In 1510 a Spanish romancer described an island called California, "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise." It was inhabited by Amazons, and even the harnesses of the beasts they rode were gold. Thus began the rich literature of California. In a place that boasts so many claims to one's attention, short fiction has flourished. Great California Stories trumpets the immense short story tradition developed by visitors like Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce but mostly by natives like Jack London and John Steinbeck. The twenty-one stories in this anthology go back to the oral tradition of the American Indians and recall the Hispanic settlement, the gold rush of the 1850s, the agricultural epoch, the growth of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the foibles of early Hollywood, and the rise of ghettos. The ethnic diversity of California is reflected in a cast of story characters including Indians, mission fathers, Asians, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and forty-niners and landseekers from the eastern states. California's varied scenery is drawn on in stories with a strong sense of place, whether Steinbeck's Salinas Valley or Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Besides Steinbeck and Chandler, authors represented are Theodora Kroeber, Bret Harte, Gertrude Atherton, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Edwin Cone, Jack London, Idwal Jones, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Dashiel Hammett, Eugene Burdick, Janet Lewis, Wallace Stegner, and Danny Santiago. For them California is a memorable background, sometimes a fabulous character, always a distinctive quality.

California's rich and colorful history has produced a wealth of tales about the supernatural. These unique tales of scary folklore come from all over the state and include such legends as the ghostly sailors that roam the decks of the Queen Mary at Long Beach to the malevolent phantoms that still haunt Alcatraz.

The discovery of gold in 1848 catapulted California into statehood and triggered environmental, social, political, and economic events whose repercussions are still felt today. Mary Hill combines her scientific training with a flair for storytelling to present the history of gold in California from the distant geological past through the wild days of the Gold Rush to the present. The early days of gold fever drew would-be miners from around the world, many enduring great hardships to reach California. Once here, they found mining to be backbreaking work and devised machines to help recover gold. These machines pawed gravel from river bottoms and tore apart mountainsides, wreaking environmental havoc that silted rivers, ruined farmlands, and provoked the world's first environmental conflict settled in the courts. Native Americans were nearly wiped out by invading miners or their diseases, and many Spanish-speaking settlers—Californios—were pushed aside. Hill writes of gold's uses in today's world for everything from coins to coffins, gourmet foods to spacecraft. Her comprehensive overview of gold's impact on California includes illustrated explanations of geology and mining in nontechnical language as well as numerous illustrations, maps, and photographs.

Children will delight in creating their very own art museum, participating in a storytelling festival, holding a yummy dinner theatre, creating a keen jeans book bag, and much more. In addition, each chapter contains a list of ideas that serve as springboards for activities that you can develop on your own. With writing projects, wordplay, arts and crafts, dramatics, math problems, history lessons, and more, this guide makes it easy to engage young learners while building literacy and reading skills, along with a love of books and reading. Grades K-6

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and the essays in Reading the West examine some of the basis of that fascination. Reading the West, first published in 1996, is a collection of critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West in the last two centuries. It showcases new ways of reading and understanding western writing. Arguing for the importance of 'place' in literature, these essays explore what makes representative literary works 'western'. They also explore the multicultural and ecological dimensions of western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work which has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.

This book contains 70 short stories from 10 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. The stories were carefully selected by the critic August Nemo, in a collection that will please the literature lovers. For more exciting titles, be sure to check out our 7 Best Short Stories and Essential Novelists collections. This book contains: Émile Zola: Captain Burle The Miller's Daughter Jean Gourdon's Four Days The Fete At Coqueville The Flood Death of Olivier Becaille Nana Stewart Edward White: The Girl Who Got Rattled Billy's Tenderfoot The River-Boss The Saving Grace The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes The Girl in Red The Fifth Way Sarah Orne Jewett: A Winter Courtship Going to Shrewsbury The White Rose Road The Town Poor A Native of Winby Looking Back on Girlhood The Passing of Sister Barsett Willa Cather A Burglar's Christmas A Wagner Matinee On the Gull's Road Paul's Case The Enchanted Bluff The Namesake The Garden Lodge George Ade The Fable of the Preacher Who Flew His Kite, But Not Because He Wished to Do So The Fable of the Two Mandolin Players and His Willing Performer The Fable of the Parents Who Tinkered with the Offspring The Fable of the Man Who Didn't Care for Storybooks The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideal The Fable of How Uncle Brewster was Too Shifty for the Tempter The Fable of Lutie, the False Alarm, and How She Finished about the Time that She Started Robert W. Chambers: The Messenger The Repairer of Reputations The Purple Emperor Passeur The Key to Grief A Matter of Interest Pompe Funèbre George Gissing The House Of Cobwebs A Capitalist Christopherson Humplebee The Scrupulous Father A Poor Gentleman Miss Rodney's Leisure Lord Dunsany: Chu-Bu and Sheemish The Hoard of the Gibbelins The Quest of the Queen's Tears How One Came, As Was Foretold, To The City Of Never The Wonderful Window The Bride Of The Man Horse The House Of The Sphinx Ruth McEnery Stuart: Sonny's Christenin' Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets The Two Tims Old Easter Saint Idyl's Light Little Mother Quackalina Blink Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: The Railroad and the Churchyard The Father The Bridal March One Day Mother's Hands Thrond Absalom's Hair