John Freeman in conversation with Steph Cha at Bart’s Books
For a state that has projected its studio-lot image across the globe, California has remained largely undersung in the world of letters, too often left to languish in the shadow of the East Coast’s literary hegemony. To rectify this peculiar imbalance, Knopf Editor John Freeman offers a thoroughgoing survey of the major voices and modern-day classics burgeoning out of the West Coast in his latest collection California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature.
“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,” says Freeman. In the last ten years alone, Californians have won more Pulitzers in literature than writers from any other region of the United States, he points out. Moreover, readers have a real appetite for these perspectives: Freeman, in his role as host for Alta Journal’s California Book Club, commands an audience of 20,000 members and counting, and California authors like Amy Tan and Tommy Orange perch on the New York Times bestseller lists for weeks and sometimes months on end.
In California Rewritten Freeman offers probing critical engagement with the writers whose works are defining this new West Coast sensibility. Across 50 essays collected from his writings for Alta, he features 49 authors and one keystone literary powerhouse that together comprise a 21st-century California canon. He spotlights the poets—Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Gary Snyder—whose voices defy the boundaries of the genre. He delves into the watershed works of the novelists—Percival Everett, Rachel Khong, Viet Thanh Nguyen—at the vanguard of a new firmament of American classics. And he explores the memoirists—Deborah Miranda, Javier Zamora, Maxine Hong Kingston—whose worlds offer a gripping, if sobering mirror, for our society.
Collectively these works address pressing concerns for our era: What is the meaning of a place, and how do we belong to it? How does the past imprison our present? What fears hobble our imaginations, and what kind of tomorrow could we possibly build if we liberated them? In short, Freeman, in this savvy and perceptive volume, shows why Californians deserve to be read the world over.
John Freeman has hosted Alta‘s California Book Club since its founding in 2020 and is the author, most recently, of California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature. 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.
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Praise for California Rewritten
“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.”
—INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds
“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 and Grand Avenue