Writing the Golden State

A collection of literary essays about California from some of the state’s most established, and most exciting upcoming writers. Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California explores California through twenty-five essays that look beyond the clichés of the “California Dream,” portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. It is a California that reclaims the beauty of the unwanted, the quotidian, and the out-of-place. Constantly in search of “the spirit of a place” Writing the Golden State pries into the themes of familial genealogy, migration, land and housing, and national belonging and identity. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individuals and towns have weathered some of the social, political, and economic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.