EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION, "Anywhere but Here" California has always struggled to see itself. It''s a myopia that begins with the name. Like many other conquered lands, the state also could have been called so many more accurate things. A number of these possible names lurk in our cities and rivers or perch atop our mountains and beaches. Take Malibu, where the Chumash people lived as far back as possibly 7,000 BCE, the name coming perhaps from their word Humaliwo, which means "where the surf sounds loudly." Or Milpitas, whose name comes from the Mexican Spanish for "cornfield." Perhaps a place as big as the Golden State shouldn''t have been given one name but many? Napa, probably a corruption of a Wappo word that means "homeland," might have been the best. But it also might mean "bear," "fish," or "village," depending on who is doing the translating.

Perhaps a state this big could have multiple meanings. But California? The name comes from a novel--at least, that''s the consensus. In all the history of states and countries, has there ever been a stranger, more official enshrinement of the interaction between the imagination and place? There are a few trick names of towns: Middlemarch; New Zealand, which may have been named after Eliot''s book; and not to be outdone, the British have a seaside village in Devon called Westward Ho! ( with the exclamation point). Still, when Spanish explorers began to sail around the coast of Baja and started calling the area California, after an island in a novel by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo called Las Sergas de Esplandián , they leapt over the thousands of years of Indigenous history, not to mention more than one hundred tribes with their own literatures and languages--and doomed the state to a kind of futurity and fantasy. California has been rewriting itself ever since, working against and with the winds of adventure, always trying to catch up with who actually lives here--or, in some cases, is arriving. Always describing how we live and often, as a result, what we fear. Frequently, this work is done by the recently arrived. When Bret Harte, the grandson of an Orthodox Jewish trader from Albany, turned up in 1854 and started telling the tales of miners arriving, he was not at the beginning of the state''s literature but somewhere way in the middle or even its late silver age.

To deal with how much had to be unremembered in order to make the place new, California spawned concepts that are with us today. Like nature. Like the wild. Jack London played to the latter concept, and how many children around the world grew up listening to its call? I sometimes mourn the youth I would have had if I had appreciated sooner the landscape and culture I come from in California. I did go east, studied literature, and moved to New York, but I felt upon arrival as though something was missing. The idea that a tiny, several-mile-long island was the so-called center of the literary universe struck me as absurd. I went to book parties; not one of them had a firepit. Let alone a diverse cast of characters, as so many spaces in California do almost by simple demographic math.

The physical elements of New York City were totally eclipsed by its concrete, too: You can smell the water around the island, but never feel it on your skin. I adore some of the city''s bookstores, but I didn''t find one that had figured out how to meld what was happening on the streets around it to the shelves inside it the way that City Lights, San Francisco''s temple to political action and wide reading, does. I also got tired of the insularity of it all. It took an absurdly long time for America''s so-called center to see that a new wave of California literature was cresting at the turn of the twenty-first century. Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people--at the highest level--has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now. In fact, if there''s been an American moment in any genre this past century, it''s had a California component. Dave Eggers''s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , made by California. Claudia Rankine''s Citizen ? Written while she taught in California.

Maggie Nelson''s The Argonauts , a breakthrough in conceiving gender, composed in California. Viet Thanh Nguyen''s rewriting of a Vietnam War novel? Straight out of California. Rebecca Solnit introduced the concept of "mansplaining" in her great essay "Men Explain Things to Me," written in San Francisco. The list goes on. Want a poem or two in the shape of a bullet that contains a universe? Kay Ryan writes them in Fairfax. She won a Pulitzer for them. As did Fairfield native Tracy K. Smith for her cosmic poetry in Life on Mars , as well as Frank Bidart for his epic body of work, and Adam Johnson, who proved you can imagine North Korea from San Francisco.

In fact, more Californians have won Pulitzers in literature in the past decade than writers from any other region in America. In an interview recently, the California writer Kathleen Alcott theorized that what makes California different is our sense of time. That when you can travel one hour in any direction and wind up in a desert or on a ski slope or against a rice field or within a small forest, time begins to mean something different to you. Because landscape, after all, is time. It''s made by geologic time. California, as much any other place on earth, knows how sudden and dangerous a rupture in geologic time can be. We also, I think, are at the forefront of knowing what happens when humans try to yoke this vast, mysterious living thing called the Earth to human time. The fires that burn almost all year round, for example.

The droughts. The sudden necessary migrations. The changes in crop patterns. Our literature has paid tribute to this already, from William T. Vollmann''s epic nonfiction narrative, Imperial , to Claire Vaye Watkins''s Gold Fame Citrus , still the best cli-fi novel to have emerged from a burning, troubled America since the astonishingly prognostic Parable of the Sower , by Octavia E. Butler. I agree with all this, but I think something more fundamental to literature is happening in California that explains why so many of its writers are breaking new ground--why it is, I think, a literary mecca for a world in which only a precious few can choose to stay put. Writing, after all, like all art forms, is social; it draws its power from the sounds and concerns of people, from the histories they carry in their bodies.

The novel, the essay, reporting, and poetry, which makes music from the sound of language, depend on how we translate what the body knows. Listening to it, stylizing it, seeing around its easier representations to more accurate narratives and better frames. [.] Since I was in high school, books like The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior , as well as Héctor Tobar''s Translation Nation , have been read and taught to students by the hundreds of thousands. Books that acknowledge the depth and complexity of families and individuals who are, as I write these words, being berated and hectored by the president of the United States. Threatened with unlawful deportation. Things I had to learn of in museum exhibits, such as the incarceration of the Japanese during World War II, have been brought to life in books, such as Julie Otsuka''s devastating When the Emperor Was Divine , also taught in schools now. Isabel Allende''s novels are taught, in English and in Spanish, across California, as well as books by Reyna Grande, Victor Martinez, Luis J.

Rodriguez, Javier Zamora, Victor Villaseñor, and Helena María Viramontes, something enormously important in a state where a third of the residents speak Spanish. Elsewhere the whitewash of culture has been significantly altered by books, as in Los Angeles. Walter Mosley retold the postwar history of Watts from the viewpoint of an African American private dick, Easy Rawlins, which begins when a white man walks into a bar owned by a Black man. And now we''re in the full throes of an era when the offspring of these writers are publishing. Cast your eye onto novelists like Elaine Castillo, whose debut novel, America Is Not the Heart , about a queer war veteran and her epic journey from the Philippines to Milpitas, proves that the banal suburbs are just as hospitable to the epic-scale novel as what we''ve come to expect from glamorous cities. Or turn your ear to Javier Zamora, America''s young second coming of Rubén Darío, who walked to the United States alone as a child at age nine without his family and reconstructed that journey in his tremendous debut book of poems, Unaccompanied , and a follow-up memoir, Solito . Zamora was tutoring young students at Dave Eggers''s 826 Valencia center when he wrote the first lines of his book of poetry. Week to week, this big, glorious, contradictory state is coming to life on the page.

Women in California prisons in the work of Rachel Kushner; Native people at a powwow in Oakland in the work of Tommy Orange; the new sounds of the Central Valley in the stories of Jaime Cortez, who grew up there, a child of documented immigrant farm laborers. Book by book, these novels and poetry and story collections are showing what bodies carry, by putting us--as readers--in them. Bodies are not simply born, the poet Natalie Diaz, from Needles, reminds us; they are built. But how? You cannot always see the gouges of tools. You have to imagine them--and in a state as trained in the eye, as saturated by light as California, this is crucial work.