RaveOpen Letters Review... doesn’t feel any less vivid or engrossing for the inventiveness. And while City on Fire isn’t the product of Edward Gibbon-style research, whether into cartel power structures or police work or drug trafficking or forensics, Winslow still communicates something authentic just by the way he talks. Writes. The characteristically clipped, swift, wise-guy voice in the prose ... magnificent. It’s the fastest-moving of Winslow’s past few tomes and, at 350 pages, about forty percent shorter than each. The voice is vividly personable, but never chatty. It’s a stew of contradictions: hilarious and violent, moody and buoyant, brooding and playful. A huge sprawling thing of what seems like almost ruinously big ambition–condensed into a neat, easy, self-contained volume (the first of a trilogy) ... Is it the best or most inventive of his novels? No. He’s been at it for thirty years and, as we know, career novelists invariably have more novels than stories residing in their fingertips...What’s magical is that we may’ve never heard it told so well.
Jonathan Franzen
RaveOpen Letters ReviewJonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads, his sixth, is also his best: brilliantly plotted and paced, as heavy with ideas as with heart, and showing on literally every page a careful interweaving of story and theme ... Crossroads is much less pretentious than Franzen’s 2001 blockbuster, The Corrections ... What serves the author, given this career-long commitment to chronicling the life of middle-class middle-Americans...is his ability to so brilliantly structure and pace these mundane stories, and to capture so vividly the frays and tangles in his characters’ relationships. A distinct pleasure in Franzen’s novels is spending a hundred pages alone with each character in a family (or family-type unit), and then understanding, progressively, how deeply each character misunderstands the others.
Don Winslow
MixedThe Open Letters ReviewLike a home run derby or an all-star game where great talent turns up to flex and pivot, to dazzle the audience with a low-stakes performance, Don Winslow’s new story collection is an enjoyable showcase of the author’s myriad talents, but it’s missing something you might have come to expect from his recent work: it’s missing the sense of risk ... what we get here with Broken is the portrait of an author having fun ... opening story, \'Broken\', is both a skilled piece of writing and the worst thing in the book: the story is fast-paced, it’s exciting, and it ends with a brilliantly orchestrated crescendo of violence—but it amounts to nothing more than noise and blood, a watered-down version of Winslow’s epic NYPD novel from 2016, The Force...It’s a harrowing start to the book, because it raises the question of whether an author of ambitious tomes can forget the subtler craft of a small-scale story ... There’s definitely an urgency, in Broken, of somebody frothing with stories to tell; these are, in fact, novellas, if you wanna get technical, and every single one feels like it could have been a novel but for the fact that its author’s appreciative of the fact that you and he both only have so much time on this earth ... It’s a testament to a writer’s talent when the most scathing thing you can say about his latest release is that it isn’t as good as his last one ... If somebody proves to be great company, as Winslow certainly has over the years, you take that company as readily for a three-course meal as you do for a beer...Broken goes down more like a beer. A good one.
Bret Easton Ellis
MixedOpen Letters ReviewIt isn’t confession, necessarily, and it isn’t reportage or evaluation. [Ellis\'s] just telling stories. And the reason those stories are so engrossing is because he’s a natural novelist—and, given the frequency with which he talks about his boyhood precocity in reading and studying horror, Ellis seems to appreciate this about himself: he loves stories and he’s good at telling them ... His novelist’s inclination is to lean, always, on character, on voice (each of his novels is written in the first person, by narrators who sometimes think they understand what’s going on but clearly don’t), and while that can be frustrating and irksome if you’re trying to appreciate White for the book of criticism that it’s billed as, it’s much more enjoyable when read as, if not fiction, a kind of literary performance art. His account of things is always anecdotal. He talks about Hollywood drama and scandal, he names names, supplies motives—and never cites a thing. Again, it’s annoying if you’re taking it seriously; funny, though, if you’re appreciating it for what it is: 200 pages of wine talk with a scathingly opinionated, fairly obnoxious, very smart friend whose observations are often clouded by ego and indignation and nostalgia for the wood-paneled anonymity of the 1970s, or the carefree affluence of the early ‘80s.
Don Winslow
PositiveOpen Letters Review\"... a brilliant, funny, complex and exciting novel, brutally violent ... And so we get one of the book’s major flaws: the cast is too big. Particularly in the Mexico section ... There are countless scenes of gangsters sitting down to discuss the issues they’re having with other gangsters, planning shipments and violent strikes, counterstrikes, compromises. It’s a lot ... Winslow’s overall story, while incredibly complex and huge, is communicated with speed and clarity and insight and spectacle. It can get overwhelming at times, intimidating, but a reader who surrenders to the complexity can trust in Winslow’s ability to tie everything together so that even a glossy understanding of certain sections, as they unfold, will be made clearer in retrospect ... The Border feels like it might be too quick on the trigger in its portrait of the present day, however riveting that portrait may be ... The Border is an outstanding book, and a solid conclusion to Winslow’s trilogy. That it gets a little too ambitious at times, and maybe lacks some of the footing of its predecessors, does nothing to subtract from the finger-slicing haste with which pages fly. On its own, The Border stands as a masterful work from a novelist at the top of his profession. Collected with its predecessors, it makes for a masterpiece.\
Jonathan Franzen
PositiveOpen Letters Review\"The language is simpler, the conclusions are clearer [than Franzen\'s previous collection of essays, How to Be Alone]. He sounds like he’s expressing himself, and having a good time, rather than instructing us. It’s like he’s looking at the moral duty in seeing and appreciating these worldly problems, but realizing that he doesn’t have to solve them ... The End of the End of the Earth, though an occasional strain for readers who don’t share Franzen’s affection for birds, communicates a compelling voice from a speaker who’s well-intentioned, well-studied and considerate, but hopelessly aloof.\
Leonard Cohen
MixedOpen Letter ReviewSome of Cohen’s unfinished projects are contained in The Flame, Cohen’s new posthumous collection of poems and lyrics and drawings; which, if you remember it, looks and reads like a direct sequel to Book of Longing, another decades-in-the-making project that Cohen pushed into the world in 2006, perhaps prematurely, as the first step of his comeback. The Flame is beautiful in places, incoherent and repetitive and cringingly bad in others, but it’s a delight for longtime Cohen fans who might care to see, firsthand, the writing process he so often discussed: having to write something out before he knows if it’s any good, the unruly sprawl of the first draft, the self-counseling.
