http://calitreview.com Book reviews, essays, and author interviews. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:18:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://calitreview.com/5515 http://calitreview.com/5515#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:08:00 +0000 Mark Fitzgerald http://calitreview.com/?p=5515 http://calitreview.com/5515/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5468 http://calitreview.com/5468#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:19:19 +0000 John R. Guthrie http://calitreview.com/?p=5468 The Lacuna in one’s hand, to read it, is to witness and experience years of distilled effort and research. Like Diego Rivera’s murals, it is a lager-than-life work full of color, life, and movement, one executed by a masterful artist at the height of her creative powers.]]> http://calitreview.com/5468/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5394 http://calitreview.com/5394#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:46:01 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=5394 Blaze and Duma Key, the King is back. Long live the King.]]> http://calitreview.com/5394/feed 6 http://calitreview.com/5287 http://calitreview.com/5287#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:58:45 +0000 Jem Bloomfeld http://calitreview.com/?p=5287 The Scarpetta Factor is driven by the reader’s need to find out what the heroes know, as well as what the villains have done. ]]> http://calitreview.com/5287/feed 5 http://calitreview.com/5158 http://calitreview.com/5158#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:23:08 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=5158 http://calitreview.com/5158/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5082 http://calitreview.com/5082#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:49:10 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=5082 http://calitreview.com/5082/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4920 http://calitreview.com/4920#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:35:30 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4920 The Bigness of the World, Ostlund's first collection of short stories, was good enough for the judges of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She won the prize in 2008. Deservedly so, for Ostlund has an ear, an appendage often ignored by writers in favor of the flashier eye. Alive to the subtext of the everyday, she uses flat conversations as a front for complicated back-stories...]]> http://calitreview.com/4920/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4879 http://calitreview.com/4879#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:39:49 +0000 Judith Harris http://calitreview.com/?p=4879 The Glass Room is a genuine intellectual achievement—a breath-taking story of love and its loss, of art and lost art, of wars lost and then won and lost again, of rich gentleman Jews and Jews lost to Nazi madness. His broad canvas covers the decades of Mittel-European horrors that began in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The themes are familiar, but treated in a fresh and stimulating, not to say disturbing, way. ]]> http://calitreview.com/4879/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4740 http://calitreview.com/4740#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:35:33 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=4740 http://calitreview.com/4740/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/4703 http://calitreview.com/4703#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:03:44 +0000 Rochelle Jewel Shapiro http://calitreview.com/?p=4703 http://calitreview.com/4703/feed 2 http://calitreview.com/4667 http://calitreview.com/4667#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:43:00 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4667 http://calitreview.com/4667/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4653 http://calitreview.com/4653#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:22:45 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=4653 The Big Machine is what urban fantasy looks like when it’s grown up and the writer isn’t relying on paranormal clichés to flesh out an epic tale of good versus evil. Not that you can pigeon-hole this novel—it’s a dizzying slipstream mashup of genres and memes and tropes and legends wrapped around a cross-cultural love story. This is a story that has depth, richness; a heart and a soul. Above all, it has a soul.]]> http://calitreview.com/4653/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4639 http://calitreview.com/4639#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:10:57 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4639 Sing in me, Muse quotes Homer (the original one). "Jacqueline, my muse, I speak to you directly for a moment," quoth our modern man. It is no accident that Homer addresses his story to a French reporter whom he briefly met. For, in a way, his account is his own universal newspaper, an elegy to the disintegration of 20th century America, the winding down of the clock.]]> http://calitreview.com/4639/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/4591 http://calitreview.com/4591#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:19:12 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=4591 Little Women. But it’s her similarity with another classic heroine, Nancy Drew, which really draws readers into her world.]]> http://calitreview.com/4591/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/4543 http://calitreview.com/4543#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:07:39 +0000 David Loftus http://calitreview.com/?p=4543 http://calitreview.com/4543/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4480 http://calitreview.com/4480#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:19:13 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4480 http://calitreview.com/4480/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4466 http://calitreview.com/4466#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:13:41 +0000 John R. Guthrie http://calitreview.com/?p=4466 http://calitreview.com/4466/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4177 http://calitreview.com/4177#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:41:47 +0000 John Holt http://calitreview.com/?p=4177 http://calitreview.com/4177/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4002 http://calitreview.com/4002#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:57:41 +0000 Ed Voves http://calitreview.com/?p=4002 The Stranger is a translation of the first of a wildly popular series of novels from Russia. By turns serious and screwball, it combines sly, sometimes campy, humor with a yearning for personal insight and a good day's sleep. The Stranger is an episodic quest set in a parallel universe, in which a Sherlock Holmes-Dr. Watson duo combat malign magicians and search for the perfect restaurant.]]> http://calitreview.com/4002/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3990 http://calitreview.com/3990#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:12:13 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=3990 http://calitreview.com/3990/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3904 http://calitreview.com/3904#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:31:31 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=3904 http://calitreview.com/3904/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/3868 http://calitreview.com/3868#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:51:05 +0000 Rochelle Jewel Shapiro http://calitreview.com/?p=3868 http://calitreview.com/3868/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3820 http://calitreview.com/3820#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:17:37 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=3820 Blood, Smoke, and The Keeper’s Chronicles books (or even the Blood Ties show on Lifetime) will find this stand-alone modern urban fantasy right in line with what they’ve come to expect from her. For those of us not so familiar with Huff’s work, a warning: This is not your usual fantasy fare. Not in the least.]]> http://calitreview.com/3820/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3344 http://calitreview.com/3344#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:03:10 +0000 Mark Fitzgerald http://calitreview.com/?p=3344 http://calitreview.com/3344/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3282 http://calitreview.com/3282#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:46:30 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=3282 Tree of Smoke or his drug-laden 1992 short story collection Jesus’ Son, his latest, Nobody Move, is a real change of pace. Originally published as a four-part serial in Playboy in 2008, this hardboiled noir tale plays with the conventions of thrillers and crime stories, utilizing nearly every stereotype and trick from the arsenal of Dashiell Hammett, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, and Raymond Chandler.]]> http://calitreview.com/3282/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/3251 http://calitreview.com/3251#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 14:24:37 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=3251 The Twin is about as flat as the Dutch landscape in which it's set. Yet lurking in the white spaces is something one can sense, if not pin down precisely. A moody sense of colors – of grey and blue – of silvery insights breaking through a dull day, and of moving between the modern world and a rural life untethered to minutes.]]> http://calitreview.com/3251/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3201 http://calitreview.com/3201#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 14:33:23 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=3201 Turn Coat is the 11th installment in the story of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, Chicago’s first (and only) Wizard private investigator. Jim Butcher has often said he has enough ideas to take the series well into the twenties, though he’s smart enough to provide an “in” for every book such that new readers can join up at anytime without starting at the beginning (or watching the interesting but short-lived Sci-Fi Channel Series The Dresden Files).]]> http://calitreview.com/3201/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3188 http://calitreview.com/3188#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 13:41:03 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=3188 http://calitreview.com/3188/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3135 http://calitreview.com/3135#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 13:38:36 +0000 Jem Bloomfeld http://calitreview.com/?p=3135 The Roar of the Butterflies displays the same qualities which make the Dalziel and Pascoe series so notable: a remarkable turn of phrase, a generous tone and persistent pushing at the boundaries of what crime fiction can encompass.]]> http://calitreview.com/3135/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/3015 http://calitreview.com/3015#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:00:07 +0000 John Holt http://calitreview.com/?p=3015 http://calitreview.com/3015/feed 0