Fiction
1. Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
(5 Rave)
“Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new. She sees unsentimentally the subtle gestures that alter people’s lives forever; and charts, too, the instances when those gestures change nothing at all.”
–Claire Messud (The Financial Times)
Read an excerpt from Bad Dreams and Other Stories here
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2. Trajectory by Richard Russo
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“….[a] collection of short fiction so rich and flavorsome that the temptation is to devour it all at once. I can’t in good conscience advise otherwise.”
–Laura Collins-Hughes (The Boston Globe)
Read an excerpt from Trajectory here
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3. Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…[a] quiet masterpiece … In a simple style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys and, in the rare miracle of fiction, makes us care about them as if they were our own family.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
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4. Spoils by Brian Van Reet
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…original, deftly plotted and incisively intelligent … Mr. Van Reet occupies these sparring perspectives with impressive balance and dispassion, avoiding the sense of victimhood that often saturates fiction about American soldiers in Iraq.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
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5. Fen by Daisy Johnson
(2 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…a creepy but beautiful debut … Johnson shares [Angela] Carter’s affinity for twisted stories that examine sexuality from the viewpoint of female desire, dispensing with the idea that the male gaze is the last word on anything sexual.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
Read an excerpt from Fen here
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Non Fiction
1. Love and Trouble by Claire Dederer
(5 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of … female masochism is a gift that keeps giving in Dederer’s hands. She gets as much mileage from it as Philip Roth did from Newark.”
–Laura Kipnis (The Atlantic)
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2. The Road to Camelot by Thomas Oliphant & Curtis Wilkie
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Add in their deep research in original sources (they make excellent use of the oral history collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) and the abundant experience they bring as veteran political reporters for the Globe, and the result is a gripping, authoritative campaign history, every bit the successor to Theodore White’s classic work, The Making of the President 1960.”
–Fredrik Logevall (The Boston Globe)
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3. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Known as a left-wing activist and author of fantasy or what he himself calls weird fiction, Miéville writes with the brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to succeed … The story is old but Miéville retells it with verve and empathy.”
–Jonathan Steele (The Guardian)
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4. Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn
(2 Rave, 5 Positive)
“Dearborn captures Hemingway in all of his extremes, the story of a hugely flawed and endlessly compelling human being producing enduring art.”
–John Reimringer (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an excerpt from Ernest Hemingway: A Biography here
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5. Do I Make Myself Clear? by Harold Evans
(1 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Mr. Evans’s skills are on display on nearly every page of Do I Make Myself Clear? Writing a book about writing well can be hazardous for the author—reviewing one is risky, too—but in this case at least the author and his readers have nothing to fear.”
–Edward Kosner (The Wall Street Journal)
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