(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay What Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is to racial inequality in the criminal justice system in America,…
Tag: California Review of Books
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Farrar Straus and Giroux Review by Jinny Webber “There will be time, there will be time / to prepare to meet the faces that you meet,” but what a different…
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
Knopf Review by David Starkey Early in Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the protagonist, Finn, notes that while white schizophrenics are allowed…
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Morrow Review by Brian Tanguay I can’t remember reading a work of fiction where bits of prose took me out of the story as often as happened while reading Yellowface…
The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Review by George Yatchisin It’s not every self-helpish book that asks you to create your own poetry anthology, but The Wonder Paradox is sui generis. As…
A Place in the World by Frances Mayes
Crown Review by Linda Lappin In her new memoir, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home, Frances Mayes, now in her eighties, looks back on the houses,…
Blue Skies by T. C. Boyle
(Liveright) Review by David Starkey Even the grimmest climate change novels usually contain a glimmer of humor, and books like Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible contain passages that are downright…
True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield
(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay There are many ways to describe Sam Shepard, but the one word that immediately comes to mind for me is protean. Playwright. Actor. Director. Screenwriter.…
The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
Black Cat Review by Walter Cummins In its opening section Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture appears to be a critical study in disguise, a consideration of John Maynard Keynes based…