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…
Category: Genres
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…
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…