Overview
The sixth volume in the series that has been hailed by NPR, O Magazine, and Vogue, Freeman’s: California features stunning new work from a broad selection of writers, revealing everything that is most important, most fascinating, and most revealing about our populous state.
In Freeman’s: California, Lauren Markham describes how four generations of her family have lived in and tried to manipulate the water in one of the driest parts of the state and how water and land means everything. Rabih Alameddine recounts becoming a bar tender in the mid-1980s as his friends began to die of AIDS. Rachel Kushner reminisces on all the amazing cars she’s owned and their peculiar, vivid personalities. Natalie Diaz narrates the process of making her body into as a professional basketball player, and how that assembly stalled some of the internal vulnerabilities she'd feel as a gay native woman growing up where she did. And Elaine Castillo goes to visit her brother in prison.
Amid the raging the forest fires plaguing California, William T. Vollmann drives to the Carr fire and sees how fire has become the new state of normality for California. And Jaime Cortez riffs on pulling over at a rest-stop and smelling the fires of Paradise burning.
Meanwhile home is in transition as Karen Tei Yamashita recalls a Japanese-American who goes to Japan after the dropping of the bomb, writing back and forth home. Reyna Grande explores how her mother, who crossed with their family, fell out of society and became a woman who collects recycling, while she and her siblings have become model immigrants.
Also featuring a haunting ghost story from Oscar Villalon, bold new fiction from Tommy Orange, and stunning poems from Mai Der Vang, Juan Felipe Herrera, Maggie Millner, and more—Freeman’s: California assembles a diverse list of brilliant writers.
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