WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO, debut art-critic novel

WE NEVER CALLED IT FRISCO
JED PERL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A candid novel about the art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in the countercultural movement of the 50’s and 60’s, by one of America's most celebrated art critics.

During intermission at a modern dance performance in San Francisco, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marcia Lang collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. Her lover, Burt, soon discovers that Marcia willed him her entire estate. His windfall includes her correspondence, her stilted redwood house in Marin County, and an incomplete draft of her unpublished memoir, We Never Called It Frisco. As he processes Marcia’s death alongside their cadre of Berkeley bohemians, Burt begins to reconstruct Marcia’s work in progress as an elegiac collage for the friend he’s lost and the city that found her.

In his first novel, Jed Perl guides his reader down the back alleys of a mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and the writers like Marcia who determined their positions in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, We Never Called It Frisco tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.

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My Review: The post-war history of US art, in novel form.

If nothing in you perked up at that précis, don't get this read onto your TBR because it's the sum total of the story. Marcia and Burt are names, not characters; their personalities aren't developed, though their...her...critical opinions about art are. Burt is quiet, he's more observant than Marcia's professional eye for art (and its movements) is.

The central tragedy, Marcia's early death, takes place before we-the-reader have the chance to invest in her whether positively or negatively. For that to work as a novelistic technique, the way we learn about her needs to be more personal, more through memories than through her writings. Burt's devastated, naturally; why would that not lead a storyteller into flashbacks, accompanied by her writings? Instead we listen to Marcia's judgmental pronunciamentos interspersed with Burt's sadness. It's not propulsive, nor was I expecting it to be; but it's also progressively less involving.

I liked the idea of this debut novel enough to finish it, and should Author Perl write more fiction, I will seek it out to read. It's not the best work he's done. But it's also not the best work he will do.

A MEDICINE GAME, men in friendship! rare find!

A MEDICINE GAME
JASON DONVILLE
North Vanguard Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Some games are played for victory. Others are played for healing.

When Moose and Jonathan, infantry officers in the Canadian Army and best friends since meeting at Royal Roads Military College, deploy to Sarajevo as peacekeepers, they are thrust into the inferno of a genocidal war. Tasked with reopening the city’s airport—a vital lifeline for humanitarian aid—they soon confront the brutal realities of human violence and the fragile boundaries of moral certainty. Snipers deliberately target civilians, often children, while the soldiers who witness these atrocities are ordered to remain neutral, powerless to intervene.

For Jonathan, a Mohawk soldier from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, healing has always meant something different. He carries with him something older than the uniform he wears: lacrosse—the Creator’s Game, known as the Medicine Game when played for healing.

Some wounds cannot be left on the battlefield. And the journey home demands a different kind of courage.

Spanning continents and generations, from Canada’s Pacific coast to the shattered streets of Sarajevo and the living traditions of Six Nations, A Medicine Game is a haunting and tender meditation on friendship, sacrifice, moral injury, and the long road home. Rooted in memory and illuminated by love, it speaks to an ancient truth: we are not healed before we learn to love. Rather, it is love itself that leads us—gently, and sometimes painfully—toward healing.

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My Review: I've been vaguely aware of the existence of a game called lacrosse since Calvin's nemesis Susie Derkins hit him with a snowball she'd chucked at him with one of the game's playing sticks. (Clearly I'm not interested enough to find out anything about it, but at least now I know it exists.) I was acutely aware of the Tutsi and Bosnian genocides that took place in the same decade as each other, and as Calvin and Hobbes introduced me to lacrosse. The idea that lacrosse could heal the PTSD of the soldiers who were forced by bizarre and humanity-denying rules simply to watch as murderers commit murder on an industrial scale, then, would never, not once, occur to me.

It still would not after reading this story where it does.

It was a painful story to read, that of the companions Jonathan and Moose as they navigate young manhood seeking their places in the military. I wanted to shout at them, to force them to utilize their evident and complementary skills in humane ways not in military endeavors. Instead they are front and center for the Bosnian religious genocide; it unsurprisingly leaves them floundering amid unresolved trauma once they're home in Canada.

I did enjoy the evocations of Canada as a locale and as a polity that's the antithesis of the wartime theater of operations. I'm not surprised the characters were always processing their grief and rage in their homeland; the contrast could not be more stark. It was worth noting that the men who became friends under hard training, then harsh service conditions, remained friends...too few stories feature men in friendship with each other, so it was very pleasant to see.

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, I'm picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 9, 2026

The Publisher Says: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry—a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus—dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world—involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

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My Review: The Swerve was a life-defining read for me in 2012. In it, Author Greenblatt took a horrendously complicated, unpleasantly difficult classical Latin poem about atomism and made it into a living document that gave form to a way of thinking that defines modernity in the 21st century.

If anyone can make a sea of "maybe"s and "perhaps"es into a life story, it is him. And he does.

Kit Marlowe is of enduring interest to many of us for lots of 21st-century reasons, including his apparent sexual interest in other men, his apparent involvement in anti-catholic espionage, and his very obvious murder in what we think was a tavern brawl before he turned thirty; but there's enough uncertainty about all of it that one can't pin him down. His plays survive him; Tamburlaine the Great and The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus shocked then, shock now four hundred years later, and likely delight in their transgressiveness to the same degree though for very different reasons in both ages. Marlowe knew how to use the prejudices of the world he wrote to entertain to deliver pointed messages well beyond the obvious scope of his story.

A provocateur's work is never done. He can still raise a rage-filled shout.

I think that would delight Kit Marlowe. I know he's not as revered as Shakespeare, his contemporary; but that's down to chance, the unpredictable lightning of luck (and probably Shakespeare's longer life thus larger surviving body of work). It could also be that Marlowe's authorship of The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, making the homoerotic subtext of male loving friendship that was so celebrated in Elizabethan times into blaring text, had a little something to do with it. Homophobia is an evergreen form of hate, powerfully corrosive to even the most wonder-inspiring talents' gifts. If the ewww-ick response is your default response to gay sex, why are you thinking about it?

Imponderables like this float through my mind as I read this fantabulous work of stitchery that sews a bit here, a scrap there, none of them large, into a very interesting if unclear portrait of a man whose unapologetic purpose was to confront and discomfit the world he so obviously saw in perfect clarity, then whipped out his microscope to look more closely at its flaws.

Dark Renaissance is well titled...the renaissance of a dark figure, the Renaissance's dark side considered then and now, the renaissance of darkness in Marlowe's lifetime and his life and times...layers, layers like an onion, gleaming, and making one tear up as the essential oils of a man's very skin hit your eyes.

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, damning indictment using evidence seldom seen by the public

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
TERENCE KEEL
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin

A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

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My Review: Starting with an acknowledgment of the demands we place on the police, "...we have asked police in America to maintain law and order in addition to managing the problems of poverty, the unhoused, the mentally unwell, and people suffering with substance abuse," Author Keel peels back the layers of denial, obfuscation, and lying that enshroud the deaths of people in law-enforcement custody. Coroners, tasked with the responsibility of reporting on the condition of the deceased's body after their death, often use terminology that clouds what would be interpreted as signs of violence lest police be accused of criminal conduct.

The obvious problem arises when there has been criminal police conduct. It is not always the case, nor is it unknown; the system is intended to hold bad actors accountable for their actions; so how are victims' families, members of the public, to feel confident when principal figures are left to perform their role largely under the radar and so in practical terms unaccountably?

Author Keel studied the problem, saw the tensions in the system up close, and presents us this honest report with all its uneasy conclusions. I'm particularly taken with the concept of "second death," the erasure of the deceased's violent death at the hands of public safety professionals; men and women who collude to prevent the truth of the deceased's time in custody leading to their death is enacting a different sort of violence on them and their survivors, whether family or society at large, by shielding violent offenders from responsibility because they are the police.

It should surprise no one that racialized and marginalized victims disproportionately suffer fatal consequences on entering police custody. It is almost impossible for members of those groups to receive posthumous justice due to the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand defeating open and transparent accountability for deaths in custody. Medical jargon, grammatical skulduggery...much can be hidden by using bureaucracy's beloved passive voice, and ameliorative jargon eg, "shots were fired" by anyone in particular, or just impelled by hard breezes?, or "an officer-involved conflict" of what sort? initiated by whom?, etc etc.

Narratives constructed in this pettifogging fashion are not rigorous, and should be challenged at every turn. That they are not indicates the true purpose of coroners' reports by whatever name: exculpation by obfuscation.

It is infuriating that this is widespread, nay ubiquitous, and goes largely unchallenged. In bringing the abuse of public trust this behavior represents, Author Keel does his best to prevent as many "second death"s as he possibly can. I pray for his ongoing success and for this cultural poltroonery to be held up for public ridicule.

A TIME TO BE BORN, Author DAWN POWELL's scathing social commentary is evergreen

A TIME TO BE BORN
DAWN POWELL
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous new paperback of Dawn Powell’s razor-sharp comedy of manners, following a glittering tale of ambition and betrayal in prewar New York City.

“Few books have so bitingly and energetically captured the hunger for status and success that animate the city and enrage so many.” — The New York Times

Deemed “wittier than Dorothy Parker, [and able to] dissect the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald” (The New York Times Book Review), Dawn Powell earns her place as one of America’s great novelists with this biting satire of a wealthy, self-involved publisher and his scheming novelist wife.

Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York’s most powerful newspaper tycoon. With his ex-wife vanquished, Amanda reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, publishing wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels, charming guests at martini-soaked parties and furiously fending off Julien’s pesky advances.

That’s until the past comes knocking in the form of Vicky Haven, a timid school friend desperate for reinvention. Ever the strategist, Amanda lands Vicky a job in listings and a studio apartment—perfect for Amanda’s daytime trysts with old flame, Ken Saunders. But matters of the heart rarely follow orders. When Vicky begins to wise up to her scheme, and sets her own sights on Ken, she ignites a love triangle that threatens to topple Amanda’s carefully constructed empire.

Scathingly funny and irresistibly glamorous, A Time to be Born is a timeless portrait of social climbing, set in a 1940s Manhattan rife with backstabbing charm, brittle friendships and women who always land on their feet–heels first. Reissued in a stunning new package, it is the perfect introduction to Dawn Powell’s wicked wit and unsparing eye, guaranteed to delight both established fans and new readers alike.

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My Review: My mother loved The Locusts Have No King and Angels on Toast. She always said it was unkind of Dawn Powell to make her bitches so funny, because in the end it was bitchiness or bust in these women's lives. I've read Edmund Wilson's famous (I think dismissive) "praise" for her writing that her audience...women...never cottoned on to her writing in droves because there was no one to relate to.

That did not age well, Mr. Wilson. It's misogynistic even for a very openly misogynistic age. My own read of the literary marketplace's lukewarm reception of Powell has more to do with my mother's observation that the women were bitches first and foremost: made up of 90% bitchiness, 8% ambition, and 2% fashion. It gets wearing when the glossy surfaces deliver gloss gloss and more shiny gloss. This takedown of Clare Boothe Luce is honest, unsparing, based in the author's cold phony-flensing eye's most well-illuminated view of a woman whose substance could never fill out the image she projected. It was one of Powell's few hot-selling titles on that basis.

But in 2026, most all y'all need to use Wikipedia to know who she is. This vitiates the power of a takedown, a roman à clef of bitter and contemptuous thoroughness, a book-length Vanity Fair hit piece. I think it's delicious. I think most people will read the sentences and enjoy the bitchery, the evocation of a vanished world of unquestionable elite power, no backfooting in this story until we get into the bedroom...it's wonderful at pitting women against each other over a man neither should even notice still less grace with their desires but he was A Man in a time that was enough.

I don't see that catching fire in today's social climate. It's out of step in 2026. It was cold, unfeeling, in 1942; and now it's a relic of a time so distant as to be semi-mythical. Because it is an evocation of coldness, fame, and the callous using of people, it really should work as a reminder that the same kind of people doing the same kind of social climbing are hollow images who stand bestride our world like they did Powell's, and are now forgotten...well, it ought to inspire us to see through them, to see the vapors they conjure for what they are.

It has the uphill battle of ongoing misogyny. It's still true that piercing social commentary is taken more seriously when it treats men as central to the story. Look how much ink is spilled about that traitorous fuck Zuck as opposed to Carly Fiorina, another evil person seen from a labor perspective. It's also the book's enemy, time (ironically enough) that's proving sic transit gloria mundi for the models its characters are based on.

I'm hoping more of y'all will pick up on the story's commentary on fame and see how deeply relevant Powell's observations are for our own time.

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL, first in a well-made paranormal series

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL
VIKKI VanSICKLE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Reluctant psychic Drew Benson can read tarot cards and get impressions from objects—she just never expected to use her gifts to investigate an infamous cold case.

Drew Benson has a secret. She gets visions, something she hasn’t tapped into since she was a teenager, when her late aunt, a TV psychic known as Hannah Mystic, became the scapegoat in the unsolved disappearance of a local teenager. Twenty years later, Drew is happy to ignore her gift, focusing instead on keeping the metaphysical shop she inherited from Hannah afloat, wrangling her sole, astrology-obsessed employee, and dodging local rake Foster Banks in her picturesque lakeside hometown.

But when Drew's arch-nemesis from high school, now a big city reporter, decides to investigate the cold case from all those years ago, it’s Drew’s ability that could finally make a break in the decades old mystery. With bills piling up, a disapproving mother laying on the guilt, and a local vandal who wants Drew and her witchy store gone, Drew has a lot to lose. But what she stands to gain—finding out what happened to the missing teen, clearing her aunt’s name, and a second chance at belonging—could change everything.

In The Mystic and the Missing Girl, Vikki VanSickle seamlessly draws readers into an utterly charming world in this unputdownable, small town mystery.

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My Review: Drew's a woman who just will not let unfairness or inequitable bullshit rampant in our world go unchallenged. Her "...but that's not right" meter's calibrated very finely indeed, which is probably why those who've gone before in dishonest or unkindly meant ways trust her to bring fairness and closure to their stolen lives.

What makes all that work on a story level is that Drew doesn't have evidence until she, and a very unusual partner in Nick, do the investigation to actually solve the crime. That was very satisfying to me, as was the fact that Drew had to overcome significant internal hurdles to accept and trust her psychometry practice was giving her accurate information to aim the shoe-leather-wearing investigation parts.

Nick being a normal adult and a reasonable guy who learns the right lesson...Drew can be trusted, the leads she turns up in this weird way all pan out or lead to the right data...is a relief. No disbelief carried beyond the point of learning Drew's correct, no rufftuff manly-man nonsense.

The small-town weirdness is played for laffs but that's how it goes in mysteries of a cozy bent. I didn't think any of them were incredible. Unlikely, but that's bog-standard nowadays; rolling with it was fine, especially as they were all adding their bits to the shoe-leather-wearing investigation part as well as fleshing out the history of Drew's late auntie Hannah, their former neighbor who also had paranormal abilities that quite famously failed her once...and that was all the town needed.

Drew needs to redeem her aunt's memory. Nick needs a resolved cold case. Their work styles mesh better than is the norm in cozy mysteries. It's clear we're going to get a series, sooner rather than later please, because the paranormal edge is neither overemphasized nor played for humor...that's all in the town's responses to it.

Drew's shop having a pweshus cutesypooh c-a-t was the loss of the fifth star.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.