Chicago Review by David Starkey I have to admit that as I was reading through Dolly Jørgensen’s Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinctions in Museums, I sometimes wondered what, exactly, I…
Author: David Starkey
Gerhard Richter, edited by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota
Citadelles & Mazenod Review by David Starkey Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of Gerhard Richter. Like anyone who has visited art museums over the years, I’ve seen plenty…
Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays by Joe Bonomo
Georgia Review by David Starkey At the bottom of the record sleeve of the original vinyl LP pressing of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed is a message…
The Norton Lectures Centenary Editions
Harvard Review by David Starkey The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University are, if not the most famous, then certainly among the most famous lectures in American letters. Established…
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly
Norton Review by David Starkey Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes…
The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom
Chicago Review by David Starkey Is Albert Camus’s most famous novel, The Stranger, a bit too programmatic? Is The Plague, which I reviewed during COVID, a bit too long? Is…
News and Notes
All the latest, from our editors and contributors 4/8/26: Read editor Brian Tanguay’s new post, “America: Land of Fears and Nightmares,” in Working-Class Scribbler. 3/20/26: Read editor David Starkey’s interview…
California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature by John Freeman
Heyday Review by David Starkey When we at the California Review of Books heard there was a new collection of book reviews about California writers, we were interested in learning…
A Place in the World by Bill Gaythwaite
Pittsburgh Review by David Starkey The most recent winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the premier awards for excellence in the short story, is Bill Gaythwaite, a…
Orlando: A Graphic Novel by Virginia Woolf and Susanne Kuhlendahl
Helvitiq Review by David Starkey Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, a novel about a male Elizabethan aristocrat who, at the age of 100, turns into a woman, has inspired a…