Doors open at 6:30pm to socialize with Charlie Haas prior to his reading at 7pm.

Novelist, essayist and screenwriter Charlie Haas presents his new book, The Current Fantasy (Beck & Branch, 2024), his second novel.

Charlie’s debut novel The Enthusiast (HarperPerennial) was published in 2009. Highly regarded as a screenwriter, Charlie’s credits include Over the Edge, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. His writing has appeared in Esquire, New West, The Threepenny Review, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, among many other journals. He lives in Oakland with his wife, the writer and editor B. K. Moran.

The Current Fantasy begins with the Lanz family in Berlin in 1914, stressed and alarmed as the city’s populace is stirred by an ugly nationalist fervor.

Seeking a brief respite from the growing madness they sense around them, they’re drawn to a community a train ride away in the nearby woods — a countercultural haven for artists and anarchists who have fled the cities, money, and the Internet of their time: telephones, telegraph, electricity. There’s a better life to be had, with flowing hair, naked farming, Expressionist art and freedom. The Lanzes are intrigued, but return to their lives in Berlin — though just for a moment.

As the Great War looms closer, the bohemians in the woods, following their leader’s “current fantasy,” take off for California, “the America of America,” where rumor says you can get away with living your own life. The Lanz family makes a life-changing decision to leave with them, and together this strange troupe of dreamers, artists and misfits make their way to New York Harbor, and then through Panama alongside the canal under construction, to San Pedro Harbor and by street car through Los Angeles, out to the high desert reaches of San Bernardino County, where Sunland, their wildflower of a settlement, takes root.

Nothing lasts forever, least of all perhaps, Utopia. But in dreams, our best virtues are nourished and made strong enough to take root in the harshest climates and toughest times.

Read this article in the latest edition of Alta Journal, where Charlie gives some insight into his research on the Naturmenschen subculture and its influence on California literature and the arts in the first half of  the 20th century. And enjoy this dreamy anthem of the nuts and berries crowd in LA in the ’50s…