California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature

This work examines the writing about California, and larger Western United States, through essays of John Freeman, who hosts a popular book club called the California Book Club. We get to read the essays he has written over the decades about new, classic, and reissued works of fiction and non-fiction, with the emphasis on the California experience, whether it is through the lens of immigrants, the role of the Missions, or how nature was harnessed and used to build the infrastructure in the state. Each section focuses on specific types of work, and each chapter is an individual essay, which looks at only one work. Each of the chapters is short, as most of these originally appeared in the magazine Alta Journal.

Your enjoyment of this easy-to-access work of literary criticism will depend on whether you are familiar with California history, geopolitics, and many of the works mentioned; along with how you feel about works from marginalized communities or written about marginalized communities. 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.