Book Review: The Californians

It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan, college dropout and temporary waiter recently dumped, steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon.

A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn, a German-Jewish immigrant and resident of the Lower East Side, inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens. In love with silent cinema, Klaus will restyle himself Klaus von Stiegl, a mysterious aristocratic German film director. In true Hollywood fashion, he will court fame, fortune, romance, and betrayal, and end his career directing Brackett: a radical, notorious 60s-era detective show.

Weaving between Tobey and Klaus is the story of Diane “Di” Stiegl: Klaus’s granddaughter, raised in Palm Springs, who claws out a career as an artist in gritty 1980s NYC. As America yields the presidency to a Hollywood cowboy, as Diane’s grifter father and free-spirited mother circle in and out of her life, Diane will reflect America’s most urgent and hypocritical years back to itself, uneasily finding critical adoration as well as great fame and wealth.

Book Review: America Fantastica

At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in Northern California. “How much is on hand, would you say?” he asked the teller. “I’ll want it all.”

“You’re robbing me?”

He revealed a Temptation .38 Special.

The teller, a diminutive redhead named Angie Bing, collected eighty-one thousand dollars.

Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to take a ride with me.”

So begins the adventure of Boyd Halverson—star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JCPenney manager—and his irrepressible hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday the pair reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.

Book Review: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate.

I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have.

Who was it? Let’s get started.

Everyone in my family has killed someone: my brother, my stepsister, my wife, my father, my mother, my sister-in-law, my uncle, my stepfather, my aunt, and me.