Online Exclusive Book Reviews

In her novel Vera, Carol Edgarian revisits the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

In The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen follows up on his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer.

Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age suggests where we’re going by examining where we’ve been.

Katherine Seligman’s At the Edge of the Haight is a novel about San Francisco’s unhoused.

In Love Is an Ex-Country, Randa Jarrar takes a look at America—and herself.

Tod Goldberg finds grace and desperation in The Low Desert.

With Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion ties up the loose ends of a literary life.

Julia Claiborne Johnson’s Better Luck Next Time takes place in the 1930s at a Reno, Nevada, divorce ranch.

In Desert Oracle, Ken Layne goes all in on the Mojave’s lore—and lure.

In The System, Ryan Gattis uncovers Los Angeles’s corrupted heart.

Felicia Luna Lemus’s Particulate Matter is a memoir of intimacy and grace.

Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris is a fairy tale for adults.

Tom Zoellner’s The National Road seeks to take the measure of America.