Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes author, editor, and poet John Freeman for a conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita about his new book California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.

“In Freeman’s hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds

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Dive into the revelatory worlds of California’s most exciting writers, and discover how their books uncover our history and can help us imagine our shared future. Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, “Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now.” Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California’s literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal’s popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state’s most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.

John Freeman has hosted Alta’s California Book Club since its founding in 2020. He is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and he edited Freeman’s (2015-2023), a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as the anthologies Tales of Two Americas, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and Sacramento Noir. He is also the author of three poetry collections, Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.