A new collection of short stories by Andrew Lam features surprising Vietnamese-American voices.

From our blog: Veteran journalist and faculty member Jon Christensen is the new editor of Boom

Less state than borderland, California is an astonishing, exciting, often confusing place through which the nation encounters Latin America, the Pacific, Asia, and the world.

Call it the inherent conservatism of regionalism. Most publications that invoke the name of a nation or state in their titles do so at least implicitly to shore up a current imaginary relationship between geographic, cultural, and political entities.

To a greater extent than most other states, California has always been a trope state. Since the Gold Rush, and arguably before, its residents have imbued the place with unreasonable expectations.

Above all, I am looking forward to Boom because I’ve always felt that California is much more than a mere collection of cities and regions, more than the sum of its parts.

In Lawrence Levine’s essay “The Folklore of Industrial Society,” he explains that magazines, music, and movies are a form of popular culture that functions in ways similar to folk culture and even acts ”as a form of folklore for people living in urban industrial societies.”

Try this: California is in crisis, a long series of complex troubles laid end to end for decades, centuries, longer. Or how about: California is laden with fault lines