Eastover Review by Walter Cummins Joan Wickersham uses the 1956 discovery of the fatal wreckage of a Swedish ship, the Vasa—sunken immediately after its August 10, 1628 launching—as the starting…
Tag: California Review of Books
The Light at the End of the World by Siddhartha Deb
Soho Press Review by Brian Tanguay This year I’ve had the good fortune to read several novels by extraordinary writers of South Asian origin, among them Latitudes of Longing by…
Time of the Child by Niall Williams
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The remote, rain-soaked village of Faha is to the brilliant Irish writer Niall Williams what Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner. On the surface a…
Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest: a novel by Chuck Rosenthal
Walton Well Press Review by Brian Tanguay For a novel of only eighty-nine pages, Awake For Ever in a Sweet Unrest is surprisingly deep, and will appeal to readers familiar…
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut
Columbia Review by David Starkey If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some…
Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins Before I attempt to say something about a book that theorizes life’s emergence from the perspective of the science of physics, I should admit that…
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak had been on my reading list for more than a year, but the book of hers that came…
Body Friend: A Novel by Katherine Brabon
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In Katherine Brabon’s third novel, Body Friend, the narrator is never named. She’s a woman who knows herself best when she’s in the greatest physical…
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction…