Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay I can’t remember if I requested this collection of stories from the publisher or if it was just sent to me, but it arrived at…
Tag: California Review of Books
Byron’s Travels by Lord Byron, edited by Fiona Stafford
Everyman’s Library Review by David Starkey First of all, God bless Everyman’s Library. What other publisher lists among its new releases the novels and tales of Pushkin, the poetry of…
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Putnam Review by George Yatchisin Kiley Reid’s second novel Come and Get It might appear to be a campus-set comedy of manners, but the joke will be on you if…
Passport Photos by Amitava Kumar
California Review by Walter Cummins A tangle of borders dominates Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos. The most obvious are the boundaries between nations that require verification of a small booklet to…
American Spirits by Russell Banks
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins It may be me, but I find the three stories of Russell Banks’ posthumous American Spirits collection to be examples of gallows humor despite the…
Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino
Scribner Review by George Yatchisin If fathers and sons didn’t exist, novelists would have had to invent them. Alexander Sammartino, in his debut novel Last Acts, dishes up quite a…
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Despite the depiction of the many triumphs of three of the greatest jazz musicians—many might argue of musicians in any genre—3 Shades of Blue is…
The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir by Susan Lieu
Celadon Books Review by Brian Tanguay Several years after the fall of Saigon, Susan Lieu’s parents fled Vietnam to escape suffocating Communist rule. Leaving was an enormous risk filled with…
James by Percival Everett
Doubleday Review by David Starkey If you were going to choose an author to rewrite The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim/James, it would be…
The Freaks Came Out To Write : The Definitive History of The Village Voice, The Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
Public Affairs Walter Cummins In my long-ago youth I was one of the thousands of young poseurs, the wannabes from the outlying regions like New Jersey, who descended on Greenwich…