shot. Read the intro here.

Flying Above California By Thom Gunn.

A California Christmas By Joaquin Miller.

By Gerald Haslam. In “Grapes of Wrath: A Book that Stretched My Soul” writes about reading Grapes of Wrath as a boy growing up in the Great Central Valley.

by Edward Humes. In “Bakersfield Diary,” Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward Humes shares an excerpt from his non–fiction saga of wrongful conviction and justice miscarried in California’s heartland.

By Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. J.G. Boswell is the biggest farmer in America. Over the past fifty years he has built a secret empire in California’s Great Central Valley while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions and anyone else who tried to lift the veil on his “factory in the fields.” Now eighty, Boswell grudgingly confides his story for the first time to journalists Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. Read an excerpt here.