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, oyster pirate, hard drinker - was pretty tough, too. Although famous for his stories of the Klondike and the Pacific, London wrote extensively about his home base. This collection contains such classic stories as 'The Apostate' and 'South of the Slot' as well as extracts from John Barleycorn and The Sea-Wolf. The overlooked 1905 story cycle Tales of the Fish Patrol is included in its entirety. London's vivid eyewitness report of the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire - which destroyed forever the old city - stands as a fitting epilogue. Discover a vanished San Francisco in these wonderful stories of Jack London.

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, raging brushfires, cloying hangovers aggravated by the crackling desperation of marginalized low-budget movie producers, meth-addicted hustlers and con men, a one-armed stripper, taco shop poets, serial killers and cannibals, overcrowded Urgent Care clinics, toxic red tides in the Santa Monica Bay, psychopathic stalkers, and a victim of spontaneous combustion.

Trace's adventures are mirrored by those of his own fictional alter ego, Dan Knight, a tough-talking, gun-toting P.I. who resolves every conflict, major and minor, with his own brand of bullet-riddled Social Darwinism. Hovering in the background of The Furthest Palm are the ghosts of Chester Himes, Sam Peckinpah, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By the time we arrive at the shattering epilogue, Trace himself dissolves into his own mythology.

"I'm drawn to "The Furthest Palm" and the adventures of Trace as he wanders through L.A. phenomena, particularly the blown-up pigeon and his dilemma with dwarfs, as well as the Kafka-like episode with the cop, and, of course, Josephine, and all the details of L.A., the dinner and the film and scribbler encounters, the curse of survival."Rudy Wurlitzer, author of "Quake" and "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid"