Anna E. Clark
Anna E Clark is a writer and teacher in San Diego.
Don’t Ask Why
In Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy, all desire feels radical.
Play It As It Lays
Didion’s Play It As It Lays captures 1960s Hollywood’s glittering surface and underlying despair, revealing the cost of living with repression and grief.
Cerebral Passions
Critic Anna E. Clark examines Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, dubbing it a thriller of ideas.
That Old Story
In The Ancients, John Larison makes a case for the long view.
Suspended Animation
In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, cliché becomes a catalyst for possibility.
Outsiders Only
D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land and the literary tradition of explaining California.
Hard-Boiled Hope in ‘Clark and Division’
Naomi Hirahara’s novel, the August California Book Club selection, veers away from conventional neo-noir and introduces a detective who grows attuned to the potential of solidarity.
A Different Kind of Bildungsroman
Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, the February California Book Club selection, offers out-of-the-ordinary epiphanies about self-knowledge.
Empathy at a Distance
Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope, the California Book Club selection for August, aims for an experience beyond ordinary fellow feeling.
Play and ‘The Argonauts’
In Maggie Nelson’s ninth book, experience described in terms of games and performance highlights that the self is always coming into being.