From one of America's great writers, this delightful collection - the first of its kind - contains twenty-three adventurous tales set in the San Francisco Bay Area. If San Francisco has captured the world's imagination through the hardboiled stories of Dashiell Hammett, the prose and poetry of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beats, through Orson Welles' Lady From Shanghai and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, it is as a romantic city of vast suspension bridges and foggy back alleys, not as the wild west of Jack London's day. Pre-quake San Francisco was a tough town, and Jack London - hobo, sailor,...

The Furthest Palm is an urban novel shaped as a series of disjointed short stories held together by tone, perception, and the single-named protagonist, Trace, a loner navigating the savage streets of Los Angeles, whose best friends are Jack Daniels, Potter's vodka, his 1948 Packard, and three women -- Lisa, Amy, and ex-wife Josephine.

Trace is a writer-for-hire, a lifestyle choice that puts him in constant contact with those who live under the "vaporous cloud of wretched hopelessness" that is at the core of the rotten L.A. promise. His L.A. is one of drumming rainstorms,...