MIT Press Review by David Starkey The Lies of the Artists is a clever title for a book with the subtitle Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750, but it seems to…
Author: David Starkey
I Found Myself… The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
New Directions Review by David Starkey On October 15, 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was on his daily walk in Cairo. “Mahfouz’s…
Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin
Doubleday Review by David Starkey 2025 was the year of the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it was also the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s first great album:…
10 Best Books of 2025
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…
The Best Poetry Books of 2025
Reviews by David Starkey As I have every year since 2014, in 2025 I set aside a couple of months to peruse the year’s books of poetry–at least those books…
A Wooded Shore by Thomas McGuane
Knopf Review by David Starkey The stories in A Wooded Shore are mostly set in Trump country, but Trump, and politics, are conspicuously absent. We do meet, in “Wide Spot,”…
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş
Bloomsbury Review by David Starkey The themes in Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş’s new story collection, Long Distance, are easy to identify: displacement, disillusionment, disquiet. Things don’t go the way we’d…
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza
Norton Review by David Starkey Living in the Present with John Prine, the new book by Tom Piazza, seems like it shouldn’t work. Piazza’s encounters with Prine were too scattered…
Talking All Night: The New York Poets – Interviews, Photographs, Letters by Mark Hillringhouse
Serving House Review by David Starkey In an interview with Mark Hillringhouse, poet Anne Waldman responds to a question about the literary scene with a quote that could apply to…