{"product_id":"california-calling-isbn-9780998825717","title":"California Calling","description":"\u003cb\u003e“This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of other worlds.”’ —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Chronology of Water\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e is a lyrical self-interrogation of obsession, emigration, and identity. Natalie Singer’s story opens in a courtroom on a witness stand, where she’s forced to testify in a family breakup that changes the course of her life. At sixteen Natalie emigrates from Montreal and the secrets it holds to the golden promise of the California Bay Area, just as her Jewish ancestors fled Russia and went west for a new life. Through uneasy rituals of high school pep rallies and college sex in boats and the backs of pickups, to a summer tracing a serial killer through the heart of Gold Country, to an eventual journalism career in San Francisco and the deserts of Palm Springs, Natalie aches to forge an American identity. At once an intimately unflinching memoir and a probing examination of the family and cultural myths that shape us, \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e calls upon history, reportage, witness interrogation tactics, music and pop culture, and the iconography of the West to explore whether we can cure loneliness through landscape. Ultimately, \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e is a search for a state of belonging.\"In her captivating literary memoir . . . Singer’s story comes through brief and lovely snapshots of moments, captured in language that is visceral and vivacious . . . a work that is both raw and incandescent, but whose most powerful reveals will perhaps reemerge in the reader’s consciousness only after the fact. This is a California that, as promised, truly does belong to all.\" —\u003ci\u003eForeword Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In this searing book . . . Singer’s candor and self-questioning are humbling. She writes with melodic precision and sunshine-soaked imagery, crafting a powerful and memorable memoir.\" —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Love, escape, education, and family . . . These subjects are intertwined in ways that make for emotionally engrossing reading.\" —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If epic longing for an identity could be cured by entering a story, \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling: A Self Interrogation\u003c\/i\u003e is the roadmap. Natalie Singer gives us the beating heart of an immigrant entering that mythic place we call the west. By and through the body of a girl becoming a woman we are reminded just how tricky forging a self is against the fractures and earthquakes and soul fires of life. I could hear and identify with an Eastern European heartsong yearning to find the rhythm called home in the west. I know both of those songs. This book split my heart open and reminded me how much immigrants matter, how much we all carry the traces of of other worlds.\" —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Chronology of Water\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Natalie Singer’s wonderful debut is about the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves as nations and individuals, and what we do when we learn about the truth beneath those myths. Singer situates \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e within the geographic, literary and pop culture of the American West but the story she tells will ring true to anyone who is or knows a daughter, a woman, an immigrant.\" —Rebecca Brown, \u003ci\u003eThe Gifts of the Body\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I couldn’t stop reading \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e―I consumed it in one gorgeous gulp. Natalie Singer writes beautifully of an ordinary, extraordinary coming of age. In prose that’s lean and elegant and fiercely honest, she captures the big pain and the small, real joys of growing up. This book shimmers like a California dream.\" —Claire Dederer, author of \u003ci\u003eLove and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling: A Self-Interogation\u003c\/i\u003e, Natalie Singer brings the universal themes of longing and displacement to life in a singular, inimitable voice. \u003ci\u003eCalifornia Calling\u003c\/i\u003e is a story of yearning for a home that no longer exists, a story of place—both real and iconic. But most of all this is a book about disruption and an interrogation in which form mirrors content; the questions leveled at the narrator become, in the end, Singer’s questions for the reader, who is left to revisit their own notions of identity, home, and belonging. Natalie Singer is an important writer we’ll be sure to be hearing from for years to come.\" —Theo Pauline Nestor, author of \u003ci\u003eWriting Is My Drink\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATALIE SINGER\u003c\/b\u003e has been published in a number of journals, magazines and newspapers, including \u003ci\u003eLiterary Mama\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eParentMap\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAlligator Juniper\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eFull Grown People\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work is included in the anthology \u003ci\u003eLove \u0026amp; Profanity: A Collection of True\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTortured\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWild\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHilarious\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eConcise\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eIntense Tales of Teenage Life\u003c\/i\u003e published by Switch Press. She won the 2013 Pacific Northwest Writers Association nonfiction award, and was a finalist for the 2016 Red Hen Press and Autumn House Press nonfiction awards. She has taught writing at a state psychiatric facility for youth and at a juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor. As a writer-in-residence at On the Boards, a contemporary performing arts collective in Seattle, her responses to performances have created a bridge of dialogue between artists and the community. Natalie earned her MFA in creative writing and poetics from the University of Washington. She was born in Montreal, lives in Seattle, and dreams of California.","brand":"Hawthorne Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532130660581,"sku":"NP9780998825717","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780998825717.jpg?v=1773182763","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/california-calling-isbn-9780998825717","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}