"Eight authors' works of personal nonfiction join with ten new stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small. Faced with a scant historical record in her urge to reconstruct the layered past of Santa Cruz, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction set amidst its architecture. Ten stories explore the California city to animate what might have been, to build the fullness of lives forgotten, and to honor their living with story and possibility. Following this impulse into the realm of nonfiction, eight other writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, these works use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land"--