Where the sun sets

by Keenan Norris
|
9 books
This is a book list framed around my reading of contemporary authors of the American West Coast. If the list only encompassed California writers, I would call it “Transparent California,” a subtle re-casting of a right-wing watchdog website’s name into something I could actually love. However, this list looks not only into California authors, but beyond that already global diversity of voices to other points and people west. Alternate title 2: “West Coast Civ—” Too ironic? Probably. Anyway, you get the idea.
Read more... Read less...

Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

A Novel
Susan Straight, 1994
After I learned that I had family who survived the Tulsa massacre, I re-traced my steps to this novel written by my first creative writing teacher, Susan Straight, years before I knew her. At its heart, the novel looks back from its southern California setting to the Tulsa massacre—back then we were still calling it a “race riot”—while grappling in real-time with the Los Angeles riots to the west.

When Living was a Labor Camp

Diana Garcia, 2000
I remember when Diana Garcia visited UC Riverside in the early 2000s and recited poems from this book from memory, not even troubling to glance at the pages. I was just an undergraduate student then, but the book moved me, in no small part because it told a story from the fields which my mother had lived but which I had never heard told with such depth and terrible beauty.

Still Water Saints

A Novel
Alex Espinoza, 2008
Alex Espinoza’s debut novel is set, according to its promotional material, “beyond the fringes of Los Angeles,” i.e., the I.E., the Inland Empire, my home ground. This was the first book that I read that was written by a prodigy whom I had actually had a chance to meet, having crossed paths with Alex at UC Riverside right before he moved on into the career that he’s since crafted over the course of several works.

The Walking

A Novel
Laleh Khadivi, 2014
Laleh Khadivi’s second novel follows its protagonist from a revolutionary-era massacre in Iran across continents and all the way to Los Angeles. Khadivi’s exploration of human migration is stunning, a fitting companion to the work of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, as well as the great immigrant narratives, from Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The New American.

What Lies Between Us

Nayomi Munaweera, 2016
A complicated work that is very much an exploration of outlaw female identity in the mold of Toni Morrison’s early novels, Nayomi Munaweera’s second novel follows the tragic narrative of Ganga, a Sri Lankan-American healthcare worker, in San Francisco. Ganga, like so many Californians, carries with her the latent trauma of a history to which she is distantly but powerfully allied and it is up for debate to what extent that history informs her fate.

The Sellout

A Novel
Paul Beatty, 2015
Paul Beatty’s best book, The Sellout is as funny-complicated as anything that I’ve read. Set in a fictional Compton, California, the novel’s heart is a narrator that just doesn’t “get it,” “it” being the collective insanity that is America and race.

Survival Math

Notes on an All-American Family
Mitchell Jackson, 2020
Mitchell S. Jackson’s second book re-visits and expands upon the concerns of his debut novel, The Residue Years. A work of non-fiction, Survival Math charts with scholarly depth and precision the history of Black Oregonians from their beginnings up to the explosion of crack cocaine across the West Coast in the 1980s and 90s. In Survival Math, Jackson reveals himself to be a brilliant non-fiction writer, presaging his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism on the life and death of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner’s World.

Rough House

A Memoir
Tina Ontiveros, 2020
When Tina Ontiveros asked me to be her MFA thesis advisor at Goddard College’s now-defunct West Coast campus and I got a load of her memoir rough house, it was the first time I encountered the world of Pacific Northwest logging culture. From the all-white work camps to the danger of the work and the rituals for the fallen, the book-as-thesis was stunning then and in its final form it is even more so now.

We Are Each Other's Harvest

Natalie Baszile, 2021
The author of the bestselling Queen Sugar, in this her second book California-based Natalie Baszile takes a non-fiction look at the past, present and future of Black farming in America. Because the relationship of Black people to American agricultural space is frated with the trauma and stigma of slavery, this epic work is an altogether necessary return to the land, our land, imbuing the work of our ancestors and our contemporaries with its proper dignity and pride.