I often encounter a category of workers in San Francisco rarely found anywhere else: twentysomethings waiting for their stock options to vest. They are part of a wave of top college graduates lured to the Bay Area by the booming tech job market [...]
The pool whirrs suddenly, and the bluebottom stirs, like the blue
in the sky when clouds sail across its seas.The tangerine sapling may be
dying, hasn’t grown in two months. Frondson palms are limp and brown.
Paradise is thirsty this November. [...]
The rest of the world eyes the lives of Golden State tribes—Hollywood “movie people,” surfers, gay San Franciscans, Silicon Valley programmers—with a mixture of fascination and longing. What is the powerful appeal of the California subcu [...]
Here and there occasionalas navels and avocados droppedby the path, scarlet cardinals,puppies, squirrels, and dodo birds pop
on front yards—pressed resin, pressedtin, all kinds of acrylic from China.Someone loves them no lessthan the animals tha [...]
Muske-Dukes has written poetry, fiction, and essays addressing a broad range of subjects—from John Keats’s “This Living Hand” to Hollywood life on the inside—but what concerns her most is discovering how language used with precision and accountability can effect transformation.
When he sent this letter to VQR Editor Lambert Davis, Wallace Stegner was in his late twenties and just starting to establish himself in national publications. From 1938 to 1943, he published three short stories and three book reviews in VQR. In 194 [...]
California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.
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