Our heart is in California, but our interests are everywhere.

It turns out that Yuval Noah Harari, in Nexus, his latest book, isn’t a complete fatalist. But one has to read to the end to find some hope that humans can agree to mitigate the dangers of Artificial ...

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 difficult to find a better candidate for the job than Percival ...

It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction categories. Thousands of readers are eagerly turning its ...

The failure of banks and savings and loan institutions has a long history in the United States. Most people know something about the bank runs that crippled financial institutions after the stock ...

It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa Barbara-ish fictional Chilesworth, CA (Pandya is an ...

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 ...

I had to read Alan Moore’s The Great When twice to fully appreciate it. At the time I wasn’t at all familiar with Moore’s body of work, but that book made me an admirer and when the second installment ...

In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Rosanna Xia, an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes: “When talking about climate change solutions, most actions ...

Although Sophie’s World was first published in Norwegian more than thirty years ago and since then has been translated into close to sixty languages and sold forty million copies, I had never heard of ...

Although I lived through the era of their ascendancy, I never understood the immense popularity of professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, the Beanie Baby craze, and the rise of reality TV. Had I paid ...

“Jazz is stupid. I mean, just play the right notes!” Though uninspired, this line from The Office TV series encapsulates a very common attitude. The quote is found in Andrew Berish’s new book Hating ...