It's the sunny beaches and the Golden Gate that make it onto the postcards. But look at a topographic map of California and you'll see that one of its defining features is the Central Valley, a 450-mile-long basin of agricultural heartland, source of almonds and fruit bound for distant states, that gets little airtime in the popular culture.
The valley has made notable appearances in literature: in the fiction of John Steinbeck, the essays of Joan Didion, as well as Leonard Gardner's 1969 boxing novel "Fat City," set in Stockton, which later inspired a movie directed by John Huston. But in the work of Manuel Muñoz, the Central Valley is a recurring character of enigmatic presence.
Muñoz was born and raised in Dinuba, a town of 25,000 about 30 minutes outside of Fresno, in an area rich with grapes, peaches and plums. Now 50, the author lives in Tucson, where he teaches at the University of Arizona. But the Central Valley still dominates his work, including two collections of short stories — "Zigzagger" (2003) and "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue" (2007) — as well as a 2011 novel, "What You See in the Dark," set in 1950s Bakersfield.
