Review by David Starkey Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, winner of the Dazai Osamu Prize for a debut novel, is based on a simple yet irresistible premise. Shibata, the…
Author: David Starkey
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
Review by David Starkey “Recitatif” is Toni Morrison’s only short story, and as she is one of the greatest novelists of the past fifty years, it deserves the careful attention…
The FSG Poetry Anthology Edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell
Review by David Starkey While no single publisher can, or should be, held responsible for bringing out all the important poetry in a country as diverse as ours, an argument…
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Review by David Starkey Patrick Radden Keeffe tells us in the Preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the twelve long-form…
Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
Review by David Starkey That Penguin Classics is publishing a new translation (by Allan Blunden) of a book packed with quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832,…
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller
The subtitle of Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph tells you most of what you need to know about the book’s contents. It is…
Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun
Review by David Starkey As he appears in Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun’s father, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, seems like kind…
Vienna 1900, Edited by Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Review by David Starkey When I visited the Leopold Museum in Vienna this past spring, I must admit that I was wowed. I was familiar, of course, with the creepy…
A Conversation between David Starkey and Brian Tanguay
The following is a conversation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay. David Starkey: It’s been a couple of years now since we started the California…
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Review by David Starkey Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These was released just before Christmas of last year. Set in a small Irish town during Christmas 1985, the book…