Haslam's Valley

     This career-spanning collection of fiction and non-fiction will introduce readers to Haslam's world: rural and small-town California, non-stereotypical and richly populated. His writing, like his perceptions, works against the Golden State's stereotype, so instead of tan blondes and hot tubs he writes of people struggling to survive--gritty Chicanos, Armenian farmers, Hmong laborers--in the midst of the richest agricultural region in the history of the world. Reviewer Jonah Raskin calls it "often ignored, largely forgotten landscape on the far side of the California dream."

     The fiction section of this book includes 23 stories about everything from a boastful bumpkin talking about his "vast-ectomy," to a Nisei veteran returning from World War II, to the last antelope and the last "wild Indian" in California. It begins with stories written in the 1960s such as "The Doll" and ends with previously unpublished material from the 2000s such as "Two-headed Man Hangs Self."

     The book's 12 essays range over topics as diverse as "Is California Part of the West?" to new personal essays such as "Very Es-smart" and "Death of an Athlete," as well as much republished pieces like "What Horton Hatched." Observes Raskin, "Haslam has that rare ability to write about places without ignoring their flaws and at the same time acknowledging their virtues."