California Rewritten - by John Freeman (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

"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

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for California Rewritten:

"There is a feeling to a John Freeman literary essay--and that feeling is awe and that feeling is fascination. In California Rewritten, Freeman writes with singular precision and intelligence about new California literature, animating that mysterious relationship that unfolds when a writer's imagination engages with place. In Freeman's hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation. I can imagine a life of just reading these essays and revisiting the books described, each act nurtured by the other." --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds

"Trump fans beware, this book is filled with things your hero won't like: diversity, dissent, and a celebration of the most un-Trumpish of all states, California. John Freeman's crisp, incisive essays cast a wonderfully sensitive eye on a wide-ranging collection of people who've written about this state in novels, reportage, memoir, history, and more. Step aside, New York; the center of the American literary universe has moved here." --Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight

"Here is vindication of all that I have argued the last fifty years--that California has had and currently has the richest, the most literary tradition in the country, the most recent of which is so beautifully chronicled in this book. I know I'm not the only California writer to say, Thank you, John Freeman." --Greg Sarris, author of The Forgetters

"What's most compelling about the work gathered here isn't what it has to tell us about our past, however recent, but what it has to say about the present and the future of California's restless and insurgent literature [...] At the book's heart is the necessary notion that literature is dynamic, living, that it changes and develops as we do, that it can show us who we are." --David L. Ulin, Alta Journal

"If you want to learn more about how the story of California has been told and how it has changed over the years, you will find much to enjoy in this book." --Seattle Book Review

Praise for Freeman's: California:

"Captures the western state's complex history through the eyes of both new writers and established names . . . From every facet of the literary world, this cacophony of fresh and well-known writers with every award under their collective belts movingly interprets struggles and dreams in the Sunshine State." ―Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Tells the story of California in pieces, which is the only way it can be told . . . The point―or one of them―is that, in California, one must learn to persevere. In this collection, California in all its glorious complexity comes vividly to life." ―Kirkus Reviews

"Illuminating . . . Perfect reading for our ever-accelerating times." ―NPR's Book Concierge

"Freeman's is fresh, provocative, engrossing" ―BBC.com

"There's an illustrious new literary journal in town . . . [with] fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by new voices and literary heavyweights . . . alike." ―Vogue.com

Praise for Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, edited by John Freeman:

"A brilliant anthology . . . There is so much excellent writing in the pages of Tales of Two Americas." --Salon

"Each contribution stands out. Each voice is unique. The only common threads in the collection are theme and excellence . . . This anthology is spectacular and devastating and provocative." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Masterful and affecting stories, essays, and poems by 36 writers profoundly attuned to the sources and implications of social rupture. These are sharply inquisitive and provocative works." --Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

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.