Excerpt from California by Edan Lepucki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cal never caught the name of the book Micah was reading that first day, because as soon as Cal said hello, tentatively, lugging his suitcase into the high-ceilinged room, Micah had jumped from his pose and tossed the book aside. It fell between the bed and the wall.

"You're here!" Micah said. He rushed forward to help Cal with his bags. He was taller than Cal and almost burly. He had a beard, which was rust colored in places, though his hair was dark. He looked older than eighteen. Cal figured he must be from a place like Montana or Maine. Definitely not a city.

"Micah Ellis," he said, offering his hand.

"Cal. Cal Friedman."

"You're Jewish?"

"My mother is. Was. She's an atheist."

"You took her last name?"

Cal nodded. "But I see my father, all the time."

"No judgment." Micah held up his hands. "My parents are married, and we don't practice any religion. Where you from? Did you say? Are you eighteen?" He smiled, almost sheepishly. "I apologize for the questions, I'm somewhat of a taxonomist."

At first, Cal thought he'd said "taxidermist." He pictured this bearded kid in a basement in Maine, stuffing bobcats and bears and, then, Cal himself.

"I like to classify things," Micah was saying now, and Cal understood that he had misheard his new roommate. "Where you from?"

"Cleveland."

Micah grinned. "I could have guessed from your accent. Flat, nasal."

Cal knew he should be offended, but he wasn't. "And you?"

"L.A."

"Really? That's hard to believe."

"Why? 'Cause my tits are real?"

They both laughed.

Micah had arrived a couple of hours before. The room was large, and at that hour sunlight pooled through the circular window between their dressers. Even now, Cal remembered how golden the light had been at Plank. In the morning, the sun spread across the floor and his desk—he kept his neat, almost bare, whereas Micah's was always covered with books and pens and dirty dishes. In Cleveland, Cal and his mother used blackout curtains, but at Plank the windows were naked, and he often woke at dawn even if he didn't have to get up then to work the school's small farm. A previous generation of Plankers had probably voted against drapes, in the same way they had rejected the Internet and the coed question, the gingham curtains burned in a bonfire one crisp winter night, the boys howling.

"I like the room," Cal said, after they'd agreed who would sleep where. "I feel like I'm in a time machine." What he meant to say was: Plank felt lost in the past. Not stuck, but suspended there, in its beauty and slowness.

"We're encased in amber," Micah had said, and smiled.

Plank's student body was made up of thirty male students. All of them lived in a converted farmhouse, though two second-years got to board in the house's former kitchen, coveted for its wood-burning stove. Cal was the only first-year from the Midwest, and one of the few kids who hadn't gone to a prep school. Micah hadn't either, but he'd attended an intense public high school in L.A. where you had to test highly gifted to get in. It closed from lack of funding a year after he graduated. Micah couldn't milk a cow, as Cal could, but he had already read Plato and Derrida. "The jugness of the jug" was how he explained Heidegger to Cal, as if that explained anything at all.

It made him laugh now, thinking about the way Plankers used to talk. They'd farm in the mornings, bring the goats out to pasture, and then, with dirt under their fingernails and smelling of animal shit, they'd head into seminar to toss big words back and forth at one another.

Excerpted from California by Edan Lepucki. Copyright © 2014 by Edan Lepucki. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.