Game ready. Catherine Sampson — a crime writer who’s lived in China for fifteen years — shares her top ten books on Beijing. The list includes two novels by Chinese authors living and working in California. Number 3 on the list, Please Don’t Call Me Human by Wang Shuo. Number 6 is The Last [...]
Stories in Fiction:
Audio files: taking Michael Chabon on the road
“I just finished listening to the audiobook of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a hardboiled alternate history novel set in a world where Israel falls in 1948 and its population of Jews relocate to a territory carved out of Alaska, a territory that is theirs for 60 years only…. I’m a great [...]
A trio of author updates
After I wrote yesterday about Latinos In Lotusland, editor Daniel Olivas shared the backstory of the anthology’s magical cover. He says, “Yes, it is a beautiful cover. Bilingual Press is affiliated with Arizona State University, which has the largest Chicano art collection in the country. So, last year, they flew me out to [...]
A new day at CaliforniaAuthors and a book lotto, too
Welcome to the new CaliforniaAuthors.com! Click around and you’ll find our familiar features with a fresh face and an easy-to-navigate new site.
To celebrate our re-launch, Kate and I are delighted to share an autographed copy of Mark Sarvas’ new novel, Harry, Revised.
Mark hosts the popular and often cheeky litblog, The Elegant Variation. Along [...]
Audio extras
BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder shares his favorite podcasts, including fiction in The New Yorker. “This month, T. Coraghessan Boyle reads Tobias Wolff’s short story ‘Bullet in the Brain.’”
Contemporary crime fiction
Daniel Olivas reviews the Los Angeles Noir anthology, edited by Denise Hamilton with stories by seventeen SoCal writers, for the Elegant Variation. Olivas loves the book (”the authors featured in Los Angeles Noir have big gumshoes to fill. And fill them they do”) and shares some choice tidbits.
Like this one:
Some of the stories take place [...]
The hot list
Granta’s list of twenty-one Best Young American Novelists includes four California authors: Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio), Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers), Maile Meloy (Liars and Saints), and ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere). From Granta:
A little over a decade ago Granta devoted an issue to new fiction by the twenty writers it [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Lost City Radio. By Daniel Alarcorn
The boss of me
Memoirist Debra Ginsberg gets fiction-y in her new book Blind Submission and the California publishing world gets dishy about the similarities between the author’s boss-from-hell West Coast literary agent character and her real-world former employer Sandra Dijkstra. Says Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times:
In Blind Submission, Lucy Fiamma, the central character, is a [...]
Audio files: taking Michael Chabon on the road
“I just finished listening to the audiobook of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a hardboiled alternate history novel set in a world where Israel falls in 1948 and its population of Jews relocate to a territory carved out of Alaska, a territory that is theirs for 60 years only…. I’m a great [...]
A trio of author updates
After I wrote yesterday about Latinos In Lotusland, editor Daniel Olivas shared the backstory of the anthology’s magical cover. He says, “Yes, it is a beautiful cover. Bilingual Press is affiliated with Arizona State University, which has the largest Chicano art collection in the country. So, last year, they flew me out to [...]
A new day at CaliforniaAuthors and a book lotto, too
Welcome to the new CaliforniaAuthors.com! Click around and you’ll find our familiar features with a fresh face and an easy-to-navigate new site.
To celebrate our re-launch, Kate and I are delighted to share an autographed copy of Mark Sarvas’ new novel, Harry, Revised.
Mark hosts the popular and often cheeky litblog, The Elegant Variation. Along [...]
Audio extras
BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder shares his favorite podcasts, including fiction in The New Yorker. “This month, T. Coraghessan Boyle reads Tobias Wolff’s short story ‘Bullet in the Brain.’”
Contemporary crime fiction
Daniel Olivas reviews the Los Angeles Noir anthology, edited by Denise Hamilton with stories by seventeen SoCal writers, for the Elegant Variation. Olivas loves the book (”the authors featured in Los Angeles Noir have big gumshoes to fill. And fill them they do”) and shares some choice tidbits.
Like this one:
Some of the stories take place [...]
The hot list
Granta’s list of twenty-one Best Young American Novelists includes four California authors: Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio), Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers), Maile Meloy (Liars and Saints), and ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere). From Granta:
A little over a decade ago Granta devoted an issue to new fiction by the twenty writers it [...]
Previously featured
as our new release of the week: Lost City Radio. By Daniel Alarcorn
The boss of me
Memoirist Debra Ginsberg gets fiction-y in her new book Blind Submission and the California publishing world gets dishy about the similarities between the author’s boss-from-hell West Coast literary agent character and her real-world former employer Sandra Dijkstra. Says Josh Getlin of the Los Angeles Times:
In Blind Submission, Lucy Fiamma, the central character, is a [...]
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Christina Meldrum, a Bay Area attorney whose book Madapple was just released this month. “In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, 
July briefs: censorship, fires, new fiction and a b-day
No room for Freedom in Perry, Indiana. A veteran high school teacher in Perry, Indiana has been suspended without pay for teaching The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. The book by Long Beach, California teacher/author Erin Gruwell and her students [...]
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