An enterprising Japanese capitalist, presumably in conjunction with the state, recruits women from all over the country to work at an innovative new silk factory, appealing both to their own financial need and to their patriotism. Once they sign the Agent’s contract, the women find themselves mutating into human silkworms.
Fiction Reviews
Book Review: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
by Marla Wick
May 1st, 2013
Book Review: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy
by Marla Wick
April 29th, 2013
Like its monsters, Red Moon is an impressive hybrid—a speculative novel about fairy tale horrors, a love story about star-crossed teenagers from different worlds, and a gritty political thriller.
Book Review: See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid
by Marla Wick
February 18th, 2013
Through the invocation of epic prose forms and literary allusion, Kincaid elevates the nuclear family drama to a grand level as she draws un-remarked and seemingly sincere parallels between the passions and animosities of familial relationships and the grand scope of literary and mythic history. In doing so, she taps into the reader’s intuitive sense of the way all personal tragedies and triumphs feel epic to those who go through them.
Book Review: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa
by Kristine Rabberman
February 11th, 2013
Ogawa begins by showing her readers the apparently boring, normal face of human society, and then slowly lets this face of normality slide back to reveal decomposition, death, and emptiness.
Book Review: Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra
by Kristine Rabberman
January 22nd, 2013
Like Bolaño, Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile. However, he was born later, in 1975, part of a generation that spent its childhood under Pinochet’s rule. In Ways of Going Home, Zambra depicts childhood experiences of trying to understand the cryptic comments and peculiar actions of adults, in an atmosphere where children’s simple pleasures – such as going to watch a soccer match at a municipal stadium — bring back memories of terror, incarcerations, and disappeared loved ones for their parents and neighbors.
Book Review: Raised from the Ground: A Novel by José Saramago
by Toba Singer
January 9th, 2013
While he has an ear for both the humdrum and the eccentric dissembling pronouncements of the landowners, Saramago primarily concerns himself with capturing the diametrically opposite and logical sentiments of the workers. To dub him the John Steinbeck of his people and generation would at once amount to a compliment and faint praise of the singularity of his writing…
Book Review: A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks
by Ed Voves
January 7th, 2013
If we could follow the mortal remains or spiritual resonance of a sport-loving soldier from the Second World War, an impoverished London lad from the time of Charles Dickens, a French servant woman of the Napoleonic era or a scientific researcher from a decade or two in the future, where might these trails lead?
Book Review: Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm
by Holly Hunt
December 30th, 2012
The value of Pullman’s new translation, I believe, lies in his willingness to encompass the darkness as well as the light in the tales, and his determination to retell them in language that does not belong to any particular historical moment or sensibility.
Book Review: Astray by Emma Donoghue
by Marla Wick
December 26th, 2012
Though some stories in Astray are more poignant than others, Donoghue once again shows herself to be a writer who excels at evoking characters with startling precision. The result is an exceptional collection that meditates widely on the way in which even the most stable-seeming lives can quickly unravel, revealing the contingent nature of the idea of stability itself.
Book Review: The Other by Thomas Tryon
by Holly Hunt
November 15th, 2012
The summer of 1935 is a hot and languorous one in Pequot Landing, Connecticut. Elms yet untouched by the Dutch Blight shade the old houses, The Good Earth and Anthony Adverse are in heavy demand at the public library, and the headlines feature Bruno Hauptmann’s trial for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby.
Book Review: Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt
by Toba Singer
November 5th, 2012
A mile wide and an inch deep? Not Christine Schutt’s Prosperous Friends. Quite the opposite. It’s a compact 205-page spare-prose novel with a wickedly deceptive rose-colored antimacassar of a book jacket. With those rudimentary tools, it rips the façade off of marriage, much the way a smiling nurse s l o w l y eases a bandage from your wound, and then when you’re good and trusting, rips off the entrenched last bit.
Book Review: You & Me by Padgett Powell
by Kohl du Maurier
October 21st, 2012
You might enjoy your own shot of bourbon to compliment the liquor these two “weirdly agreeable dudes” are drinking while “on a porch…talking a lot.” The book is a page turner, primarily because once you meet the never named southern characters you are hooked on the hilarious observations they share.
Book Review: Office Girl by Jay Meno
by Kohl du Maurier
October 9th, 2012
Chicago is the city, 1999 is the year. This book is a love story but one with a different twist on your typical boy-meets-girl, then boy-loses-girl story. Somehow, the book covers that ground but remains refreshingly breezy and simple. Perhaps, because it’s a love story on bicycles.
Book Review: NW by Zadie Smith
by Fran Bigman
September 21st, 2012
By calling her newest novel NW, Zadie Smith follows in the tradition of other writers, including Mary Gaskell, George Eliot, and Winifred Holtby, who have named the work after the setting. Like its predecessors, NW is an ensemble novel that explores human nature through a microcosm of the world, a technique that has historically appealed to women writers. Jane Austen famously said her work, containable on a “little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory,” was about “four or five families in a country village.”
Book Review: This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
by Marla Wick
September 12th, 2012
Perhaps it’s fair to say that the big accomplishment of Diaz’s new book is that it does what authors have always done, but it does it really well. He explores grand concepts—pain, love, history, and life—through an obsessive devotion to particulars. The violence of colonial history replays itself in the troubled starts and stops of a family struggling for connection and in Yunior’s own search for love.

CLR's most popular articles
- The Office Recap: Finale (Season 9, Episode 23) (1,631 views)
- The Office Recap: ‘Livin’ The Dream’ (Season 9, Episode 21) (1,476 views)
- Setting Fallout 4 Part 1 (of 2) - How the West Was Fun (983 views)
- The Office Recap: ‘Paper Airplane’ (Season 9, Episode 20) (865 views)
- Setting Fallout 4 Pt. 2 (of 2) - On The Road Again! (592 views)
- Broadway Review: Motown: The Musical (575 views)
- The Office Recap: ‘A.A.R.M’ (Season 9, Episode 22) (522 views)
- Community Recap: ‘Basic Human Anatomy’ (Season 4, Episode 11) (491 views)
- Mad Men Recap: "The Flood" (Season 6, Episode 5) (389 views)
- Photo Essay: North Korean Propaganda Posters (383 views)
- Photo Essay: North Korean Propaganda Posters (194,487 views)
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett (175,355 views)
- Kick-Ass and the Hit-Girl debacle (80,964 views)
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (75,508 views)
- Erotic Art of Ancient Pompeii (56,632 views)
- Video Game Review: Mass Effect 3 (55,164 views)
- Images from How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb (51,707 views)
- Frida Kahlo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (44,494 views)
- The Strange World of Quantum Entanglement (37,950 views)
- Mad (wo)Men: The Complexity of Womanhood in "Mad Men" (37,632 views)
Get The Latest California Literary Review Updates Delivered Free To Your Inbox!
Powered by FeedBlitz
Follow the California Literary Review on Twitter: @calitreview
