Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns

I think I may have attended more J. California Cooper book readings than any other author. I believe she lives someplace in Northern California so I she frequented Marcus Books in Oakland. I used to make treks there at least once a month. In addition to being a wonderful story teller, she also is a delightful treat to see in person. Her energetic and animated personality lets me see how she can create some of her characters. Now she has a new book that I have to add to my stack!

You’re probably dying to know what the J stands for, right? Well, J. California Cooper isn’t saying. She hasn’t used her first name since the early eighties, when complete strangers in the Bay Area theater scene took to chatting up the playwright as if they knew her personally. So she kept her last name, adopted her home state for her middle one, and dropped every letter in her birth name but the first initial.

A quarter century later, people still talk to Cooper, and a good many of those voices are characters in her head. Her latest menagerie has plenty to say in Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns (Doubleday, $23.95), Cooper’s first story collection in five years. Leafing through the nine stories is like propping open a screen door and peering into the homes of family and friends. As you may have guessed from the title, Cooper’s characters are looking for something: a soul mate, justice or the strength to persevere in a difficult world. The master storyteller sweeps us into their lives and makes us care deeply about them. We find ourselves surprised and moved by their complexities: They’re world-weary yet optimistic, cautious yet giving, virtuous yet nonjudgmental, shy yet bold, and they are the brainchildren of a woman who’s a complete original. Her works cause us to smile while making us think.

What distinguishes Wild Stars—Cooper’s eleventh book—from previous titles like In Search of Satisfaction (Anchor), A Piece of Mine (Anchor), The Matter Is Life (Anchor) and Some People, Some Other Place (Anchor) is that her latest work displays less urgency to arrive at answers to life’s Big Questions. Instead it relishes in the search itself.

I think the thing that I like about Ms. Cooper's books are that no matter how tragic or sad some of her stories are, goodness and happiness always seem to prevail in the end.