{"id":1957,"date":"2014-07-02T19:38:02","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T19:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=1957"},"modified":"2014-07-02T19:39:47","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T19:39:47","slug":"the-book-were-talking-about-california-by-edan-lepucki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/the-book-were-talking-about-california-by-edan-lepucki","title":{"rendered":"The Book We’re Talking About: ‘California’ By Edan Lepucki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted: 07\/01\/2014 4:41 pm EDT Updated: 07\/01\/2014 5:59 pm EDT<\/span><\/p>\n

CALIFORNIA EDAN LEPUCKI<\/p>\n

Maddie Crum
\nmadeleine.crum@huffingtonpost.com
\n\"\"
\nCalifornia
\nby Edan Lepucki
\nLittle, Brown, $26.00
\nPublishes July 8, 2014<\/p>\n

The Book We’re Talking About is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.<\/p>\n

What we think:
\n\u201cThere is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,\u201d Joan Didion wrote in \u201cLos Angeles Notebook,\u201d an essay using the Santa Ana phenomenon as a metaphor for California\u2019s apocalyptic state. She continues, \u201cIt is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.\u201d She quotes Nathaniel West and Raymond Carver to accentuate her point, which is: California is the ideal setting for a story about the end of the world.<\/p>\n

Edan Lepucki must\u2019ve agreed, as she chose to set her debut novel in the sunshine state. You might\u2019ve heard about California from Stephen Colbert. It publishes with Little, Brown next week, an imprint under the Hachette umbrella, and thus was swept up in the most recent Amazon ruckus. Colbert\u2019s book, too, was a victim of Amazon\u2019s decision to remove Hachette titles from their site, so he\u2019s taken it upon himself to encourage viewers to pick up Lepucki\u2019s title — a dystopian romp through a suddenly rural California — at an independent bookstore.<\/p>\n

The story opens with Cal and Frida, a couple that has chosen to flee Los Angeles, one of many American cities that has fallen to shambles due to a sudden oil crisis and a slew of global warming-related natural disasters. As a result, the very wealthy have migrated to cloistered \u201cCommunities,\u201d where they have highly coveted Internet access, among other luxuries. The rest of the country either lives in squalor in drug-addled former cities, or off the grid, as Cal and Frida have opted to do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For detail please visit here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted: 07\/01\/2014 4:41 pm EDT Updated: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[232,161],"tags":[530,531],"views":1022,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1961,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions\/1961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}