RaveSan Francisco Chronicle\"Charles Yu was a story editor for Westworld, and his bracingly metafictive second novel, Interior Chinatown, takes the theme of social roles beautifully sideways. The novel skewers pop-culture stereotypes of Asian Americans and contends, memorably, with assimilation ... Arranged in acts and told in the second person in the form of a screenplay, Interior Chinatown is bold, even groundbreaking, in its form. It’s full of clever wordplay and in-jokes about the Chinese American experience ... Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation that shouldn’t be missed by intellectually adventurous readers.\
Roxane Gay
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleWhat binds Roxane Gay’s 21 short stories in Difficult Women is that they are told with direct, plainspoken intimacy — the same voice that makes her personal essays so compulsively readable. She takes a reasonable tone to convey erotic, graphic and wry observations about the ways people try to love each other. Although her stories play with form, diving into realism, magic realism, speculative, noir and experimental fiction, unimpeachable narration leaves a reader believing ... Gay treats the power dynamics of gender, economics and race with a clear-eyed sobriety regardless of whether everything else in the world of the story is tinged with magic ... An inclination to combine fairy tales with social critique is one that the author has followed since her small-press debut story collection Ayiti. Like Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? or Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is fiction pressed through a sieve, leaving only the canniest truths behind. The addictive, moving and risk-taking stories of Difficult Women provide a release valve for our collective dark anxieties and fantasies.
Karan Mahajan
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksViewed as a whole, The Association of Small Bombs is a thing of loveliness — its structure and concept are a marvel, and the close-up study of Vikas’s grief is quite moving. However, the artful language in an overly plotted larger story emphasizes the grotesque aspects of humanity, tugging the reader between twin poles of delight and disgust without as much exploration of what lies between.
Idra Novey
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle“Ways to Disappear gallops forward, gracefully bending genres of mystery, romance and noir, while considering philosophical ideas and telling a fun, entertaining story besides. Novey uses a light, sensitive touch and a giddy sense of play to explore weighty concepts. Witty dictionary entries, news clippings and the plots of Yagoda’s stories punctuate the narrative, and two crucial plot points are rendered as poetry.
