Bohemia in Southern California, edited and with an essay by Jay Ruby, is a critical anthology and photo album devoted to the region's long experiments in unconventional living, artistic community, and cultural refusal. It asks what happened when la vie bohème migrated from the classical bohemias of Paris, Greenwich Village, and San Francisco's North Beach into the peculiar social and geographic conditions of Southern California.

The essays range across the Arroyo Seco and Edendale communities of the early twentieth century, Malibu beach culture, coffeehouses, surfer enclaves, 1960s counterculture, Venice, Laurel Canyon, downtown Los Angeles, and the Santa Barbara hillsides. Together they show that Southern California did not merely imitate older bohemian models; it generated its own forms of creative living, performance, visual culture, alternative community, and artistic production.

Fully illustrated and deliberately multidisciplinary, the volume brings together work from literature, cultural studies, anthropology, librarianship, book arts, history, psychoanalysis, performance studies, and related fields. Contributors include Jessica Holada, Mark Thompson, Daniel Hurewitz, Genie Guerard, Naima Prevots, Richard Hertz, Katherine Stewart, Pablo Capra, Kristin Lawler, William Mohr, Rachel Rubin, Jay Ruby, and Harry Polkinhorn.