California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://mfitzgeraldspage.com/

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Book Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
  Posted on 02 Jan 2012 in Books, Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  

  Magic is all around us, if only we’d pay attention more—if only we’d dream. Maybe then we’d sense its dark secret is really light, a bonfire of belief beyond understanding, but real. The kind of magic—or is it love?—that slays dragons and rescues princesses and lives happily ever after in the imagination of children.

• Book Review: Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
  Posted on 31 May 2011 in Books, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Place, in literature, is often the most complex of characters, boasting variable backdrops with tones and textures of every mood imaginable—windswept cliffs, checkered floors, twisted roads and rivers, cobwebbed attics, portentous slants of light and so on down the centuries.

• Book Review: Walks With Men by Ann Beattie
  Posted on 03 Aug 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Short Stories
  

  Beattie, like in so much of her earlier work, leaves a lot to the imagination. Between the dialogue and the action, certain assumptions, even leaps of faith, are sometimes necessary to get from one paragraph to the next. There are better ways to render suspense—less does not always mean more—but you get the sense from the very first sentence that something important is about to be revealed.

• Love and Summer by William Trevor
  Posted on 19 Nov 2009 in Fiction Reviews, Great Britain
  

  Why is it that summer can never last forever, especially when we want it to? The once long and amorous days wane too soon in circumscription. A small chill creeps down from the hills. Something is about to end. Then someone leaves town. Someone always leaves town.

• Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple by Kaoru Nonomura
  Posted on 21 Jul 2009 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion
  

  Why drop everything—a decent job, girlfriend, your family—and embrace rigor and sacrifice at a Zen Temple? Kaoru Nonomura, author of Eat Sleep Sit, never directly tells us why he goes to Eiheiji, but he brings us inside the walls and describes the year he spent there with remarkable detail and clarity.

• Shadow and Light by Jonathan Rabb
  Posted on 17 Jun 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
  

  A man is found dead in a bathtub, brandy is poured and the whodunit game grows darker with every turn. Throw in a gritty 1927 Berlin, a major film studio and a chief inspector who never misses a beat and the pages practically turn themselves.