What do sea otters, abalone and sardines have to do with the settling and development of California? What can these creatures reveal about the age-old struggle between greed and conservation? The ...

Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay As anyone who has raised a daughter knows, alliances and jealousies among teenage girls ...

California Review of Books appreciates the bookstores in our communities and encourages you to support your local independent bookshop. Our links connect to bookshop.org, a website that partners with ...

Although Tana French has won awards for crime fiction and mystery/thrillers, including an Edgar, The Keeper is little like our expectation of a mystery novel. While its plot does include a number of ...

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

Polymath producer-musician Brian Eno has this great theory about “scenius” as the corrective to “‘genius,’ which exemplifies what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of history – where events are changed by ...

In 2021, Susan Cohen’s poem “In Respect to the Jellyfish” won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize. The poem crossed my radar at that time, and I recall appreciating its intelligence, restraint, and beauty. When ...

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

It’s late November in Norway and the days are cold and short. A woman and her dog occupy a small cabin in a remote, forested area. The woman, whose name we never learn, tells us, “I usually retreated ...