David Leavitt reviews (and mostly likes) Michael Tolliver Lives, the latest tales of the city from Armistead Maupin, while Thomas Mallon plods through This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood, the memoir Jack Valenti completed before he died in April. “The Hollywood portion of his book is strangely without sizzle,” Mallon says.
Also, San Francisco writer Mary Roach, an occasional NYT contributor, explores Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, a new memoir. Roach writes, “To the fine essays of the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch must be added this gleaming, humane work by the poet Christine Montross, written during, and about, her first year of medical school.”
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Christina Meldrum, a Bay Area attorney whose book Madapple was just released this month. “In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, 
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