Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.

Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she’s called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.

Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.

"Eight authors' works of personal nonfiction join with ten new stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small. Faced with a scant historical record in her urge to reconstruct the layered past of Santa Cruz, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction set amidst its architecture. Ten stories explore the California city to animate what might have been, to build the fullness of lives forgotten, and to honor their living with story and possibility. Following this impulse into the realm of nonfiction, eight other writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, these works use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land"--