The Other California · the Great Central Valley in Life and Letters

This enlarged edition of The other California, originally published in 1990, contains nineteen essays (six of them new to this collection) on the landscape, literature, and life in the Great Central Valley of California. A vast, flat patchwork of fields and orchards about the size of England, the Valley has become the richest farming region in the history of the world. It also has a rich literary tradition: William Saroyan, Joan Didion, William Everson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, and Richard Rodriguez were all raised in this agricultural heartland.