Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In A Case of Mice and Murder, Sally Smith introduces Sir Gabriel Ward KC, a King’s Counsel who lives and works in the Temple, fifteen…
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Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya
Ballantine Review by George Yatchisin It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa…
The Redesignation of Paradise by Denise Newman | Alibi Lullaby by Norma Cole
Kelsey Street | Omnidawn Review by Laura Mullen Two books by powerhouse Bay Area writers are reason to celebrate—offering welcome sites of refuge and refreshment. Poets Denise Newman and Norma…
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins Three of the four women who figure in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s Dream Count are attractive, affluent, successful Nigerians—the wealthy travel-writer and hopeful novelist, Chiamaka, her…
Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920 – 1970 by Pollyanna Rhee
University of Chicago Press Review by Brian Tanguay The city of Santa Barbara, California, has always traded on its unique location, tucked snugly between the Santa Ynez mountains and the…
The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell
Belknap / Harvard Review by David Starkey “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of…
Standard Time by Dante Di Stefano
Cow Creek Review by H. L. Hix By the wholeness it tenders in so slender a volume (38 pages of poetry plus front and back matter), Dante Di Stefano’s Standard…
Held by Anne Michaels
Knopf Review by David Starkey California Review of Books is a bit late to the party in reviewing Anne Michaels’ Booker-nominated third novel, Held, although perhaps we may be excused…
Alba and Other Songs: Poems by Fred Arroyo
Gunpowder Review by Laura Villareal In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami quipped, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.” Not…
Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch
Harper Via Review by George Yatchisin It would be easy to spend a ton of time teasing out where writer/musician Stuart Murdoch ends from where the main character of his…