The Spinners' Book of Fiction

A glittering time capsule of early 20th-century California, this anthology emerged from San Francisco's most distinguished literary salon in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. The Spinners' Club, which counted Jack London, Gertrude Atherton, and Charles Warren Stoddard among its members, assembled these stories as a fundraiser for the poet Ina D. Coolbrith, making this book both an act of literary solidarity and a document of a city rising from ashes. The sixteen tales span the range of California experience: from Eleanor Gates's stark racial drama 'A Yellow Man and a White' to Jack London's sweeping Yukon epic 'The League of the Old Men,' from Mary Austin's desert meditations to Geraldine Bonner's frontier portraits. The collection opens with Atherton's 'Concha Argüello, Sister Dominica,' a quietly devastating story of a young nun wrestling with devotion and desire in the California missions. These are writers capturing a place and moment before it transformed forever. For readers who crave the rough beauty of American regional literature, this anthology offers sixteen windows into a vanished world.