Oscar Villalon
Oscar Villalon is book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. A member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, he's also a long-time juror of the California Book Awards, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club. His writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Believer, and his reviews have aired on KQED's The California Report. He lives with his wife and son in San Francisco.
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A delicious comedy of miscommunication, Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier takes on racism and its absurdities. It's a freewheeling coming-of-age, and one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years.
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Part Russian mafia thriller, part postmodern reflecting pool of sentence fragments and literary allusions, Jose Manuel Prieto's confounding, glimmering Rex celebrates the aesthetic and spiritual power of writing.
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A scientist and adventurer of legendary endurance, will and bravery, Percy Fawcett set out in 1925 to find the Amazonian city of El Dorado. The Lost City of Z, David Grann's novel-like reconstruction of Percy's quest, thrills both the heart and mind.
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In his slyly comic Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, David Eagleman speculates about the great beyond. His whimsical thought experiments set in the hereafter expose truths of the here and now.
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Interviews from the influential journal tease out the triumphs and struggles of literary giants, including Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison and Joyce Carol Oates.
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The late-period novels of Philip Roth — arguably, America's greatest living writer — have unflinchingly chronicled the perils of old age. But vibrant youth is at the center of Roth's newest work, making its hard truths all the more resonant — and crushing.
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In oral histories, undocumented immigrants tell their stories of anxiety, alienation and loneliness.
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In Horacio Castellanos Moya's dazzling novel, a boozing hack writer chronicling the stories of Central American natives finds both poetry and paranoia.
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Book critic Oscar Villalon offers his appreciation of Bill Buford's new memoir Heat. Inspired by Italian star chef Mario Batali, Buford experiences a trial by fire in the kitchen of one of New York's top restaurants.