From Booklist
The State of California's reputation is surely as vast as its landmass, equated at once with unimaginably weird trends and scenery of breathtaking beauty. Like a series of crisp snapshots, this satisfying collection of stories presents picturesque vignettes that capture a moody, mythic landscape bracketed by boundaries where ethnic enclaves exist alongside regions of luxurious exile. Such conspicuous contrasts are focused in on by the agile prose we have come to expect from Alice Adams, Greg Sarris, and other well-known masters of the short-story form. Editor Gilbar introduces fresh new literary voices as well, who collectively record revelatory, wide-ranging visions of contemporary California in a rich panoply of characters and images. Alice Joyce

Lin Rolens, Santa Barbara News Press, April 4, 1999
Gilbar's latest collection is no mean feat, and it makes for a thoughtful and wonderfully diverse reading experience that will transport the reader.... This collection will hearten you about the diversity and power of the short story and remind you of how splendidly and painfully varied we are in this place called California.

Paul Signorelli, The San Francisco Bay Guardian "Lit" section, May 1999
A strong, entertaining, and challenging collection.

From the Back Cover
Short stories by twenty-two of America's most talented writers reveal some of the remarkable worlds that comprise modern California: the fast-paced urban centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farmlands of the Central Valley, the lakes of the Sierra Nevada, the deserts, beaches, small towns, ranches, and redwood forests. Each story plunges the reader among people whose lives are variously chaotic, quirky, heroic, desperate, driven, or redemptive, but always compelling. Here, we witness a Japanese immigrant's lonely new life, the emotional upheaval of a couple after an earthquake, a California Indian girl's coming of age, a black runaway's search for shelter and companionship, a fire lookout's encounter with a disturbing visitor atop Mount Whitney. California Shorts provides a vivid, moving, and unforgettable portrait of the many faces of California. It also convincingly shows the vitality and power of today's short story, which, as editor Steven Gilbar notes, "more than any other literary form, best captures contemporary California on the wing." This is American writing at its best.

About the Author
Steven Gilbar is the editor of numerous anthologies about California, including Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing (University of California Press). Other collections include Santa Barbara Stories (John Daniel and Company), Red Tiles Blue Skies: More Tales of Santa Barbara from Adobe Days to Present Days (John Daniel and Company), and Reading in Bed: Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading (David R. Godine). He currently lives in Santa Barbara.

Excerpted from California Shorts by Steven Gilbar. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
"People would ask her what it was like. She'd watch them from her tower as they weaved along the trail in their baseball caps and day packs, their shorts, hiking boots and sneakers. The brave ones would mount the hundred and fifty wooden steps hammered into the face of the mountain to stand at the high-flown failing of the little glass-walled shack she called home for seven months a year. Sweating, sucking at canteens and bota bags, heaving for breath in the undernourished air, they would ask her what it was like. "Beautiful," she would say. "Peaceful." But that didn't begin to express it. It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God. Nine thousand feet up, she could see the distant hazy rim of the world, she could see Mount Whitney rising up above the crenellations of the Sierra, she could see the stars that haven't been discovered yet. In the morning, she was the first to watch the sun emerge from the hills to the east, and in the evening, when it was dark beneath her, the valleys and ridges gripped by the insinuating fingers of the night, she was the last to see it set. There was the wind in the trees, the murmur of the infinite needles soughing in the uncountable branches of the pines, sequoias and cedars that stretched out below her like a carpet. There was daybreak. There was the stillness of 3:00 A.M. She couldn't explain it. She was sitting on top of the world." from "Sitting on Top of the World" by T. Coraghessan B

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This original collection presents writings by some of America's most talented authors, revealing the remarkable worlds that comprise California: the fast-paced urban centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farmlands and small-town life of the Great Central Valley, the beauty of the Sierra Nevada, the deserts of Southern California. It is here that we witness a first-generation Japanese woman's lonely new life, the emotional upheaval of a couple after an earthquake, a son's reluctant return to his roots, a California Indian girl's coming of age. Each story, surprisingly different, introduces us to one the many faces of modern California.

California Shorts also reaffirms the short story as a vigorous form that can capture and express the strongest and at the same time most nuanced of emotions. Individually, each story is a masterwork of its form, fully realized and utterly gripping. California Shorts contains exemplary works by familiar authors such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Bill Barich, James D. Houston, Alice Adams, and Howard Norman, as well as those by brilliant and emerging writers such as Greg Sarris, Chitra Divakaruni, Dagoberto Gilb, Jess Mowry, Roy Parvin, and Mari Sunaida. Together, they affirm that the short story form is alive, its practice in the hands of skillful and thoughtful writers, and that California remains a fertile ground for literary exploration.