What California Means to Writers

What about California captures the imagination of American writers? The state—the country’s most populous, and one of its most diverse—provides fodder for every sort of author.

This week, Ross Perlin wrote about Malcolm Harris’s new book, , which argues that , as well as Silicon Valley at large, is responsible for “wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.” But Perlin is slightly more optimistic: He thinks we could leverage the state’s history to positively change the course of its future. Californian geography can is , and explores a phenomenon he calls “psychogeology”: “the feelings and perceptions caused by the exposed rock, the light, the thinner air at altitude.” As Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in July, Robinson’s book not only details his own sublime encounters but shows us how we might find “our own transcendence.”