Friday, October 10, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 **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.** "In Freeman's hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation." --**Ingrid Rojas Contreras**, author of _The Man Who Could Move Clouds_ 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. **Héctor Tobar** is a Los Angeles-born author of six books, including, most recently, _Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino_," winner of the Kirkus Prize and other honors. His nonfiction _Deep Down Dark_ was a _New York Times_ bestseller, and his novel _The Barbarian Nurseries_ won the California Book Award. Tobar’s fiction has appeared in _Best American Short Stories_, and he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine, where he is currently a professor. At the _Los Angeles Times_ he was a foreign correspondent and won a Pulitzer Prize. Tobar has been a Guggenheim fellow, an op-ed writer for the _New York Times_, and a contributor to _The New Yorker_. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.