Norton Review by David Starkey Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes…
Tag: Review by David Starkey
The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom
Chicago Review by David Starkey Is Albert Camus’s most famous novel, The Stranger, a bit too programmatic? Is The Plague, which I reviewed during COVID, a bit too long? Is…
California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature by John Freeman
Heyday Review by David Starkey When we at the California Review of Books heard there was a new collection of book reviews about California writers, we were interested in learning…
A Place in the World by Bill Gaythwaite
Pittsburgh Review by David Starkey The most recent winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the premier awards for excellence in the short story, is Bill Gaythwaite, a…
Orlando: A Graphic Novel by Virginia Woolf and Susanne Kuhlendahl
Helvitiq Review by David Starkey Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, a novel about a male Elizabethan aristocrat who, at the age of 100, turns into a woman, has inspired a…
The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf Review by David Starkey There’s something depressing about the fact that renowned historian Joseph J. Ellis felt the need to write The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the…
The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750 by Ingrid D. Rowland
MIT Press Review by David Starkey The Lies of the Artists is a clever title for a book with the subtitle Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750, but it seems to…
I Found Myself… The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz
New Directions Review by David Starkey On October 15, 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was on his daily walk in Cairo. “Mahfouz’s…
Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin
Doubleday Review by David Starkey 2025 was the year of the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it was also the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s first great album:…
10 Best Books of 2025
The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…