Graywolf Review by Walter Cummins The contents of most short story collections are united by similarities of voice, tone, and subject matter. Despite differences of characters, dramatic issues, and even…
Tag: California Review of Books
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
Harper Review by Jinny Webber A manhunt across the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven in 1660 drives Robert Harris’ latest novel, Act of Oblivion. Two officers in Oliver…
An Interview with John Holman
John Holman is the author of two memoirs, Pom’s Odyssey and A Horse in My Suitcase (see the In Brief review that follows the interview), which chronicle his boyhood on…
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond
(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,…
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,…