Edan Lepucki is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a staff writer for The Millions. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney's and Narrative magazine, among other publications, and she is the founder and director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles. This is her first novel.
An NPR best book of 2014A New York Times BestsellerA Los Angeles
Times BestsellerA San Francisco Chronicle BestsellerAn Indiebound
Bestseller "Rewarding....[One of] 30 books you NEED to read in
2014." ---Huffington Post
"California is a wonder: a big, gripping and inventive story built
on quiet, precise human moments. Edan Lepucki's eerie near future
is vividly and persuasively imagined. She is a fierce new presence
in American fiction." ---Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
"California is carefully drawn and beautifully textured. It's a
pleasure to watch love and family transform in this dark, strange
forest." ---Ramona Ausubel, author of A Guide to Being Born and No
One is Here Except All of Us
"An ambitious, powerful, frightening first novel...California shows
the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the
price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the
wrong things." --Sarah Stone, San Francisco Chronicle
"An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught
in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and
failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal,
honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped
me as much as any fictional denouement I've encountered in recent
years....I firmly believe that Edan Lepucki is on the cusp of a
long, strong career in American letters." ---Ben Fountain, author
of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Breathtakingly original, fearless and inventive, pitch perfect in
its portrayal of the intimacies and tiny betrayals of marriage, so
utterly gripping it demands to be read in one sitting: Edan
Lepucki's California is the novel you have been waiting for, the
novel that perfectly captures the hopes and anxieties of
contemporary America. This is a novel that resonates on every
level, a novel that stays with you for a lifetime. Read it now."
---Joanna Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age
"Edan Lepucki is the very best kind of writer: simultaneously
generous and precise. I am long been an admirer of her prose, but
this book---this book, this massive, brilliant book---is a four
alarm fire, the ambitious and rich introduction that a writer of
her caliber deserves. I can't wait for the world to know what I
have known for so many years, that Edan Lepucki is the real thing,
and that we will all be bowing at her feet before long." ---Emma
Straub, author of Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures
"Edan Lepucki's first novel comes steeped in Southern California
literary tradition....One thinks of Steve Erickson or Cynthia
Kadohata, or Carolyn See, whose 1987 novel Golden Days ends with
the nuclear holocaust." ---David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Edan Lepucki's novel California kept me up for five nights. This
was a problem. However, I was not just tired, but often worried for
the characters, for our world, and then astonished and laughing at
her skill with humor and lyricism even in the fearful landscape.
It's a ruined place, yes, but the bonds of family, and the betrayal
of blood, are as true as every in her surprising imagery and her
complicated humans, who could be any of us." ---Susan Straight,
author of A Million Nightingales
"In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush,
intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully
exploits its dramatic possibilities." ---Jennifer Egan, author of A
Visit from the Goon Squad
"In her remarkable debut California, Edan Lepucki has conjured a
post-apocalyptic vision that is honest, frightening, and altogether
too realistic. At times disturbing and often heartbreaking,
California is an original examination of the limitations of family
and loyalty in a world on the verge of collapse." ---Ivy Pochoda,
author of Visitation Street
"It's tempting to call this novel post-apocalyptic, but really,
it's about an apocalypse in progress, an apocalypse that might
already be happening, one that doesn't so much break life into
before and after as unravel it bit by bit. Edan Lepucki tells her
tale with preternatural clarity and total believability, in large
part by focusing on the relationships -- between husband and wife,
brother and sister, parent and child -- that are, it turns out,
apocalypse-proof. Post-nothing. California is timeless." ---Robin
Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
"Lepucki gives readers the most welcome surprise--in a dystopian
novel, anyway--of flashes of humor. Many of her witty touches make
reference to the familiar details of life in 2014, and what happens
to them in the future." --Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Noteworthy....Lepucki's debut is an inventive take on the
post-apocalyptic novel, about a couple who moves from an isolated
existence in the wilderness to a guarded community that, they soon
realize, harbors terrifying secrets and unforseen dangers."
---Laura Pearson, Time Out Chicago
"Stunning and brilliant novel, which is a wholly original take on
the post-apocalypse genre, an end-of-the-world we've never seen
before and yet is uncomfortably believable and recognizable. By
turns funny and heartbreaking, scary and tender, beautifully
written and compulsively page-turning, this is a book that will
haunt me, and that I'll be thankful to return to in the years to
come. It left me speechless. Read it, and prepare yourself." ---Dan
Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
"There's been no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios in our recent
literature. What makes Edan Lepucki's novel so stunning is that her
survivors don't merely resemble us, they are us, in their emotional
particularity and dilemmas. The result is a book as terse and
terrifying as the best of Shirley Jackson, on the one hand, and as
clear-eyed and profound a portrait of a marriage as Evan Connell's
Mrs. Bridge, on the other. California is superb." ---Matthew
Specktor, author of The American Dream Machine
"This thrilling and thoughtful debut novel by Edan Lepucki follows
a young married couple navigating dangers both physical and
emotional in a wild, mysterious post-collapse America. It's a
vivid, believable picture of a not-so-distant future and the
timeless negotiation of young marriage, handled with suspense and
psychological acuity." ---Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black
"When the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper, you want a
guide whose insight into the subtle revolutions of the heart are as
nuanced as her perceptions about the broken world are astute. In
prose witty, seductive, and exacting, Lepucki reminds us that, in
the after-life of social collapse, it's not only the strongest
willed, but the most compassionate among us, who must rebuild.
California is an epic of interiors." ---Shya Scanlon, author of
Forecast
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