What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette A.

Faber and Faber Review by George Yatchisin At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno…

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

Random House Review by Walter Cummins Variations of similar human tensions unite the twelve stories in this collection. In each, at least one character stands out as mastering one or…

The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker

Random House Review by Walter Cummins This case is indeed strange as it is revealed by through the voices of the two people at the center of the complication—Dr. Henry…

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins For many readers of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction, an immediate satisfaction will be Frank’s close consideration of more than thirty novels…

Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya

Ballantine Review by George Yatchisin It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa…

The Redesignation of Paradise by Denise Newman | Alibi Lullaby by Norma Cole

Kelsey Street | Omnidawn Review by Laura Mullen Two books by powerhouse Bay Area writers are reason to celebrate—offering welcome sites of refuge and refreshment. Poets Denise Newman and Norma…

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Knopf Review by Walter Cummins Three of the four women who figure in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s Dream Count are attractive, affluent, successful Nigerians—the wealthy travel-writer and hopeful novelist, Chiamaka, her…

Standard Time by Dante Di Stefano

Cow Creek Review by H. L. Hix By the wholeness it tenders in so slender a volume (38 pages of poetry plus front and back matter), Dante Di Stefano’s Standard…

Alba and Other Songs: Poems by Fred Arroyo

Gunpowder Review by Laura Villareal In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami quipped, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.” Not…

Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch

Harper Via Review by George Yatchisin It would be easy to spend a ton of time teasing out where writer/musician Stuart Murdoch ends from where the main character of his…