David Ulin

Mar 24, 2025 | altaonline.com | David Ulin

It’s tempting to call Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History timely, especially in California, where, in the wake of January’s Eaton and Palisades conflagrations, fire has ceased to feel seasonal at all.

Mar 24, 2025 | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyJack Kerouac’s breakthrough may have been his 1957 novel, On the Road, but I’ve always preferred his follow-up, The Dharma Bums, which appeared the next year. For one thing, there’s less baggage around the book. For another, it’s spare and self-contained, mostly taking place in Northern California and revolving around the author’s friendship with the poet Gary Snyder, fictionalized as Japhy Ryder.

Mar 24, 2025 | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyRaymond Chandler may not have invented noir, but he gave the form a Southern California edge. For him, literature emerged from voice more than from content or genre. “There are no vital and significant forms of art,” he wrote in 1950. “There is only art, and precious little of that.” Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, published (like Ask the Dust) in 1939, represents a case in point.

Mar 24, 2025 | altaonline.com | David Ulin

I like to think about a book as an iceberg,” Julie Golia was saying. “The published thing is just that little tip that sticks out.” This was on a Zoom call early in March to discuss the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Archive at the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue building, where Golia is associate director of the Rayner Special Collections Wing and the Charles J. Liebman Senior Curator of Manuscripts.

Mar 24, 2025 | altaonline.com | David Ulin

chris hardyGolden Days is the only Carolyn See novel that opens outside California. “Once, I remember, in an entirely different world,” she begins, “I interviewed that East Coast photographer who made a good living taking pictures of people as they jumped.” And yet, even here, that voice—gossipy, insinuating with its reference to that photographer—operates like a whisper in your ear. This is what I most admire about See’s fiction, the way its conversational qualities get us to drop our guard.