Georgia Review by Paul Willis Amy Muia’s richly entangled grouping of fourteen short stories, A Desert Between Two Seas, explores the afterlife of the Spanish missions in Baja California. While…
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The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog
Penguin Review by George Yatchisin Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of…
Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton
Stanford Review by Walter Cummins I wish Impasse had been written when my wife was still alive. The book would have provided so much information and so many ideas to…
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law by Terese Svoboda
OR Books Review by Walter Cummins Terese Svoboda could have begun the title of her latest book with a number of other famous or familiar names—Goebbels, Goering, Martha Gellhorn, H.V.…
Repetition: A Novel by Vigdis Hjorth, Translated by Charlotte Barslund
Verso Review by Brian Tanguay It’s late November in Norway and the days are cold and short. A woman and her dog occupy a small cabin in a remote, forested…
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…
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins A Guardian and a Thief is chaotic novel, filled with surprising turns and ironic shifts, with characters whose plans constantly backfire, causing accidental but often…
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…
Savings And Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank by Justene Hill Edwards
W. W. Norton & Company Review by Brian Tanguay The failure of banks and savings and loan institutions has a long history in the United States. Most people know something…
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Hogarth Review by Walter Cummins When I read The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny I hadn’t known Kiran Desai had devoted twenty years to creating the novel, but I suspected…