Spring brings a sensational abundance to many places in California as early as February. After the storms this winter, it looks like it could be another year for superblooms as the weather grows warmer, even though it’s typically a decade between these lush displays of wildflowers. This month, we’ll be reading a novel set in the Mojave Desert, which sees a painterly explosion of lupines, bluebells, California poppies, sand verbenas, desert lilies, evening primroses, and the playfully named popcorn flowers in a superbloom spring. Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans opens when a Moroccan immigrant dies in a hit-and-run, with foul play suspected by some. The nine characters who voice the story of the investigation and the death’s aftermath cross paths for a range of reasons but are united by their feelings of “unbelonging,” as Lalami calls it.
After The Other Americans, we’ll be looking at a novel, an essay collection, a poetry collection, and a memoir. One of the thrilling aspects of the California Book Club, since its opening show, has been its recognition of the many ideas and stories subsumed into the most populous state in the country. Network television, which has focused primarily on sunshine-oriented or criminal tales of Los Angeles, popularized a certain image, but our CBC gatherings also revolve around other narratives, other perspectives, and other landscapes within the state.
While much has been made of the California exodus in the past year or two, the immigrant population of California accounts for 23 percent of the foreign-born population around the nation—California is the most diverse state in the United States. A California canon must include a wide range of immigrant voices, as well as voices familiar with the societies and practices that occur outside the country.
We head this spring into the luminous profusion of not only wildflowers but also books, reminders of this state’s continued, unusual capacity to give a home to ideas, stories, and people from all over.
THE GANGSTER OF LOVE, BY JESSICA HAGEDORN
When: Thursday, April 18, 5 p.m. Pacific time.
Many teenage California artists, writers, and musicians dream of going to New York City in search of fame and fortune. An essential element of that vision has been sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but these are given a different spin in Hagedorn’s bicoastal, semi-autobiographical novel The Gangster of Love, about the coming-of-age of a Filipina punk musician. Hagedorn’s novel is two parts exhilaration and one part acute observation; as a novelist, playwright, and multimedia performance artist, Hagedorn brings to these pages the sense of spectacle that should accompany a ’70s and ’80s künstlerroman—the countercultural sensory delights and the grit of bustling and ever-fluctuating cities. We know you’ll love this lively, postmodernist jamboree of a novel as much as we do.
RIPRAP AND COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS AND THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD, BY GARY SNYDER
When: Thursday, May 16, 5 p.m. Pacific time.
In May, double your pleasure with two books, published 31 years apart, by one of our greatest environmental writers and activists. In 1959, Snyder published the chapbook Riprap. The term riprap refers to loose stones set on slick rocks to provide horses with sure footing as they travel up a trail—without needing to cut into or destroy nature. The loose stones after which the collection was named seem symbolic of a greater idea of Snyder’s—that of writing in harmony with the essential nature of things in the world rather than taming the wild or forcing unnatural meanings. This chapbook was later gathered together with Snyder’s translation of the Chinese poet Han-shan’s work in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. The porousness between humans and the wild—humans as beings of the wild rather than masters of it, as they were framed by Enlightenment thinkers—is also the substrate of The Practice of the Wild, a collection of nine essays by Snyder that draw on wilderness practices in other cultures around the globe. You’d probably be hard-pressed to find books that spotlight nature that have been as seminal as Snyder’s in shaping the minds and ideals of the state’s contemporary environmental writers.
SOLITO, BY JAVIER ZAMORA
When: Thursday, June 20, 5 p.m. Pacific time.
The allure of complete immersion into someone else’s experience has never been as fully realized in the real world as it is now. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Academy Award–winning virtual reality installation Carne y Arena, for instance, allows viewers to experience the journeys of immigrants and refugees. However, for lived reality, for how it feels to live this experience as someone experiencing it for a prolonged stretch, books continue their reign as the trippiest immersive technology into the present. Take, for example, our June selection, poet Zamora’s beautiful 2022 memoir, Solito. In the plain, simple language of a child, the book recounts his harrowing journey at the age of nine from El Salvador to San Rafael, California, encountering serious dangers in a complicated system but also aware of the strong sense of compassion that strangers show him along the way. The language of Zamora’s story has an immediacy that is utterly disarming: this is a profoundly affecting work that all Californians—really, everyone—should experience.•
Join us on March 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific, when Lalami will appear in conversation with Alta Journal books editor and guest California Book Club host David L. Ulin and a special guest to discuss The Other Americans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read an excerpt from Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, the March CBC selection. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Lalami explains that when she started writing The Other Americans, she “wanted to explore how that feeling of unbelonging can manifest within a family and a community.” —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin recommends Lalami’s novel, saying that a “faith in literature as a conversation…animates The Other Americans.” —Alta
URBAN LIGHT
Ulin reviews India Mandelkern’s Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles, calling it “smart and passionate, knowledgeable and deeply investigated.” —Alta
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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.
