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…
Tag: Review by David Starkey
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik
Scribner Review by George Yatchisin Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz…
31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024 – Alcalá to Zarin
Reviews by David Starkey Every year since 2014, I’ve set aside a couple of months to sit down with what amounts to a long shelf of of poetry published in…
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss
Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
Playground by Richard Powers
Norton Review by David Starkey In some ways, Richard Powers’ new novel Playground is a double bildungsroman, showing us the youth and early adulthood of Todd Kean—white, a native of…
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Review by David Starkey I honestly don’t know how much I would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, if I hadn’t already been familiar with…
Webbed Skies by Melissa Cody
Museu de Arte de São Paulo / KMEC Review by David Starkey Webbed Skies is the monograph accompanying a recent exhibition of Melissa Cody’s weavings at the Museum of Modern…
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City by Richard E. Ocejo
Princeton Review by David Starkey In the conclusion of his new book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, Richard Ocejo, a sociology professor at John…
Burn by Peter Heller
Knopf Review by David Starkey Like a lot of readers in these unnerving times, I’m a sucker for a dystopian novel. Imagining how things might go wrong is oddly comforting:…