Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
Author: David Starkey
Playground by Richard Powers
Norton Review by David Starkey In some ways, Richard Powers’ new novel Playground is a double bildungsroman, showing us the youth and early adulthood of Todd Kean—white, a native of…
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Review by David Starkey I honestly don’t know how much I would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, if I hadn’t already been familiar with…
Webbed Skies by Melissa Cody
Museu de Arte de São Paulo / KMEC Review by David Starkey Webbed Skies is the monograph accompanying a recent exhibition of Melissa Cody’s weavings at the Museum of Modern…
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City by Richard E. Ocejo
Princeton Review by David Starkey In the conclusion of his new book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, Richard Ocejo, a sociology professor at John…
Burn by Peter Heller
Knopf Review by David Starkey Like a lot of readers in these unnerving times, I’m a sucker for a dystopian novel. Imagining how things might go wrong is oddly comforting:…
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut
Columbia Review by David Starkey If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always employs that anger in the service of…
Small in Real Life by Kelly Sather
Pittsburgh Review by David Starkey When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of…
Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda
Liveright Review by David Starkey “Reading about how a succession of relatively small misjudgments and poor decisions can lead, with surprising speed, to human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale should,…