About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Julius Taranto
Positive The Atlantic A gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy ... One suspects that Taranto is still grieving the loss of Roth’s ferocious wit and sense of moral outrage and wishes the author were alive to pillory Millennials and Gen Z.
Matt Bell
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The story is timeless, and it could be told in countless ways ... In his debut novel...the short-story writer Matt Bell takes the mythic route, using ritualistic, almost biblical language to describe the dissolution of a marriage between an unnamed man and woman ... On the surface, Mr. Bell has written a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell ... Taken singly, Mr. Bell’s descriptions are eerie and hypnotic; sometimes they can even be lovely. And the anguish that pervades this work seems heartfelt. But the worldview presented here is rather antediluvian, particularly in its depiction of gender relations. As the novel proceeds, the reader may start to think that the author is employing his dense language to obfuscate meaning, to conceal a paucity of ideas rather than to express a slew of them ...readers may be left thinking that Ernest Hemingway was right when he wrote in The Garden of Eden, \'Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.\' Understanding how simple a story is, then making it complicated, turns out to be considerably less gratifying.
Alexander Maksik
Rave The New York Times Book Review This is a novel so rivetingly plotted and beautifully written that you forget its shopworn premise ... Early on Mr. Maksik’s echoes of Camus are faint, but later, when he paraphrases and quotes directly from The Stranger the parallels between Will and Meursault become nearly impossible to ignore. The novelist is not only modernizing The Stranger but demonstrating its enduring relevance ... Where Mr. Maksik’s tale is headed may seem obvious. Nevertheless, he writes about the moral ambiguity of Will’s circumstances with dazzling clarity and impressive philosophical rigor ... With Camus, simple, declarative sentences can make for a certain deadness in the reader, mirroring Meursault’s, but here they create nerve-racking tension ... The novel’s very title serves as a tart reply both to the school administrators, who feel that Will owes them an explanation, and to Mr. Maksik’s readers, who may think they deserve a more satisfying moral or resolution than the one provided here.
Eleanor Henderson
Mixed The Washington Post ... empathetic ... romances and battles play out during the twilight of the Reagan 1980s, near the end of the sketchy New York of Ed Koch’s reign, but not quite in the gentrified Manhattan that became the hallmark of Giuliani Time. Henderson’s novel pays tribute to this transitional period and the seemingly marginal people who inhabited it. Hers is a book where minor characters play the major roles ... Henderson proves herself to be an expert ethnographer; her detail work is phenomenal...Henderson’s witty, offhand observations and throwaway lines are worthy of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers ... But her characterizations demonstrate Henderson’s greatest skill. Even the ones who receive comparatively little stage time are always precisely defined ... Not all of these characters are particularly appealing, but they’re memorable, and Henderson’s affection for them is palpable ... Whether readers will share the author’s sympathies for her vividly realized characters, however, is debatable. Their interactions could have benefited from a bit more of the historical and political context ... at times, the experience of reading about Jude and Henderson’s other \'saints\' recalls that of meeting a close friend’s significant other who doesn’t quite live up to the billing ... may provoke more ambivalence than nostalgia. Nice place to visit, this Manhattan, but you might feel glad you don’t live there.
Ben Fountain
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public, Fountain's novel gives us one Denisovichian day in the life of Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old soldier who's on a ‘Victory Tour’ of America during the time of the Iraq war … In Fountain's fairly persuasive view, the American public has been ruthlessly manipulated by the government and the media, which in turn are shamelessly beholden to moneyed, corporate interests.
Chad Harbach
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle As in a great baseball game, in which individual plays prove to be far more memorable than the final score, The Art of Fielding is less noteworthy as a showcase for its perfectly serviceable, if somewhat schematic, plot than for Harbach's mad skills, his humor and above all, the humanity with which the author infuses each of his characters … The author's observations about baseball can be both pithy and witty … The parallels that Harbach frequently draws between the art of creating literature and that of mastering the game of baseball are wonderfully insightful. And the writing throughout, as Walt Whitman once said of the game itself, is glorious.