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Alta Journal’s California Bestsellers List (January 30, 2025)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending January 26, 2025.This week’s list includes two popular titles. First is Onyx Storm, the latest installment in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series. After 18 months at Basgiath War College, a brutal military academy, Violet Sorrengail heads into unfamiliar lands to gather allies for the battl...
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Alta Journal’s California Bestsellers List (January 23, 2025)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending January 19, 2025.This week’s list features two powerful novels. First, Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, shows a world devastated by climate change and economic collapse, where California suffers from a severe water shortage and fires. In this chaos is 15-year-old Lauren Olamin...
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Alta Journal’s California Bestsellers List (January 16, 2025)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending January 12, 2025.This week’s bestsellers list features two exciting new titles. First is Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Blending insights from philosophy, religion, and literature, Burkeman offers practical...
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Alta Journal’s California Bestsellers List (January 9, 2025)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending January 5, 2025.Fewer than 10 percent of Americans stick to their New Year’s resolutions—don’t be part of that statistic! Check out the inspiring self-help titles from this week’s bestsellers list to stay on track. In Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break B...
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11 New Books for January

This month, we’ve got our eyes on Call Her Freedom, Alternative Facts, and nine other titles by writers on the West.1AFLAME: LEARNING FROM SILENCE, BY PICO IYER Riverhead BooksThe book of Ecclesiastes states that “to everything there is a season.” Iyer learns to respond to the seasons of life by making more than 100 pilgrimages to a small hermitage in Big Sur. In practicing silence, he discovers something deeper: how to find and keep joy. Along the way, Iyer shares his revelations and affirms th...
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Q&A with Susan Howland of Alzheimer’s Association

The California Book Club’s December selection, Goodbye, Vitamin, by author Rachel Khong, centers on a family living in Southern California and grappling with the progression of their father’s Alzheimer’s disease. Khong constructs the book as a series of journal entries written by the daughter, Ruth, that capture the emotional strains that families and caregivers often experience when their loved one seems to be slipping away and memories are no longer shared. Despite the difficult circumstances...
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10 New Books for December

This month, we’ve got our eyes on How We Know Our Time Travelers, The Last One, and eight other titles by writers on the West.1CABIN: OFF THE GRID ADVENTURES WITH A CLUELESS CRAFTSMAN, BY PATRICK HUTCHISONSt. Martin’s PressWashington State–based journalist Hutchison gets a sudden notion to purchase a 120-square-foot cabin in the forests of the Cascade Range. He sets out to renovate the structure, a process that takes six years. Hutchison endures mishaps and setbacks but ultimately glories in the...
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10 New Books for November

This month, we’ve got our eyes on Didion and Babitz, Cher, and eight other titles by writers on and of the West.1AN IMAGE OF MY NAME ENTERS AMERICA: ESSAYS, BY LUCY IVESGraywolf PressIves’s essays address everything from her early obsession with My Little Pony to the American West and her uncle’s suicide. She thoughtfully brings together reflections about identity, family, and our current culture, offering nuanced thoughts on pain and fear and how they can transform into possibility and healing....
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Before ‘Violent Spring’

The deluxe edition of the California Book Club’s November selection, Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring, was published 30 years after the first printing. In a foreword, the author writes, “While there has been significant change, too many of the underlying factors setting off the unrest in ’92 remain.” This powerful sentence sets the tone for the novel and signals the issues it will explore—race, equality, police brutality, and media representation.Media representation is a theme central to the expe...
Alta Online •

Before ‘Violent Spring’

The deluxe edition of the California Book Club’s November selection, Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring, was published 30 years after the first printing. In a foreword, the author writes, “While there has been significant change, too many of the underlying factors setting off the unrest in ’92 remain.” This powerful sentence sets the tone for the novel and signals the issues it will explore—race, equality, police brutality, and media representation.Media representation is a theme central to the expe...
Alta Online •

Before ‘Violent Spring’

The deluxe edition of the California Book Club’s November selection, Gary Phillips’s Violent Spring, was published 30 years after the first printing. In a foreword, the author writes, “While there has been significant change, too many of the underlying factors setting off the unrest in ’92 remain.” This powerful sentence sets the tone for the novel and signals the issues it will explore—race, equality, police brutality, and media representation.Media representation is a theme central to the expe...
Alta Online •

<i>Alta Journal</i>’s California Bestsellers List (October 10, 2024)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending October 6, 2024.This week’s bestsellers list features two literary masterpieces. Kicking things off is The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. What began as a guide to writing evolved into something much deeper. In this new release, Coates shares reflections from home and abroad in the form of...
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<i>Alta Journal</i>’s California Bestsellers List (September 19, 2024)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending September 15, 2024.This week, the excellence of California Book Club authors is on full display in the literary world and on the bestsellers list. James, the latest novel by Percival Everett, the CBC’s May 2023 author, was recently long-listed for a 2024 National Book Award for Fiction....
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<i>Alta Journal</i>’s California Bestsellers List (August 15, 2024)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending August 11, 2024.On the bestsellers list are two new charming books that are sure to delight with every page turn. First up is The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, by Evan Friss. Starting with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia, the nonfiction title takes re...
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Q&A: A Conversation with the Women of Líderes Campesinas

Novelist Helena María Viramontes deftly captures farmworking conditions of the mid-20th century in the August California Book Club selection, Under the Feet of Jesus. In carefully drawn descriptions and scenes, the book reveals the grueling circumstances workers are forced to toil under: constant exposure to the sun and toxic chemicals, minimal breaks, a lack of safe drinking water, and the push to always keep working faster and faster.In the real world, however, consumers rarely witness the phy...
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Spotlight on a Literary Venture: Betty

Betty Books is an energized, synergistic collective. We work with each other, for each other.” This is how Haley Hach—author of a forthcoming collection of short stories spotlighting women in rural America, When We’re Ready—describes publisher WTAW Press’s new imprint, Betty (known on social media as Betty Books).Named after WTAW publisher Peg Alford Pursell’s mother—a literary enthusiast who began to value her autonomy later in life—the imprint was born in May 2023. WTAW sought to promote and e...
Alta Online •

Spotlight on a Literary Venture: Betty

Betty Books is an energized, synergistic collective. We work with each other, for each other.” This is how Haley Hach—author of a forthcoming collection of short stories spotlighting women in rural America, When We’re Ready—describes publisher WTAW Press’s new imprint, Betty (known on social media as Betty Books).Named after WTAW publisher Peg Alford Pursell’s mother—a literary enthusiast who began to value her autonomy later in life—the imprint was born in May 2023. WTAW sought to promote and e...
Alta Online •

Spotlight on a Literary Venture: Betty

Betty Books is an energized, synergistic collective. We work with each other, for each other.” This is how Haley Hach—author of a forthcoming collection of short stories spotlighting women in rural America, When We’re Ready—describes publisher WTAW Press’s new imprint, Betty (known on social media as Betty Books).Named after WTAW publisher Peg Alford Pursell’s mother—a literary enthusiast who began to value her autonomy later in life—the imprint was born in May 2023. WTAW sought to promote and e...
Alta Online •

<i>Alta Journal</i>’s California Bestsellers List (June 27, 2024)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending June 23, 2024.This week’s bestsellers list debuts a few titles just in time for summer. Catherine Newman’s recently published novel, Sandwich, follows Rocky, a woman stuck between two generations—her elderly parents and her rapidly growing children—all vacationing together in the family’...
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Music of ‘Solito’

Everywhere we’ve been, the same artists follow us. Los Temerarios. Los Bukis. Bronco. Control Machete. Vilma Palma e Vampiros. Los Yonic’s. Grupo Límite.” In his memoir, Solito, the June California Book Club selection, author Javier Zamora traces his 3,000-mile journey from El Salvador to the United States—and shares the music he was exposed to on the trek. Music has an immense effect on how we perceive ourselves, others, and our situation, as this month’s book beautifully recognizes.Boleros, ra...
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Running with Coyotes

I ’ve never seen a coyote. I’ve seen more people called coyotes than animals,” a nine-year-old Javier Zamora thinks when he happens upon a rotting coyote carcass in the California Book Club’s June selection, Solito. After excruciating days of battling thirst and weariness in the dry desert heat, Zamora, known as Chepito, and his fellow migrants from El Salvador, referred to in the book as the Six, stumble upon the wild canine, the animal from which migrant smugglers derive their name. Although s...
Alta Online •

Running with Coyotes

I ’ve never seen a coyote. I’ve seen more people called coyotes than animals,” a nine-year-old Javier Zamora thinks when he happens upon a rotting coyote carcass in the California Book Club’s June selection, Solito. After excruciating days of battling thirst and weariness in the dry desert heat, Zamora, known as Chepito, and his fellow migrants from El Salvador, referred to in the book as the Six, stumble upon the wild canine, the animal from which migrant smugglers derive their name. Although s...
Alta Online •

Running with Coyotes

I ’ve never seen a coyote. I’ve seen more people called coyotes than animals,” a nine-year-old Javier Zamora thinks when he happens upon a rotting coyote carcass in the California Book Club’s June selection, Solito. After excruciating days of battling thirst and weariness in the dry desert heat, Zamora, known as Chepito, and his fellow migrants from El Salvador, referred to in the book as the Six, stumble upon the wild canine, the animal from which migrant smugglers derive their name. Although s...
Alta Online •

<i>Alta Journal</i> ’s California Bestsellers List (May 30, 2024)

With reporting from the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, Alta Journal brings you a list of the bestselling titles at independent bookstores across Northern and Southern California for the week ending May 26, 2024.On the list this week is the California Book Club’s June pick, Solito, by Javier Zamora. The memoir recounts nine-year-old Zamora’s difficult and dangerous journey from El Salvador to the United States. Join the book club on Thursday, June 20, for a conversation with author...
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