Haslam s stories are of the quintessential California of working people who struggle to make a living. He is their spokesperson no matter what their color or language because he, too, has chopped cotton under the searing sun, has toiled on drilling rigs in fog thick as oatmeal, has lived in a house where Spanish and English mingled. His writing marks a boundary between the Golden State's stereotypes and the real people who persevere in seeking the California dream.

That Constant Coyotecontains twenty-five stories in all, nineteen selections previously published and six new pieces....

This enlarged edition of The other California, originally published in 1990, contains nineteen essays (six of them new to this collection) on the landscape, literature, and life in the Great Central Valley of California. A vast, flat patchwork of fields and orchards about the size of England, the Valley has become the richest farming region in the history of the world. It also has a rich literary tradition: William Saroyan, Joan Didion, William Everson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, and Richard Rodriguez were all raised in this agricultural heartland.

Haslam explores the rural areas and small towns of his native region California's Great Central Valley in this collection of twenty-five short stories. The stories are filled with a principally masculine cast that is as culturally diverse as the West gets: a Chinese laborer, a Portugese farmer, a Vietnamese schoolboy, a black cowboy, and an Armenian poet, just to name a few. These pieces range from traditional stories to vignettes to sketches and talks as Haslam seeks literary structures that powerfully project his characters and their experiences. The author s triumph in these stories is...

Leroy Upton, the "straight white male" who is the novel s central character, has come a long way from the sun-baked working-class neighborhood in Bakersfield where he grew up. The son of an oil-field laborer, Leroy is now a professor at a small college in Northern California. He is happily married, has three much-loved children, and close friends who share his memories and success.

But life is about to deliver a series of challenges that overturn Leroy s hard-won serenity and threaten to destroy his marriage and his family. Leroy s father, Earl, once so wise and invincible, is descending...

Just when Sacramento journalist Marty Martinez thinks his life can't get any worse, it does. His beloved son has died of AIDS, his wife has divorced him and joined a cult, and his daughter blames him for the disintegration of their family. Then a chance medical examination reveals that he has prostate cancer. Marty faces his bewildering new role as a cancer patient with awkward grit and desperation. He is a sympathetic, utterly convincing character seeking faith in a Catholic Church as troubled as he is; bringing increased intensity to his career as he investigates a far-reaching political...