Rumpus contributor J. Ryan Stradal edited the recently published California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Gold State, Number 2. The anthology’s goal? To find the best new practitioners of Californian prose. Down at LARB, Dinah Lenney quizzes Stradal on just how impossible that is:
Like a lot of people, when I think of California prose, I think of writers like Joan Didion, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Michelle Tea, Luis J. Rodriguez, Walter Mosley, Amy Tan, and James Brown, just for starters. All of them capture a sense of their place and time perfectly — but California’s size and variety renders futile any attempt to capture it in a single voice…Trying to capture California in one book is like attempting to catch a hurricane in a shot glass.
