LISTEN NOW | Day to Day, August 13, 2008 · James D. Houston’s latest book, WHERE LIGHT TAKES ITS COLOR FROM THE SEA, is filled with stories and essays about his native California, and particularly Santa Cruz. He lives there with his family in a roomy Victorian house with a water view. Karen Joy Fowler, author of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, also lives in Santa Cruz, and has set her new novel, WIT’S END, in a house very much based on Houston’s home. (Rick Kleffel reports for member station KUSP.)

LISTEN NOW | James D. Houston in conversation with Andrew Tonkovich at KPFK’s Bibliocracy
30 mins (give or take)

Click images

Photo © Paul Kitagawa | Sacramento Bee

Cover image: Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz Pogonip © Tom Killion

By James D. Houston
Foreword by Alan Cheuse

A stirring collection of short prose by the author of Snow Mountain Passage and Bird of Another Heaven.

Taking inspiration from California’s breathtaking landscapes, history, and distinctive ways of life, Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea reveals a writer’s keen appreciation of place. This selection of James D. Houston’s essays and short stories illuminates the themes and styles he has explored in his forty years as a writer.

Heyday Books
Spring 2008 release

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Monday, May 5 at noon on KPFK
My guest [was] novelist and essayist, short story and travel writer James D. Houston. Like Joan Didion and John Steinbeck, Jim Houston has chronicled life in the West, California, the Pacific Rim over a career as a writer that has spanned forty years. He is author of the prizewinning novels Snow Mountain Passage, a telling of the story of the Donner Party and Bird of Another Heaven, about the last king of Hawaii; nonfiction classics including The Men in My Life and Californians: Searching for the Golden State. He is author of one of our country’s most influencial and enduring books, another classic, Farewell to Manzanar, with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, read and studied as part of the public school curriculum. Now in its 63^rd printing, it is the singular story of the internment of Japanese-Americans as told from the perspective of young Jeanne Wakatsuki. Jim Houston was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and has written on family, surfing, Hawaii, and in every medium so that it’s a real pleasure to welcome him to Bibliocracy on the occasion of the publication of his career-defining collection from Heyday Books, Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea.

– Andrew Tonkovich (Host of Pacifica Radio’s Bibliocracy; editor of Santa Monica Review)

Bibliocracy Radio Blogspot
KPFK
James D. Houston’s Web Site

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