Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1960 the aspiring Texas writer Larry McMurtry enrolled in Stanford University with a fellowship in the Stegner creative writing program. Along with his studies, McMurtry became immersed in the world of antiquarian and used bookshops that flourished during that time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM’s The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California As a counterpart to research on the 1930s that has focused on liberal and radical writers calling for social revolution, David Welky offers this eloquent study of how mainstream print culture shaped and disseminated a message affirming conservative middle-class values and assuring its readers that holding to these […]
The Celebrate People’s History poster series has organized and curated by Josh MacPhee since 1998. The over 200 posters in the ongoing series are rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history. Over more […]
Troublemaker tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death; this biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism. Who […]
Few people realize that Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, was written in California in 1939-41. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, O’Neill and his third wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, built Tao House just outside Danville, California. Realizing that his writing career was coming to an […]
For many people, the concept of landscape is associated with gardens, especially estate gardens. California Eden reaches far beyond the elite circle of private estates; this book highlights a wide range of landscapes from the professional to the vernacular and delves deep into the cultural and historical significance of these landscapes, revealing the untold stories of the […]
Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression, edited by Jorge J. Santos and Patrick S. Lawrence, explores US comics that have been challenged for their boundary-breaking content. Covering well-known underground figures like R. Crumb and Charles Burns, newcomers such as C. Spike Trotman and Emil Ferris, and mainstream creators including Chris Claremont and Archie […]
From 1890 to 1990, American book art color reproduction printing went through a series of revolutionary technological changes, not only in how books looked, but who could afford them. Visually Impressive shows these technological changes using examples of American books that reveal the changing artistic aesthetic reflected in the evolving color printing process. Exhibition opening with […]
The experiences of Mexicans who were living in California when it was annexed by the United States is a crucial element of the history of the American Southwest. These Californios, as they called themselves, made California diverse and multi-cultural from the moment it became part of the United States. The Vallejos of Sonoma were one […]
What does it take to bring a remarkable book into the world? Join the co-publishers of Transit Books for a behind-the-scenes conversation about the role of award-winning, nonprofit publishing—from discovering singular voices and acquiring international literature to editing, designing, translating, producing, and championing books that find devoted readers around the world. Founded in 2015 in […]
How we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food is bound up with how we use (and abuse) environmental resources, and how we achieve (or undermine) collective well-being. In North Stars of Emancipation, Antonio Roman-Alcalá finds in the radical experiments of new food movements the seeds of a world liberated from old, extractive systems, where a more […]