Anthologies

Classic and contemporary writing on California culture, society, history, and politics. California: Wallace Stegner calls it "America, only more so." Moguls and migrant workers; primal natural beauty and the artificial glitz of neon-lit cities; high-tech prosperity and grinding poverty; religious fervor and insistence on personal freedom; the triumph of the new frontiers and the weariness of a final destination; madness; exotic; and heartbreak. There is not one California; there are many. As Unknown California demonstrates, the conflict, divergence, and juxtaposition of California's cultures have given birth to writing of resonant richness--some of the best America has known. Unknown California offers Mark Twain "roughing it" in San Francisco, Norman Mailer exposing the corruption at the heart of the film industry, and John Steinbeck reporting on the miseries of the migrant camps. Thomas Pynchon measures the aftershocks of the Watts riots, Evelyn Waugh explores Hollywood's bizarre burial practices, and Henry Miller evokes the majesty of Big Sur. Equally revealing are voices of writers yet to be discovered. As they express the dreams and fury of the Latino community and describe life in Silicon Valley and Harvey Milk's San Francisco, they add the shadows and highlights that mark California's ever-changing landscape. In Unknown California , history and commentary, parody and polemic come together. In letters from a woman describing life in the mining camps in 1852, in a disturbingly familiar portrait of turn-of-the-century Chinatown, in an account of a summer spent in that quintessentially Californian phenomenon called the Magic Kingdom, witnesses from North, South, East, and West testify to a remarkable place. Unknown California is a feast of good writing and a voyage of discovery to a state and state of mind that are as all-encompassing and mysterious as America itself.

The term “cyberpunk” entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer . Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

Eight essays on the ultimate temptations of humankind include Thomas Pynchon on Sloth, John Updike on Lust, Gore Vidal on Pride, A. S. Byatt on Envy, and Joyce Carol Oates on Despair. Reprint.