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…
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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…
Rome: Pedestrians Beware by Rafael Alberti (trans. and with essays by Anthony L. Geist & Giuseppe Leporace)
Swan Isle Review by David Starkey As someone who has spent a fair bit of time in the Eternal City, I can say that in order to truly love Rome,…
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times by Ross Benes
University Press of Kansas Review Brian Tanguay Although I lived through the era of their ascendancy, I never understood the immense popularity of professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, the Beanie Baby…
Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk
Knopf Review by David Starkey Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner dismissed Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022 as “breezy and frictionless,” “a book of…
Gliff by Ali Smith
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins Words create multiple possibilities throughout the world two adolescent siblings inhabit in Ali Smith’s latest novel, Gliff–title’s sound what the younger one, Rose, chooses to…
Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman
University of North Carolina Press Review by Brian Tanguay Scholar Brittany Friedman begins Carceral Apartheid with a black and white photograph of her maternal grandmother. The year is 1939, and…