It’s almost summer, and the world, in all its brokenness, continues to be on fire. We hope that you’ve been enjoying a reprieve from the news by reading this month’s astounding selections, luminous literary high points in a career full of them: Gary Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and The Practice of the Wild. This week—May 8—is Snyder’s birthday, and we wish him a very happy birthday. Perhaps books like his are especially vital in a time like this, when so much seems urgent and it becomes increasingly necessary to balance an awareness of the dire with solitude, meditation, and connection with the earth. A former Buddhist monk, a former teacher, told me the other day, to enrich my own thinking, about certain Zen precepts that underpin Snyder’s work.
He believes that Snyder’s writing is guided by the bodhisattva ideal of working for the liberation of all and also aligns with the 10 Zen “clear-mind” or “prohibitory” precepts, including these three: No illusory words. No selling the wine of delusion. No dwelling on past mistakes.
The important thing, my former teacher added, was to follow these precepts without grasping, relating them to the Bhagavad Gita’s direction to “act with no attachment to the fruits of action.”
This summer, predicted to be a scorcher because of climate change, we swerve to explore want and striving. The California Book Club’s summer-quarter novels, gorgeously written, are about laboring, about struggling, about grasping and the troubles that arise from a culture polarized, in part, around needs and luxuries. We’ll be armchair-traveling to the avid subcultures of Long Beach, to fields of crops in the Central Valley, and to the glittering, oblivious, and funny environs of Hollywood. Anticipate away!
DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, BY VENITA BLACKBURN
Blackburn’s original, queer, mind-bending novel moves through permutations of grief. Its very premise feels like a melancholy one: machine librarians from the future, anthropologists of sorts, are trying to understand, through their artificial intelligence, the misguided humans of now and, in particular, a reserved graphic novelist, Coral, who finds her brother, Jay, dead from suicide and proceeds to impersonate him in texts to his friends and daughter, discovering aspects of his life she never knew. Yet, for a book about the grief involved in self-destruction, both Jay’s literal one and Coral’s figurative one, Dead in Long Beach, California is also wonderfully zany—Coral has written these machine librarians, imagined her narrators.
UNDER THE FEET OF JESUS, BY HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES
Although their job is incredibly precarious and essential, farmworkers in California continue to lack the protections afforded to workers in other industries. Viramontes’s powerful 1995 debut novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, takes place in the Central Valley and follows a family of seven Mexican migrant farmworkers. Its principal is a 13-year-old girl, Estrella, who falls in love for the first time under these harsh conditions. Viramontes unflinchingly describes the brutality involved in farmwork and the fear of xenophobia, yet at every turn of these pages, you’re likely to feel as if you’re in the orbit of a dream, her sentences are so sensuous and beautiful. The flawed desire here is not Estrella’s, of course, but ours: a people who live in abundance yet can’t generate the political will to provide fair conditions for those procuring it for us. Acutely conscious of the dangers of farmwork, Viramontes writes, still, toward beauty. Hers is an unforgettable literature of enlarged vision.
COLORED TELEVISION, BY DANZY SENNA
Senna’s bold, unnerving, and irresistible latest is a comic novel, a send-up not only of Hollywood but also of the book’s melancholy biracial leading lady’s extreme striving toward creating the “Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies” with a major producer, after being crushed that her editor won’t buy her second novel, which was informed by the centuries-long history of “mulatto people.” Nobody gets out unscathed in this one; Colored Television satirizes us, the audience, too, and what we expect—nay, demand—from our dreams and entertainments, however conflicting those expectations, particularly with regard to race. Senna’s fiction often taps into themes of mixed background, racial performance, and doubling, veering between registers: sadness, suspense, dread, the unhinged. Somehow, she writes all of her novels in elegant, pristine prose and delivers funny narrative turns and reversals in a perfect deadpan. But this superbly ruthless and electric book is one of the best I’ve read about Hollywood.
Join us on May 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when an array of panelists and CBC host John Freeman, with an appearance by author Gary Snyder, will gather to discuss Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems and The Practice of the Wild. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
NATURE’S SINGING
Read Lisa Teasley’s lovely personal essay about the meaning of wilderness in The Practice of the Wild and in her life. —Alta
WARTIME TRAUMA
Critic Lorraine Berry reviews journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s “vivid and engaging” debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory. —Alta
MAY RELEASES
Here are 15 titles by authors of the West that we’re looking forward to this month, including CBC selection panelist Paul Yamazaki’s Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale and prior CBC special guest (for Maggie Nelson) Miranda July’s All Fours. —Alta
‘TWIN CAMERAS’
Read Sandra Cisneros’s “Despedida Poem for Lourdes Portillo.” The filmmaker, a friend of Cisneros’s, passed away in San Francisco on April 20. —Alta
AMERICAN DICTION
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin wrote about prior CBC author Percival Everett; his latest, James; and language, calling the novel “a brilliant rendering” and “a work of astonishing ambition.” —Alta
MULTIFACETED MEANING
Read author Nina St. Pierre’s fascinating piece on binary perceptions of self-immolation as either protest or the consequence of mental illness, which springs from her experience of her mother’s own self-immolation. Her thoughtful memoir, Love Is a Burning Thing, contends with her mother’s self-immolation, mental illness, and life in Mount Shasta. —Los Angeles Times
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Anita Felicelli, Alta Journal’s California Book Club editor, is the author of the novel Chimerica and Love Songs for a Lost Continent, a short story collection.
