RaveThe Financial Times (UK)\"
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Even a flat account of life with the Zappas would be intriguing, but Earth to Moon is told with such vigor and intensity that you wonder why the author (now in her mid-fifties) took so long to get around to it ... Earth to Moon is extraordinarily well written. A TV director is \'a mealy apple of a man in a black turtleneck.\' London taxis are \'swanky.\' Moon’s Empire State Building night-light \'casts a pointy shadow on the ceiling.\' This is a wonderful book: lyrical, moving and funny.\
Patrick Bishop
RaveThe Guardian (UK)The book resembles some epic thriller, with vividly evoked characters all somewhere on the spectrum between collaboration and resistance, shame and glory ... That Bishop can break off from war for some literary reflections is testament to his relaxed confidence as a writer, and Paris ’44 is a wonderful book: droll, moving, with a cinematic eye and not a boring line in it.
Clare Sestanovich
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewEach of these elements makes sense intellectually — the novel is insistently concerned with different ways of being \"of use\" to the world — but the proportions are off ... Sestanovich can be wonderfully observant about sexual dynamics, as in an exactingly described round of post-breakup sexting and a surprising election-night hookup; and, as in her stories, her protagonists’ palpable disappointment with the world is endearing, even if its source isn’t always clear. But on the scale of a novel, the author’s hesitancy becomes unsatisfying. There’s a failure to commit to plotlines and characters, a skittish abandonment of deeper engagement at key moments.
Bob Stanley
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Stanley’s description of sound is a constant pleasure ... Here’s a summer project for pop fans: read this book, then listen to the music.
Nathan Hill
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe ingredients are in place for a Franzen-esque exploration of The Way We Live Now, and, at least for a while, this is what the book delivers ... Hill is less interested in getting to the bottom of the modern predicament than he is in constructing an elaborate, back-story-laden plot machine that will, after hundreds of pages, solve all its characters’ problems with a series of satisfying clicks ... Hill intertwines past and present with militaristic precision, revealing the ways his characters’ histories come to bear inexorably, unambiguously on their present lives ... Hill...is so dogged about connecting narrative dots that he loses sight of the messiness of lived reality ... Hill’s storytelling abilities are impressive, if maddening, and underneath all the moving parts, his novels vividly capture lonely Midwestern childhoods and real yearning for connection and understanding ... What’s frustrating is that, characteristically, even this moment of artistic appreciation turns out to have an ulterior motive.
Jonathan Escoffery
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewThe book moves backward and forward in time, immersing us in the muggy Miami atmosphere and the unresolved family tensions ... Given Escoffery’s skill in making me care for these characters, I wished at times that I was caught more forcefully in a current of narrative momentum with them, and some episodes...struck me as less than convincing. But the author is, throughout, a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen detail.
Zachary Lazar
PositiveNew York Review of BooksA characteristic novel of the Trump era ... By trying to capture so many crosscurrents of contemporary life, Lazar risks loading the novel with a surfeit of meaning, everyone and everything in it doing (at least) double duty as a symbol for or comment on something ... Lazar’s ability to render the odd, memorable details of his characters’ lives, however, saves the book from feeling like it was designed solely to illustrate \"the way we live now,\" even if that’s exactly what it is.
Mark Hodkinson
PositiveThe Observer (UK)[Hodkinson] has none of the chippiness afflicting some of the kitchen sinkers; he is not out for revenge. Instead, he’s a dreamer ... I know Hodkinson slightly ... Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed the way he talks about literature, some negative remarks about one of my own works excepted ... There are vivid character sketches of authors Hodkinson has published ... There is much dark comedy about Hodkinson’s publishing career ... This is a book about the north; it is also about publishing, writing and music, but it transcends its subjects.
Yuko Tsushima, trans. by Geraldine Harcourt
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksTsushima...draws on the fierce, sometimes monstrous tradition of individualism in which her father participated, and makes of it something strange and new ... Her work is unusual in the interpretive demands it makes of the reader, though the prose itself is always clear and accessible ... The novel is somewhat carelessly paced—there are long stretches of verbatim logbook entries from Akira’s first weeks in daycare that, while they accurately capture the tedium of childcare, can’t help but test the reader’s patience. The novel opens up when Takiko takes a job at a plant nursery ... Her would-be romance with a gruff coworker who has a developmentally disabled son shades heavily into melodrama ... The reader is liberated by the change of pace and setting after the claustrophobic depiction of early parenthood and domestic cruelty that dominates most of the book. As in much of Tsushima’s writing, there is a clash of styles at work, an uneasy blend of raw detail and more conventional fiction that threatens the book’s tonal coherence ... In Woman Running in the Mountains...Tsushima makes the novel’s escape into romantic fantasy feel, viscerally, like an escape.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... excellent ... [Sayrafiezadeh] writes with a veteran’s swagger and discipline. Nothing here feels obligatory or tossed off; instead, the collection joins a list that includes Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, Lorrie Moore’s Like Life and Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Dead Fish Museum as a second book of stories that exceeds and expands upon the promise of the first, confirming the writer as a major, committed practitioner of a difficult form.
Guido Morselli
PositiveHarpers... less a traditional novel than a series of brilliantly despairing philosophical disquisitions, pegged to the narrator’s wanderings through abandoned streets, airports, and hotels. We wait for him to find a companion, to hear a crackling SOS over the radio or discover a message left behind, anything to set a plot in motion ... In essayistic digressions that voluptuously condemn the decadence of modern civilization, complete with copious references to imagined or embellished Latin sources, Morselli makes the case for himself as a cantankerous shared relation of Huysmans and Houellebecq.
Saul Friedländer
RaveHarper\'s Magazine... charmingly ramshackle ... Friedländer, a lauded expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, describes his short book as an essay, and notes at the start that he is no specialist on Proust. Indeed, the pleasure of the book comes from its old-fashioned, amateur quality, the author unspooling thoughts and venturing theories collected over many years about a book he clearly loves.
Danielle Evans
PositiveHarper\'sIn the wrong hands, the marshaling of so much sociological material risks didacticism, a morally salutary but lifeless march to a preordained conclusion. But Evans is interested in the nuances and contradictions of the characters she depicts. She wants to understand the messy, contingent processes through which history is created, and her curiosity and empathy extend, throughout the collection, to characters buffeted by personal and political crosswinds.
Susan Taubes
PositiveHarper\'sKnowing how her life ended makes reading the novel at times unbearably sad ... Though Divorcing was her only published novel, her philosophical writing, correspondence, and (one can hope) unpublished fiction await rediscovery. In dark times, it is good to have things to look forward to.
Wolfgang Koeppen, trans. Michael Hofmann
PositiveHarper\'s Magazine... Wolfgang Koeppen’s Pigeons on the Grass, first published in German in 1951, and newly translated by Michael Hofmann, is an exercise in outrunning the past. His novel, presented in bursts of action from shifting perspectives, is a modernist tour of Munich over the course of one eventful day in 1948 ... Koeppen’s narration is free-flowing, shifting at times, even over the course of a sentence, from a character’s inner thoughts to the verbal static—\'Commie Onslaught, Children love Ludens Drops\'—of the outside world. The novel’s roving consciousness deliberately blurs the boundaries between characters’ minds, turning Munich into one large, pulsing brain, throwing off brilliant mini-disquisitions on German versus American writers, or the Proustian disappointment one visitor feels in finding the city not quite as ruined as he’d imagined. For a contemporary American reader, there are a few jarring moments that bespeak the author’s ignorance, or worse, of black American life (not least of which is a black character named Odysseus Cotton). It is a dispiriting limitation in the work of a writer who is otherwise often exhilarating and original, and who should be better known in the English-speaking world.
Janis Tomlinson
PositiveHarpersOne of the pleasures of Tomlinson’s book lies in encountering the unvarnished details of Goya’s life; her delineation of the artist’s remarkably flexible political allegiances is especially engrossing. But those, like myself, who have long felt an emotional connection to the cryptic melancholy of his late works, which Goya originally frescoed onto the walls of his home...will find themselves chastened by her approach. She argues that \'the romantic image of Goya, deaf and isolated\' recording his inner pain for his own contemplation, is not based in fact ... It’s a reasonable enough supposition from a historian’s perspective, but those who have contemplated Goya’s giant—gnawing, with an expression of agonized helplessness, on a mutilated body—may be unconvinced.
Scholastique Mukasonga, Trans. by Jordan Stump
RaveHarpersThe stories in this collection, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, work...[by] narrating individual experiences and resisting the pull toward parable ... The matter-of-fact psychological probity of Mukasonga’s work is akin to the piercing memoirs of Annie Ernaux and the early novels of Edna O’Brien. She also shares their gift for writing about childhood ... With visceral immediacy, Mukasonga captures the children’s creeping fear and desperation as they grow weak from starvation ... Mukasonga\'s work is a lament for a destroyed world[.]
Chris Frantz
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... easy-going prose ... He seems to record a \'dream come true\' about every 10th page, but I prefer his minor key. The mysterious Mr Byrne always brings this out, and it’s strongly present in Frantz’s account of the early days ... There are many exquisite character portraits ... That Frantz remained star-struck is one of his many winning qualities, and I commend Remain in Love to discerning rock fans everywhere.
Teddy Wayne
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSince Wayne is a veteran writer, he knows that we know what he’s doing in these opening pages. He’s setting himself the difficult task of asking the reader to cut through numerous layers of prophylactic irony — the unnamed narrator protecting himself, as an insecure aspiring writer; the author operating within the limited skill set of his narrator — to access some deeper emotional truth about these characters. It’s to Wayne’s credit that he often succeeds, despite the sometimes-maddening (I know, he knows!) flaws that he’s painstakingly signposted ... the roommates pivot on questions of gender and sexuality, questions to which I found Wayne’s approach at once overly cagey and too on-the-nose ... Wayne’s choices here \'work\' in the sense that we believe his narrator would, were he writing the novelization of his life, handle his discomfort with his body and feelings with these kinds of hints and dodgy revelations. But at the same time, it feels a little cheap to turn the central character’s genuinely poignant longing and trauma into a scavenger hunt ... I couldn’t help feeling that the busyness and extremity of the plot’s denouement undercut the author’s otherwise humane sensibility. In other words: Just because he told me he was going to flinch doesn’t mean I wasn’t disappointed when he did.
Nell Zink
MixedThe New York Review of BooksAfter the chaos of Nicotine, I didn’t know what to expect from Doxology. The events and aftermath of September 11 and the 2016 presidential race did not seem a natural fit for the Zink treatment, perhaps because the world’s insanity has outpaced even the imagination of an expert hyperbolist. Though there are a few of Zink’s trademark moves—notably a couple of side characters who run away with large portions of the plot—her approach to the broader canvas has changed. The characters, especially the central couple, grow and develop in more subtle ways over the course of the novel than Zink’s characters usually do, and the story proceeds at a more measured pace than any of her previous books. It shows signs of a longing, not entirely fulfilled, to meet the world where it is ... Her setups are often richer and more inhabited than the follow-throughs, with promising plotlines receding from view in favor of an old-fashioned insistence on pairing characters off into romantic relationships before the book ends. Like Helen DeWitt, perhaps the contemporary closest to her stylistically, she has a weakness for a Rube Goldberg approach to plot, in which the story can’t end until every object that has been set in motion comes to rest in its predetermined place. As a result, the books can feel somewhat weightless, even after they’ve engaged with the weightiest subjects ... The result is a book that doesn’t quite justify its deployment of the trappings of the \'novel of our times.\' Caught somewhere between satirizing that genre and earnestly attempting it, Zink lands in an uncertain middle ground.
James Griffiths
PositiveScience... documents the history of the Chinese internet through a series of 25 cameos, drawing in the reader through narratives grounded in individual experience. [Griffiths] brings to bear his journalistic skills, both in engaging storytelling and in careful (well-footnoted) research. His special interest is in censorship and human rights, leading him to track down the accounts of (and often personally interview) numerous dissidents and dissenters ... Despite the \'How to build and control an alternative version of the internet\' subtitle, the book actually reports not on how but on what happens when you do. It is a cautionary tale for us all because—not just in China, but worldwide—more control seems to be the inexorable direction of travel: control of the internet and, with it, control of the citizens.
James Griffiths
PositiveScience... documents the history of the Chinese internet through a series of 25 cameos, drawing in the reader through narratives grounded in individual experience. [Griffiths] brings to bear his journalistic skills, both in engaging storytelling and in careful (well-footnoted) research. His special interest is in censorship and human rights, leading him to track down the accounts of (and often personally interview) numerous dissidents and dissenters ... Despite the \'How to build and control an alternative version of the internet\' subtitle, the book actually reports not on how but on what happens when you do. It is a cautionary tale for us all because—not just in China, but worldwide—more control seems to be the inexorable direction of travel: control of the internet and, with it, control of the citizens.
Simon Garfield
RaveThe ObserverThis intriguing study of our urge to make scale models is full of bizarre stories and poignant insight ... engaging and exhuberant ... In Miniature reads like an upmarket Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, and I did keep having to search the internet to make sure Garfield wasn’t fantasising ... Sometimes I paused just to marvel at a fact, or the implications thereof ... The moral seems to be that we’re all small, relatively speaking, which is perhaps why In Miniature is not only highly entertaining; it is also moving.
Yuko Tsushima Trans. by Geraldine Harcourt
RaveThe New York Review of Books... elegantly translated by Geraldine Harcourt ... While Tsushima is a master at creating character and atmosphere in all of her work, the compressed form of the short chapters puts a welcome pressure on this novel’s quotidian dramas, giving each incident a sharp-edged significance. By isolating these episodes, Tsushima elevates them to something like parables, though their meanings remain as opaque to the narrator as they do to the reader ... In this way they resemble, at times, the stories of Amy Hempel and Grace Paley, which are rich in details that capture the uncanniness of everyday life. Also like Paley and some of her recent inheritors such as Rivka Galchen in her nonfiction book Little Labors or Lydia Kiesling in her recent novel The Golden State, Tsushima chronicles the difficulties of motherhood, but with a mordant self-awareness that tends to emphasize the protagonist’s identity outside of her role as a mother. Tsushima has an unorthodox approach to narrative that can be alienating at times—perhaps this is part of the reason my proselytizing for her work has so far not yielded many converts. Whether writing in first or third person, she brings a clinical tone to her depiction of her characters’ choices and psychological states.
Sally Rooney
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHer prose, much like Salinger’s — her predecessor in philosophical post-adolescent neurosis — is sharp, dialogue-heavy and unadorned, written to be absorbed into the bloodstream quickly ... Part of the excitement of reading Rooney is seeing this old-school sensibility applied to what feel like acutely modern problems ... Rooney’s novels have the unusual power to do what realist fiction was designed to do: bring to light how our contemporaries think and act in private (which these days mostly means off the internet), and allow us to see ourselves reflected in their predicaments ... Normal People, even as it is almost physically impossible to stop reading once begun, feels in some ways like the slightly less impressive follow-up album by a beloved band ... It’s wonderful to hear the sound of Rooney’s voice on the page again, and the pleasures of her storytelling are even more immediate than in the first novel. But the book can also seem rushed and conventional in ways her debut did not ... the clarity of Rooney’s language gives way to clichés and not terribly convincing similes...as though the urgency of writing the story were so great that she was reluctant to pause to find the more perfect phrase.
Joshua Rivkin
PositiveHarpers...even in ideal conditions, Rivkin’s book was unlikely to be a definitive traditional biography. A poet and creative writing professor, Rivkin often filters his understanding of Twombly’s art and life through his own experience of grappling with it, focusing as much on the tantalizing ambiguities presented by the artist’s work as on the available facts. Given his relative lack of access to primary source material (and the gaurded interviews to which important figures such as Twombly’s son, Alessandro, did submit), another writer might have simply written a short, impressionistic appreciation or settled for a pithy portrait of the artist as an enigma sealed off by his posthumous handlers ... Instead, Rivkin combines these modes with that of a full-dress chronicle, recounting Twombly’s life with the biographical information he was able to dig up (most significantly from the archives of Twombly’s friend and sometime lover Robert Rauschenberg). Interspersed throughout, meanwhile, are close readings of the work, well-researched accounts of important exhibitions and milestones, the narrative of the author’s own engagement with the important sites of Twombly’s life, and his quixotic attempts to wrangle information from the living members of Twombly’s small circle. Though Rivkin is at times left to throw up his hands and admit that he won’t be getting to the bottom of this or that episode or painting, his book is nevertheless a valuable synthesis of what’s been said and written about Twombly, and the author’s lyrical analyses of Twombly’s paintings are both lovely and insightful ... Rivkin is often at his best navigating the complex territory of reputation formation, carefully tracking the reception of the MoMA show (aided by the rare profiles to which Twombly submitted in order to promote it) and the concurrent exhibition of Say Goodbye, Catullus[.]
Martin Riker
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"First, it seems only fair to mention that those looking for a book about the enduring legacy of James Boswell’s great subject should look elsewhere. A mention of that Samuel Johnson does appear toward the end of Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, Martin Riker’s darkly inventive debut novel, as though to reassure the reader that she isn’t insane to wonder if the titular character would turn out to have some connection to the 18th-century lexicographer. He doesn’t, but, given the novel’s precipitous swerves, it would not have been shocking if he had ... At times, especially in the depths of...nightmarish sequences, I admired Riker’s audacity more than I enjoyed following his logic to its gruesome endpoints. The book is ingenious, but unsparing in its vision of a country populated almost entirely by selfish people in thrall to their vices and, more often than not, well on their way to being killed in automobile accidents. Maybe what I’m saying is that the truth hurts.
Deborah Eisenberg
RaveThe New York Review of Books\"One of Eisenberg’s great innovations is in the real-time depiction of thought on the page, the banal revelations and asides that sustain us through otherwise intolerable days ... One marvels at the tonal tightrope Eisenberg walks, the adoption of the mock highfalutin internal monologue allowing for multiple levels of riffing ... There is, too, a sense of polyphony across the entirety of the collection. Though Eisenberg has said that she doesn’t write individual stories with the idea of their relationship to the others in mind, each of her collections has a cohesiveness that derives in part from her preoccupations, which echo across the pieces ... [Eisenberg] has few peers among contemporary story writers, and like those to whom she might be usefully compared (Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, the late Mavis Gallant), her work has continued to expand and mutate over the course of her career... [her techniques] have only grown more sophisticated over time, resulting in stories that feel both architectural and organic ... One gets the sense, when deep inside an Eisenberg story, that she is pushing past her own understanding of what she knows, trying to find and identify the most difficult questions possible.\
Justin Torres
PositiveBookforum... series of truncated, carefully carved vignettes ... The line between their games and real lives is frequently in question, and Torres captures this ambiguity from a child’s-eye perspective, depicting their world as wholly changeable and therefore terrifying ... The book’s only serious stylistic flaw is a tendency towards occasional \'lyrical\' overwriting and overstatement that makes certain themes more obvious than is necessary ... They’re animals; we get it. But this is a small annoyance.
Helen DeWitt
RaveThe Paris ReviewDeWitt’s ruthless honesty about the sausage making of literary production is no doubt autobiographical ... But the generosity and humor of these stories soften any sense of personal grievance into something much more interesting and complicated. The stories are devastatingly specific, and yet they serve as broad parables about the inevitability of being misunderstood, both as an artist and as a person ... DeWitt captures the particular mix of sincerity and jadedness of the publishing world and of those whose job it is to be enthusiastic about highish culture in the face of periodic reports of its demise ... It’s probably not good for most writers’ sanity to spend a lot of time analyzing the cycles of hype, money, and fate that can dictate a career. But DeWitt has already done the work. One little look or two won’t hurt.
Teju Cole
PositiveOpen Letters MonthlyFor Manhattan residents, current or past, the initial joy of reading Teju Cole’s Open City comes from pure, unadulterated recognition ...the approach that Cole will take throughout the book: a matter of fact, nearly fussy exactitude that attempts to fully situate the reader in Julius’s reality at all times ... What makes Cole’s book and style distinctive is the evenness with which he distributes his observations, the almost purely descriptive consistency with which the narrator treats street scenes, conversations, memories, and even emotions ... When he combines his observations about the city with a piece of historical or cultural insight, the effect is transformative, and Cole’s facilities as a prose writer are on full display.
John Boyne
MixedThe GuardianThe Absolutist is another wartime story, but this time it's the first world war. It depicts a relationship between two soldiers, Tristan Sadler and Will Bancroft, the latter of whom gravitates towards being the most extreme form of conscientious objector, refusing any role at all in the campaign: an absolutist ... With Williams, that sort of thing would have been followed by an amusing lurch into the demotic, but The Absolutist contains no humour whatsoever ... There are references to 'jokes and japes' among the men, but none is adduced. In fact, the whole book felt to me numb, generic ...will undoubtedly work for some readers but I felt it was better suited to a short book for children than a full-length novel for adults.
Tim Harford
PositiveThe Financial TimesIt did keep occurring to me that it’s easier to follow Harford’s prescriptions if you’re rich and famous, so that unpunctuality, or a no-show, might only add to your mystique rather than getting you sacked. For Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently, 'appointments are always a no-no,' which is easy to say with a line of people queueing outside your door. But I know Harford is fundamentally right, and I am proud to say that I have so far managed not to file this thoroughly enjoyable book on my shelf under 'H' in non-fiction.
