John Freeman in conversation with Rebecca Solnit and Paul Yamazaki
at The Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Tickets available here.
Alta Journal, City Lights, and Litquake celebrate the publication of
California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature
By John Freeman
Published by Heyday Books
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.
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.
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.
Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is the author of twenty books, including River of Shadows, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; A Paradise Built in Hell, from 2009, which charts community responses to disaster; The Faraway Nearby, a wide-ranging memoir published in 2013; and Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays on feminism and women’s writing first published in 2014. She has also produced the essay collections –Hope in the Dark and The Mother of All Questions–as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities. Her most recent work, No Straight Road Takes You There is published by Haymarket Books. Solnit is a columnist at Harper’s and a frequent contributor to The Guardian.
Paul Yamazaki has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, the legendary San Francisco bookstore and publisher founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, for more than fifty years. A champion for national and global literature, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores, Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. He has mentored generations of booksellers across America. He is the author of Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale published by Ode Books.
Litquake is a project of the Litquake Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit registered in the state of California. Litquake’s diverse live programs aim to inspire critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bring people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuate a sense of literary community by providing a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. Because they believe in literature as a public good, they work to produce events that are accessible to all.
Visit them at https://www.litquake.org
This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.