Author: Arthur Grove Day
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803265837
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
In 1510 a Spanish romancer described an island called California, "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise." It was inhabited by Amazons, and even the harnesses of the beasts they rode were gold. Thus began the rich literature of California. In a place that boasts so many claims to one's attention, short fiction has flourished. Great California Stories trumpets the immense short story tradition developed by visitors like Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce but mostly by natives like Jack London and John Steinbeck. The twenty-one stories in this anthology go back to the oral tradition of the American Indians and recall the Hispanic settlement, the gold rush of the 1850s, the agricultural epoch, the growth of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the foibles of early Hollywood, and the rise of ghettos. The ethnic diversity of California is reflected in a cast of story characters including Indians, mission fathers, Asians, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and forty-niners and landseekers from the eastern states. California's varied scenery is drawn on in stories with a strong sense of place, whether Steinbeck's Salinas Valley or Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Besides Steinbeck and Chandler, authors represented are Theodora Kroeber, Bret Harte, Gertrude Atherton, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Edwin Cone, Jack London, Idwal Jones, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Dashiel Hammett, Eugene Burdick, Janet Lewis, Wallace Stegner, and Danny Santiago. For them California is a memorable background, sometimes a fabulous character, always a distinctive quality.

Author: Barbara Smith
Publisher: Lone Pine Pub
ISBN: 9781551052373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
California's rich and colorful history has produced a wealth of tales about the supernatural. These unique tales of scary folklore come from all over the state and include such legends as the ghostly sailors that roam the decks of the Queen Mary at Long Beach to the malevolent phantoms that still haunt Alcatraz.

Author: Donovan Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780942087062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description

Author: Simeon Wade
Publisher: Heyday Books
ISBN: 9781597145374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking "nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade-ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade's partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Foucault in California is Wade's firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade's bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault "Country Joe"); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip in Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man's burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

Author: Pam Mu¤oz Ryan
Publisher: Charlesbridge
ISBN: 1607340488
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
Takes the reader on an imaginary trip through California while offering information about the history and geography of the major cities and towns.

Author: Mrs. Fremont Older
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : California
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Typescript of a book published by Coward-McCann (New York, 1940).

Author: Linda Feyder
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1647422000
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
In present-day Southern California, a diverse group of characters seeks the fulfillment and connection this sunny state has always promised. They come with hopes for a better lifestyle, for a change of perspective, or for the dry, mild West Coast weather. A couple moves to Palm Desert from New York for the arid, warm climate a doctor prescribes and they manage both illness and homesickness. The woman makes an unlikely friend in a young albino boy who teaches her a harsh lesson about the margin for cruelty that resides in us all. A young Mexican woman migrates to California and marries an American man—only to be deserted. A young man is disqualified from the Naval Aeronautical program and returns to his sister’s home, where he struggles with his identity and sexuality. After years of estrangement, a teenage girl travels to California from New York to spend the summer with her father. Between each of the thirteen stories in this collection are interspersed several “snapshot” stories—poetic pauses—that blend a set of images into an artistic visual unit, much like a brief cinematic experience. Every character in this collection is distinct from the next, but all of their stories unfold under the glare of the same Southern California sun—a western desert light so clear and unfiltered that it reveals everything.

Author: Mary Hill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520929678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The discovery of gold in 1848 catapulted California into statehood and triggered environmental, social, political, and economic events whose repercussions are still felt today. Mary Hill combines her scientific training with a flair for storytelling to present the history of gold in California from the distant geological past through the wild days of the Gold Rush to the present. The early days of gold fever drew would-be miners from around the world, many enduring great hardships to reach California. Once here, they found mining to be backbreaking work and devised machines to help recover gold. These machines pawed gravel from river bottoms and tore apart mountainsides, wreaking environmental havoc that silted rivers, ruined farmlands, and provoked the world's first environmental conflict settled in the courts. Native Americans were nearly wiped out by invading miners or their diseases, and many Spanish-speaking settlers—Californios—were pushed aside. Hill writes of gold's uses in today's world for everything from coins to coffins, gourmet foods to spacecraft. Her comprehensive overview of gold's impact on California includes illustrated explanations of geology and mining in nontechnical language as well as numerous illustrations, maps, and photographs.

Author: Jan Irving
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313085455
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Children will delight in creating their very own art museum, participating in a storytelling festival, holding a yummy dinner theatre, creating a keen jeans book bag, and much more. In addition, each chapter contains a list of ideas that serve as springboards for activities that you can develop on your own. With writing projects, wordplay, arts and crafts, dramatics, math problems, history lessons, and more, this guide makes it easy to engage young learners while building literacy and reading skills, along with a love of books and reading. Grades K-6

Author: Michael Kowalewski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521565592
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and the essays in Reading the West examine some of the basis of that fascination. Reading the West, first published in 1996, is a collection of critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West in the last two centuries. It showcases new ways of reading and understanding western writing. Arguing for the importance of 'place' in literature, these essays explore what makes representative literary works 'western'. They also explore the multicultural and ecological dimensions of western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work which has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.