San Antonio College Library

Set in Depression-era California, the novel focuses on Richard, a young pocho who experiences the intense conflict between loyalty to the traditions of his family's past and attraction to new ideas.

In 1941, Los Angels police detective Zeke Bannon investigates the suspicious electrocution of Verna Wilensky. He follows a trail of checks stretching back twenty years that leads him to Thomas Culhane of San Peitro, a man who may well be the next governor.

Collection of short stories about a girl growing up in California traces her life from the age of 12 to 16.

Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. Oedipa leaves her home and her husband and heads to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs. Pierce, however, did not intend for the job to be an easy one for Oedipa, and soon she becomes ensared in a surreal, hilarious, and puzzling world-wide conspiracy centered around Pierce's...

Opportunity knocks for an Iranian immigrant in California when the county offers for sale a seized house at a bargain price. It will serve as a launching pad for his real-estate business. When the county discovers it made an error, the drug-addicted woman who owned the house demands its return, but the Iranian refuses. Unfortunately for him, the woman's lover is a policeman who takes the law into his hands.

"Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast." --...

The Whip is inspired by the true story of a woman, Charlotte "Charley" Parkhurst (1812-1879) who lived most of her extraordinary life as a man in the old west. As a young woman in Rhode Island, she fell in love with a runaway slave and had his child. The destruction of her family drove her west to California, dressed as a man, to track the killer. Charley became a renowned stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo. She killed a famous outlaw, had a secret...

"The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning "5 Under 35" fiction writer. In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins's story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future. Unrelenting...

In 1970 in East Los Angeles, Gloria Damasco, a feminist political activist from Oakland, and her best friend Luisa are attending a march in support of the Chicano Moratorium. After the protest turns into a riot, Gloria and Luisa discover the dead body of a 4-year old boy named Michael David Cisneros; he has been strangled and his body defiled. Working unofficially with the lead LAPD homicide investigator, Gloria and Luisa become acquainted with the...