RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA master class in the difficult art of first-person, narrative nonfiction ... The prose has wonderful momentum even when he’s writing about arcane debates in the early Christian church. Each chapter is a turn, a surprise. The writing is never clichéd, nor is the thinking.
Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
RaveBookforumFor Stamm, like Stendhal before him, erotic love is not something given to or withheld from you so much as an act of the imagination, and the kind of fictionalizing it requires is very much like writing a story. Rather than demand love and recognition, Stamm’s characters are more generous, more accepting, more creative ... The book is rife with juxtapositions between art, imagination, and memory ... Whatever Stamm is trying to do, his questions about the relationship between art and life are happily left unresolved. I don’t think the novel contributes much as metafiction. But its meditations on how erotic love may work are fascinating. And of course Stamm’s prose, as always, is lean, deliberate, and gorgeous.
Atticus Lish
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] astonishing, gorgeous and very upsetting debut novel ... How does Lish do it? ... It is hard to imagine a more daunting task for a novelist than to say something new about 9/11. Preparation for the Next Life is dizzying in its ambition and exhilarating in its triumph ... About a hundred pages in I closed it and walked around the room. A book hadn’t left me so breathless with its intensity — its inventive and detailed descriptions, its psychological surprise, its re-evaluation of values — since Gravity’s Rainbow. Then I picked it up again and read until the end ... [Lish] provides the most absorbing and detailed description I’ve read of the city’s underclass since Richard Price’s Lush Life.
Leslie Jamison
PositiveBookforum\"The Recovering is in its way a successful synthesis of [William] Styron’s and [Al] Alvarez’s masterpieces ... Jamison’s greatest strength is her ability to show honestly the outrageous mental gymnastics every alcoholic masters in the attempt simultaneously to quit drinking and, above all, to continue drinking ... Jamison’s descriptions of drinking are so well turned and evocative that those who have just quit drinking, who haven’t found their footing as nondrinkers yet, might find them triggering. But this too is a compliment ... The prose is clean and clear and a pleasure to read, utterly without pretension. Although the subject is dark, Jamison has managed to write an often very funny page-turner ... I applaud Jamison for not romanticizing drunks, for her frankness about the destruction that alcohol and drugs can wreak on a great artist...But why not admit that booze has helped some writers find their best lines? Not because they wrote best drunk, but because the trauma of addiction might keep some nerves sensitive that otherwise become dull.\
Kevin Young
RaveBookforumYoung’s encyclopedic study of cons is so exhaustive that it will undoubtedly be the definitive book on hoaxes and fraud. He looks at more than sixty splendid, sad, and often hilarious case studies of American fakery, and they all have at their core one simple fact about human psychology: Just as we all too often tend to lie—while telling ourselves how honest we are—we similarly love to be duped ... Young, who is a poet by trade, tells his stories beautifully. There are more delightful synonyms for deception here than you will find in any book I’ve read ... His readings are impressive not only because he moves so fluidly among apparently incongruous subjects (Lance Armstrong, Jay Gatsby, Jayson Blair, Avatar), but also because he brings such limber insight to every con he takes on ... If I was ever frustrated with Young’s brilliant and definitive account, it was because in almost every case his argument follows the same pattern: Racists easily believe false claims that confirm racist views. This argument is no doubt true, and Young demonstrates it repeatedly, but occasionally I did wish that he would reflect more pointedly on the other reasons we fall for frauds.
David Shields
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewHe is fearless about making himself vulnerable to the reader; so fearless he is willing to say, over and over in this triumphantly humane book, that he is a coward. But at the same time — and this is the David Shields we’ve come to love and doubt — we never know when he is making it all up, when he’s just pretending, when he’s pulling our leg. He’s our elusive, humorous ironist, something like a 21st-century Socrates, who happens to be particularly interested in sex, sports, selfhood, actors and fiction. Whether you love this book or find it incredibly annoying might depend on how you feel about irony ... The shortest essays here tend to be the best, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and also the reviews and shorter essays of Jean-Paul Sartre ... Shields is a master stylist — and has been for a long time, on the evidence of these pieces from throughout his career. You have to really search for a single off-note. The collection can stand as a textbook for contemporary creative nonfiction: erudite, soulful and self-deprecating like John Jeremiah Sullivan; freewheeling and insatiably curious like Geoff Dyer; hilarious and precise like Elif Batuman; and always fresh, clean, vigorous and clear ... All good writers make us feel less alone. But Shields also makes us feel better. He takes in some of the bad of everyday life and our culture and the whole inescapable mess of being human and sends it back to us as good.
Ottessa Moshfegh
PositiveBookforumOttessa Moshfegh’s narrators exhibit a curious combination of extreme moral nihilism and a desperate need for violent, unforgettable experiences. Eileen, her new and best novel, is a love story told by a young woman who doesn’t understand love and who is leaving behind the only man she really loves, her father ... Eileen’s problem is that she finds life boring; what Eileen never considers—and this is where Moshfegh’s gifts for dramatic irony and moral subtlety are especially apparent—is that Eileen herself may be boring. X-ville and her father are pretty horrible, but the real problem is just...Eileen. Moshfegh shows us, with this character, the dangerous connections between boredom and nihilism.
