Other Press Review by Brian Tanguay In what he refers to as a “sort of epilogue” to his colossal novel, The Suicide Museum, Ariel Dorfman thanks the Spanish author Javier…
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Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
Little, Brown Review by George Yatchisin Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography sold nearly 230K copies in its first eight weeks in stores and is currently at #47 in Books at…
Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick
Bloomsbury Review by Walter Cummins I decided to read Becoming Beauvoir when I came across this endorsement in a review excerpt: “Here we finally have a biography that makes Beauvoir’s…
Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia by Tobias Becker and The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym
Basic Books | Harvard Review by Walter Cummins Tobias Becker opens his new book with this epigraph from the Beatles’ song to explain the origin of his title: “Yesterday /…
Signatures in Stone: A Bomarzo Mystery
Pleasure Boat Review by Walter Cummins Linda Lappin’s novel, which was the overall winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense in 2014, is now out in…
The Vulnerables: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins While reading The Vulnerables, my eye kept being drawn to the subtitle, A Novel, in the header at the top of every page, as if…
Restless for Words by DeWitt Henry
Finishing Line Review by Jack Smith Founder of one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country, Ploughshares, DeWitt Henry is also a prize-winning novelist, memoirist, essayist, and poet. …
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead Books Review by Brian Tanguay The first time I became aware of Abdulrazak Gurnah was on this website when I read fellow contributor Walter Cummins’ review of The Last…
A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis
Norton Review by Brian Tanguay “There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.” So wrote author and cultural critic William Deresiewicz in “The…
California Review of Books – 10 Best Books of 2023
The following list was decided after much consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journals’ most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin.…