An Index of Reading at CaliforniaAuthors.com

Excerpts

And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You. A honky tonk love letter: An excerpt from Kathi Kamen Goldmark’s cool and quirky debut novel. Read it here. Buy the book here.

Barbie in L.A. 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. Buy the book here.

Bear In Mind. Once the most powerful creature in the lush California landscape, the grizzly bear now prowls only in our imaginations. In her lively historical collection, Susan Snyder reminds us that the absence of the grizzly today evokes what else is now gone from California. Read the intro here. Buy the book here.

Blithe Tomato. California farmer and author Mike Madison writes about the evocative — almost magical — effect of lilac-time at the farmers' market in "Listening to Lilacs," an excerpt from Blithe Tomato. Read it here. Buy the book here.

Bloodvine. Negotiating the Grapevine: Read an excerpt from Aris Janigian’s debut novel, Bloodvine, a story of brotherly love and betrayal set against the backdrop of the Armenian culture in California’s Great Central Valley. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Breaking the Fever In her 2006 collection of poetry, Mary Mackey journeys from her childhood Indianapolis to a Brazilian favela to the Golden State she shares with the world. Read here poem "The Californian" here. Buy the book here.

Burn, baby! BURN! Bob Baker writes about his thirty-nine year journey to write the book on LA radio personality Magnificent Montague. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

California Girl. Novelist T. Jefferson Parker shares an excerpt of his page turner set in 1960s Orange County. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Read a selection here. Buy the book here.

California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. 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. Buy the book here.

The Canal House. On love, faith and revenge: In his new novel, Mark Lee offers the timely story of a veteran foreign correspondent who struggles to find meaning in his own chaotic life. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Cold Pursuit. San Diego murder mystery: Southern California mystery writer T. Jefferson Parker shares an excerpt from his thriller, Cold Pursuit. Read the excerpt here. Buy book here.

Darknet. In his new book, J.D. Lasica explores the new age of prohibition. In this excerpt, he shares the story of three Mississippi teens and their labor of love: a movie Steven Spielberg praised and you'll probably never see. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Dog is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World's Oldest Friendship. California author Susan Straight shares a tale of anxious heroism in her essay “Brave and Noble is the Preschool Dog” — one of forty-two essays and short stories in the book from the editors The Bark magazine. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. First-time novelist Cory Doctorow fashions a future where death has a cure, scarcity is unknown and your karma is currency. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Essential Saroyan. "There are certain writers that find us in youth, or in a moment of youth when we're bent-backed and hoary, who cause a strange and irreversible reaction... William Saroyan is such a writer," William E. Justice writes in Essential Saroyan, a collection of stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Fresno author and playwright. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball. 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. Buy the book here.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Holy Land was published by W. W. Norton in 1996 and has been in print — and collecting accolades — ever since. It’s found new readers over the years in book clubs and college classrooms and among writers as well as urban planners. The poet Michael Palmer called it "a new American classic." Norton released a new, expanded paperback edition of Holy Land in April 2005. The new edition includes an introduction and extended afterword that bring the book’s themes into the contemporary debate over the value and durability of suburban places. Read an excerpt from the new introduction here. Buy the book here.

The Green Age of Asher Witherow. M. Allen Cunningham's novel-styled-as-memoir set in the boom and bust years of an immigrant coal mining town in nineteenth-century California. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Indigenous. Growing up Californian: In Indigenous — her autobiographical collection of essays — Cris Mazza looks beyond the pop culture clichès to the California of her own native dreams. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Iron. Building respect: Gil Garcetti on photographing ironworkers building the Walt disney Concert Hall. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

The King of California. 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 excert here. Buy the book here.

Mean Justice. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward Humes shares an excerpt from his non–fiction saga of wrongful conviction and justice miscarried in California’s heartland. Read the excerpt. Buy the book here.

The Misread City. Literary 101 (and 405 and PCH, too): How many hours do we sit in traffic, working through the expanding and contracting snake of cars on the freeway? For many of us, literary radio gets us there and back. In an essay featured in The Misread City, author Marcos M. Villatoro is our tour guide and reminds us that Angelenos actually buy more books than New Yorkers do. Read the excerpt here.

More Like Wrestling. 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 an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

My California. Lauded travel writer Pico Iyer introduces My California: Journeys by Great Writers. This critically acclaimed anthology of travel and adventure stories donated by 27 of California's most talented writers benefits the beleaguered California Arts Council. Learn more about the project and author events at mycaliforniaproject.org. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

My California. Hector Tobar writes about Southern Californian's specal relationship to the freeways in this essay from the critically acclaimed anthology. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within. 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. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Sacred Spaces: Historic Houses of Worship in the City of Angels. Photographs from more 300 churches, synagogues and temples, along with text by architectural historian Alfred Willis. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

San Francisco Stories. Derek Powazek shares Twenty-five cents and counting, his first-person slice of a freshly minted author’s life and his pilgrimage to the neighborhood bookstore. Read the excerpt here.

Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History. 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. Buy the book here.

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes chronicles life inside California’s top public high school, where the test scores are stratospheric, sleep is optional, and the kids chug espresso just to keep up. Read excerpts here and here. Buy the book here.

Single Women of a Certain Age. In this anthology twenty-nine writers address the challenges and rewards of growing older as a single woman: sex, loneliness, motherhood, learning to live alone (and happily), financial struggles, blossoming careers, menopause, and more. April Sinclair shares her essay "Straight Outta Marin." Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing. The Real Gidget: Best-selling author Deanne Stillman tells the story behind the story of the original California girl — an essay featured in Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Symphony in Steel. Photographer Gary Leonard shares his history — in words and pictures — of LA’s splendid new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Two-Hearted Oak. Photographer Roman Loranc brings the ancient, still soul of the Great Central Valley into exquisite focus. In his new book he lets us into its secret places where California’s heart is reflected back to us: subtle and startling; eternal and ephemeral. See the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters who Covered Vietnam. Reporter Tracy Wood writes about getting to the war her essay in this collection. Read the excerpt. Buy the book here.

Where the Money Is: True Tales form the Bank Robbery Capital of the World. FBI agent William Rehder spent three decades chasing L.A. bank robbers of every description — takeover bandits, roof and tunnel men, inside jobbers, junkies brandishing nothing more than a finger or a note. With co-author Gordon Dillow, Rehder spins out his truly stranger-than-fiction crime fighting story. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story...With Wings. Mark Bittner tells the story of how he found his life’s work caring for a flock of birds. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles. Kevin Roderick tells the life story of the famed drag and all that grew up around it. Read an excerpt here. Buy the book here.

The Wrong Side of the Wall: The Life of Blackie Schwamb, the Greatest Prison Baseball Player of All Time. Eric Stone relates the "real-life noir" story of 1940's pitcher Blackie Schwamb. "It involved gangsters and nightclubs and baseball from Mexico to Canada and mostly behind prison walls. There were girls and guns and gambling and booze and ballgames ..." Read more from the introduction here. Buy the book here.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. Lewis Buzbee, a former bookseller and sales representative, celebrates the unique experience of the bookstore — the smell and touch of books, the joy of getting lost in the deep canyons of shelves, and the silent community of readers. Read an excerpt here.

Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing 1777 - 2004. From its first written record more than 200 years ago, surf literature traces a surprisingly broad arc, but, Matt Warshaw puts it all into historical and cultural context in this must-read intro to his surf-writing anthology. Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here.

Essays

Gayle Brandeis on the evolution of the story of The Book of Dead Birds. Read the essay here.

Gayle Brandeis shares her “negative” experience surviving her dreaded author photo shoot. From our “Road Warriors” series. Read the essay here.

Kate Cohen on Shame Utility Vehicles and old-style Catholic contrition. Read the essay here.

Sandra Dijkstra tells us how it is to be a left coast literary agent. Read the essay here.

Dayna Dunbar on the road from screenwriting to novels. Read the essay here.

Charles Fleming shares a recollection of Cuba and the rainy research trip for his book After Havana. Read the essay here.

Gerald Haslam writes about reading Grapes of Wrath as a boy growing up in the Great Central Valley. Read the essay here.

Cristina Garcia discusses her novel, A Handbook to Luck in Q & A format. Read it here.

Susan Goulding tells the story of eleven-year-old Annie — the poet. When an her gloomy verse appeared in a million newspapers, readers and even her elementary school principal called to investigate her seemingly bleak existence. Read the essay here.

Reyna Grande author of Across a Hundred Mountains shares her own immigration story. Read the essay here.

Rochelle Krich offers a bestselling mystery author's personal guide to California’s mystery scene. Read the essay here.

Mark Lee kicks off “Road Warriors” — our essay series from authors on tour — telling us what it’s like to ride with the Pulpwood Queens. Read the essay here.

Aimee Liu on the powerful practice of keeping a journal. Read the essay here.

Aimee Liu returns to writes about the renewed interest in the international novel and what it meant to her group of California writers. Read the essay here.

Kat Meads A Carolina-born writer finds she is a California author after all. Read the essay here.

Penelope Moffet shares her memories of the extraordinary Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. When it burned down after 25 years of operation, many California authors, composers and visual artists lost a beloved, if rugged, haven. Read the essay here.

Jim Newton on his judicial biography of Earl Warren, Justice for All. Read the essay here.

Janis Cooke Newman bakes Mary Todd Lincoln's white cake and discovers a delicious kind of “literary method acting.” Read the essay here.

Derek M. Powazek writes about marriage, gratitude and the scene as San Francisco City Hall was granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Read the essay here.

Pamela Ribon on her accidental and highly successful internet book drive for the Oakland Public Library. Read the essay here.

Richard Sparks on turning procrastination and poker into his first book. Read the essay here.

Thomas Steinbeck tells the story behind the publication of his collection of Big Sur stories, Down to a Soundless Sea. Read the essay here.

Ellen Sussman tells us about the story that knocked on her door, sat down and had a beer with her. Read the essay here.

Veronique de Turenne offers us a page from her Malibu Diary. Read the essay here.

Veronique de Turenne explores the real meaning of home in the era of HGTV. Read the essay here.

David Ulin on his "fascination with seismicity" and the birth of The Myth of Solid Ground. Read the essay here.

Wil Wheaton feels the love at his first reading. Read the essay here.

Amy Wilenz author of I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen — on California, niceness and the writing life. Read the essay here.

John Morgan Wilson tells us screenwriters get to schmooze, but novelists get to write. Read the essay here.

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