PositiveAssociated PressAnolik makes a convincing case for Babitz’s literary genius and sets up an interesting contrast between the two women— one loose, libidinous and joyfully debauched; the other shy, cerebral and tightly controlled ... But don’t expect the calm, organized, even-handed approach of a literary critic or biographer. In the breathless, gossipy style of the tabloids, and with frequent, winking asides to the “Reader,” Anolik dishes dirt on all the major and minor players in their haute bohemian circle, especially Didion and Dunne.
Anna Montague
PositiveAssociated PressMontague is such a gifted, sensitive and big-hearted writer that she can extend her imaginative sympathy even to Magda’s parents, whose strict Protestant religion taught them to revile this essential aspect of their daughter.
Susan Minot
MixedAssociated PressMinot writes in her characteristic style that is both dreamy and precise ... In real life, we often become impatient with friends in the grip of an obsession, erotic or otherwise. So, too, in fiction, where it’s crucial that readers at a minimum remain interested in the lives of the characters. Minot succeeds intermittently in making us care about Ivy. As for Ansel, it’s obvious from the start that he’s pretty much of a jerk.
Roddy Doyle
RaveAssociated PressMesmerizing, dialogue-driven ... Fabulous company ... Doyle has created a fictional character as memorable as Molly Bloom or the Wife of Bath.
Shalom Auslander
PositiveAssociated PressPoignant, profane, and scabrously funny.
Morgan Talty
RaveAssociated PressPoignant ... A gripping ending to a thoughtful, heartfelt exploration of what it means to be part of a family and a community. Is it a matter of blood, biology or simply the bonds of love?
James Shapiro
RaveAP NewsAn enthralling new book about this little-known chapter in American theater history.
Claire Messud
RaveAssociated PressThis latest work will be ambrosial, brimming with long passages that attempt to capture the evanescent sensations of life — touch, taste, sounds, smells, the ever-shifting register of light. Others may get lost in dense, descriptive passages that roll on and on ... Yet all in all, the book is a masterful achievement, a somber, joyous meditation on the consolations and disappointments of empire, nation, faith and family.
Lilly Dancyger
RaveAP NewsA vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays ... The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism.
Rachel Khong
PositiveAssociated PressVery serious ... Wrestles with issues of class, race and the genetic component of disease ... Khong...has offered up a veritable smorgasbord of ideas.
Jen Silverman
PositiveAP NewsSilverman constructs an intricate, clever plot that braids together two separate stories ... Though the novel is a little slow to get off the ground and might have benefited from being 50 pages shorter, eventually it gathers unstoppable force as it moves toward a dramatic denouement that offers no easy conclusions.
Rita Bullwinkel
RaveAssociated PressBullwinkel’s rhythmic, muscular prose matches the visceral, sometimes stomach-churning material ... Stylistically, she takes risks ... She gives agency to a group of girls who might not otherwise be seen and shows them to us in the full flush of youth, striving for recognition and glory.
Vinson Cunningham
MixedAssociated PressThe novel lacks the twisty plot and unforgettable characters of its namesake. However, Cunningham-as-David is an astute observer of the role that money plays in U.S. politics and the seductive allure of access to powerful and charismatic political leaders like Obama ... This book is sure to be catnip to those who believed in that hopey changey thing of long ago.
Kaveh Akbar
RaveAssociated Press\"A modern take on the age-old story of a young person’s moral and psychological education, Martyr! is told in chapters that move back and forth in time, narrated from the perspectives of the central characters. Some voices are more convincing than others ... But overall, it is an extraordinary work of art, one of the best sobriety stories since Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Anthony Veasna So in its rich evocation of immigrant lives. The glue that holds it together is Cyrus’s determination to write the novel we are reading: a contemporary exploration of how to make one’s life and death truly matter.\
Lauren Grodstein
RaveAssociated PressMesmerizing ... A deeply moving conclusion to an extraordinary work of historical fiction.
Benjamin Taylor
RaveAssociated Press\"[Taylor] has written a passionate love letter to her in the form of a brief but illuminating biography. Chasing Bright Medusas clocks in at just over 150 pages but it offers a fine introduction to one of the leading novelists of the American frontier ... By marshaling judicious quotes from her letters as well as her short stories and novels...Taylor makes a case for Cather’s enduring place in the American literary canon.\
Sigrid Nunez
PositiveAssociated Press\"...classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer’s block ... But as a writer and academic thoroughly steeped in literary theory, Nunez knows that a conventional marriage plot is not an option in contemporary fiction, not \'with the world on fire and its systems collapsing… with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope.\' Plus, someone like her likely would have thought that he was not just too troubled but also too young. And so, their unlikely friendship becomes just one more oddball incident in this elegiac essay-novel.\
Safiya Sinclair
PositiveAssociated PressSinclair writes of a chaotic yet magical childhood ... She channeled her father’s rage at the injustices of Babylon into her own shimmering tapestries of words.
James McBride
RaveAssociated PressTour de force ... [A] mesmerizing, moving, almost magical tale ... Utterly believable characters who speak pitch-perfect dialogue ... Gorgeous.
Colson Whitehead
MixedAssociated Press\"As he did in Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead mixes noir crime tropes and social history to present a slant, cynical view of New York as a thoroughly rotten Big Apple, only occasionally redeemed by individual acts of love, loyalty and kindness. Whenever Carney’s wife wants something that’s going to cost serious money, and Carney realizes he doesn’t have it, he says to himself, \'What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?\'
Whitehead’s sly sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of the city make Crook Manifesto an entertaining read, but as incident after incident piles up, you just want it to be over.\
Lorrie Moore
PositiveAssociated Press\"...a slender, surreal, beautifully written novel that explores the long afterlife of love, death and domestic devotion ... Moore is widely revered as a master of the short story...Her style is unmistakable, jam-packed with jokes, non sequiturs, alliteration and allusion ... Virtually every page has some similarly dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, but the relentlessness of Moore’s wordplay and erudition can also be wearying.\
Frieda Hughes
RaveAssociated Press\"On one level, it is an expert bit of nature writing, akin to a David Attenborough documentary. But on another level, it is a psychologically profound investigation of how George, her other animals, and the extensive gardens she cultivates on an acre of land in the Welsh countryside give her the \'stability and sense of permanence\' that she lacked as a child ... George is a wild animal so inevitably, he must depart. At first, Hughes is devastated. Then she turns her seemingly inexhaustible energy to rescuing other wildlife in distress, doing further restoration work on her part Georgian/part-Victorian hall, developing \'the garden of my wildest dreams,\' constructing an aviary, and writing and illustrating this captivating book.\
Jolene McIlwain
RaveAssociated PressA stunning new collection of short fiction ... The first-person-plural of the story is only one of the thrilling narrative devices that McIlwain uses to tell her linked stories ... McIlwain brings to life a luminous world of plants and animals that even the extraction industries, sleazy bettors and smooth-talking city hunters \"with slick cars and six-figure salaries\" cannot destroy
Brandon Taylor
RaveAssociated PressAt first, the story seems like a sendup of campus cancel culture until Seamus meets Bert, a sinister, down-on-his-luck townie ... A worthy addition to the genre [of campus novels], not because anything much happens but rather because Taylor is indeed a beautiful writer. His tautly constructed sentences are as concrete and vivid as the poems that the hapless Seamus adores.
Alexandra Auder
RaveAssociated PressIt takes guts and a sense of humor to kick off your debut memoir with an insult from Andy Warhol ... Captivating ... In the acknowledgments, Auder, an actor and yoga instructor, says she has been writing versions of this story for over 25 years. You can tell. Her childhood memories sparkle.
Nicole Chung
PositiveAssociated PressA Living Remedy is most powerful when Chung frames the story of her parents’ deaths as an unnecessary tragedy brought on by the broken health care system in this country.
Mona Simpson
RaveThe Washington PostA minimalist masterpiece ... Simpson excavates the multiple meanings of the word \'commitment,\' seemingly daring us to consider whether the state-run institutions of the past were in some ways more humane than the community-based treatment that was meant to succeed them ... She captures time and place with uncanny precision and the compression of language characteristic of a poet ... Commitment makes the case in a quiet but insistent voice that our lives do matter, even if other people think they are broken.
Rebecca Makkai
PositiveAssociated PressA sleekly plotted literary murder mystery ... Makkai, a lyrical writer...has gone all-in...with intricate plot twists (the novel feels about 100 pages too long) and a major red herring. But most of the characters are straight out of central casting ... With its ripped-from-the-headlines flavor, Makkai has written a complicated whodunit fueled by feminist rage as Bodie relentlessly interrogates her past and recalls the countless murders of girls and women whose stories have been all but lost in our collective memory.
Martin Riker
RaveAssociated PressA quirky second novel of breathtaking genius ... Bizarre but charming.
Janet Malcolm
PositiveAssociated PressRather wondrous, revealing fascinating and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life ... Some of the sketches feel frustratingly inconclusive. Nevertheless, simply by trying to describe the photos accurately and capture the complicated cloud of feelings they evoke, Malcolm offers up a vivid portrait of Malcolm, almost in spite of herself.
Kevin Wilson
PositiveAssociated PressAn earnest exploration of adolescence and the power of art to change lives ... Wilson...has created in Frankie and Zeke — two quirky, appealing characters who can barely contain their own combustible blend of teenage omnipotence and despair ... The novel wobbles a little when Wilson is tasked with writing grown-up Frankie, who acts and sounds a lot like her junk food-loving younger self, but, overall, he has written a seductive, highly imaginative story that testifies to the transformative power of art.
George Saunders
RaveAssociated PressGeorge Saunders is back with a new collection of short stories that feature his usual dystopian worlds and heartland characters whose lives and language have been fractured by social and economic pressures they barely understand ... Saunders’ outrage runs deep, and at least a couple of them...can be read as parables of our current political situation.
Ian McEwan
RaveUSA TodayWhat distinguishes the book from an ordinary coming-of-age story is the monstrous crime that the boy was a victim of at 14, a violation of his body and spirit that distorts, disfigures and discolors the rest of his life. Or does it? The tricky thing about Lessons, just one of the many qualities that makes it such a beguiling and irresistible read, is that Roland Baines, the fictional character at its center – who shares a lot of history with the author – can’t quite decide ... In writing Roland’s life story, McEwan, an unparalleled master of social realism, performs a remarkable trick: He manages to create an ineffable sense of mystery out of a rather ordinary human life. You keep turning the pages, wondering how things are going to turn out for Roland ... How does McEwan pull it off? Through the patient accretion of closely observed detail and one beautiful, shimmering sentence after another ... McEwan weaves into the text his perceptive, nuanced thoughts about these world-changing events without ever seeming ponderous or pedantic, bringing them to life with the same understated elegance and good humor that he musters for chocolate bars and, years later, for his own son’s rocket-shaped, rainbow-colored lollipop. All of it is simply part of the fabric of his characters’ ordinary and extraordinary, utterly believable lives.
A. M. Homes
PositiveAssociated PressA strange, scary, often very funny mashup of political thriller and family melodrama, although at nearly 400 pages, it drags a little at the end ... Homes, a fluid writer and brilliant thinker utterly besotted with American politics and history, deftly weaves actual historical facts and personalities into the fictional fabric of the novel. Unfortunately, the political story overshadows the personal one, and many of the characters, including Meghan and Charlotte, never truly come to life on the page.
Tom Perrotta
RaveThe Associated Press... darkly comic ... Perrotta has nearly all the plot points in place to drive the novel to its shattering conclusion ... brilliant, biting satire. Perrotta never belabors a point or uses more words than absolutely necessary even as he takes on society’s most intractable problems, including racism, gun violence and toxic masculinity. Indeed, the novel is so lean and taut it almost reads like a screenplay, leading one to wonder whether Witherspoon would ever reprise her role as the inimitable Tracy Flick.
Elif Batuman
PositiveAssociated PressCharming, mordantly funny ... It all makes for an eventful year, albeit one recounted in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness style that threatens at times to sap the book of its narrative power.
Heather Havrilesky
RaveThe Associated PressHave I got a book for you! Heather Havrilesky’s new memoir, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, is a wise, witty, profane, even profound, meditation on her 15-year marriage ... Sometimes in this latest book her writing bogs down or turns purple when she tries to link one chapter to the next to propel the story forward. She needn’t have worried. Her voice is so engaging, and her comic timing so impeccable, that she turns the \'divine tedium\' of her marriage into a rollicking adventure for her readers, too.
Tessa Hadley
RaveThe Associated Press... brilliant, sensual, seductively plotted ... Moving forward and backward in time from that fateful night, Hadley, who has written seven previous novels and three short story collections, has devised an intricate plot that unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a Greek tragedy. At the same time, it manages not to take itself too seriously in large part due to the uncanny good humor and common sense of its very English main characters ... Hadley has written an extraordinary story about love and transformation with a woman in early middle age at its center who is willing to sacrifice virtually everything to achieve what Hillary Clinton memorably described in her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley as \'more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living\' ... This is a novel that will stay with you for a long time.
Kathryn Schulz
PositiveThe Associated PressLost & Found is a straightforward, elegantly written tribute to her father, Isaac Schulz ... The second half of the book is a passionate paean to her New Yorker colleague Casey Cep, whom she met and fell madly in love with 18 months before her beloved father died ... [William] James is one of many writers, thinkers and poets, including Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman, whose words amplify Schulz’s own often dazzling reflections on loss, discovery and the continuity of life. Toward the end of the book, however, she resumes her contrarian stance, challenging Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina—\'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way\'—to ask why family stories of joy and contentment such as her own are necessarily dull.
Ann Patchett
RaveUSA TodayA writer’s life is by definition one of solitude, but Patchett, perhaps more than others, appears determined to wrest incident out of the random details of her busy life as an A-list writer and advocate for independent bookstores ... Patchett’s good intentions to help a stranger she took a liking to can’t be separated from her self-promoting instincts to make a story worth writing about. Which she did. And which, despite several cringe-worthy passages, it is a moving and memorable account of a brief but incandescent friendship.
Elizabeth Strout
PositiveThe Associated PressThe halting voice, the habit of interrupting and repeating herself, of being at a loss for words — these are peculiar qualities for someone whose celebrity was built on her presumed facility with words. Nevertheless, if you loved Lucy Barton, you’re sure to love this one. If you didn’t, not so much.
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveThe Associated Press... invigorating ... Solnit describes that Orwell essay as a \'triumph of meandering\' — and the same might be said about this book ... At times her digressions and literary flourishes are maddening, but she always returns to the startling brilliance and clarity of Orwell’s work. She ends with a sensitive reconsideration of 1984 that, if you haven’t done so already, will make you want to reread it, too.
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveHouston ChronicleA triumph of meandering\' ... It is not a biography in the traditional sense ... At times her digressions and literary flourishes are maddening, but she always returns to the startling brilliance and clarity of Orwell’s work. She ends with a sensitive reconsideration of 1984 that, if you haven’t done so already, will make you want to reread it, too.
Louise Erdrich
PositiveThe Associated PressErdrich does many things well in this book — it is filled with vivid characters, naturalistic dialogue, and startlingly beautiful descriptions of babies and the natural world ... But it often feels as if she has written three or four separate sagas — a bookseller’s memoir, a family drama centered on Tookie, Pollux and their adopted daughter; a convoluted, overly symbolic ghost story; and a diaristic account of the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown and aftermath of Floyd’s murder — and smushed them together in one novel ... still deserves consideration because notwithstanding its flaws, it is an inextricable part of this brilliant writer’s \'one long sentence\' and life’s work.
Lauren Groff
RaveThe Associated PressGroff brings to vivid life the appalling conditions of the period, such as burying the sick “crown to toe in warm manure” to cure them. Yet she also finds much to admire in the rituals and rhythms of a monastic life devoted to prayer — and not an insignificant amount of steamy sex ... [Groff] uses her abundant storytelling gifts to knock her readers to the ground.
Miriam Toews
RaveUSA TodayDespite the timeliness of Toews’ story – it resonates with #MeToo and calls to \'Smash the patriarchy\' – Fight Night is the farthest thing imaginable from a political diatribe. Toews, who began her writing career making radio documentaries, has created a vibrant, mostly female ensemble of eccentric, endearing voices, girls and women doing their best to stand up to the Willit Brauns of the world. Even the minor characters spring to life on the page ... With Swiv, Toews has perfectly captured the spongelike way kids absorb the language of adults while retaining their fundamental innocence ... Moving back and forth in time through her characters’ fragmentary memories, Toews has written a big-hearted, briskly paced family saga about the extraordinary love that binds three generations of free-spirited women together, and the tools and techniques that they’ve had to develop to survive.
Maggie Nelson
MixedUSA Today... more academic, less personal (than Nelson\'s last book) ... The last section, \'Riding the Blinds,\' is the most vivid and accessible, taking up the topic of climate change and how to deal with the terrifying prospect ... If you approach this book expecting another Argonauts, you’re likely to be confounded or disappointed. But if you approach it in a Nelson-esque spirit, with an open, curious mind, you may stumble at times over the dense language and academic theory, but you’ll also find lots to keep you engaged—provocative ideas, thinkers you’ve never heard of and a vast encyclopedia of cultural references, from the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron to the Allman Brothers’ \'Ramblin’ Man.\'
Anthony Veasna So
RaveThe Associated Press... dazzling ... In each of the nine stories, So lays out for inspection all the problems of his beloved community — from gambling and gossip to alcoholism and suicide — then embraces it all with love and compassion. It is a virtuosic performance.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe Associated Press... a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York ... the plot is twisty, with a large, at times bewildering cast of characters and a few storylines that border on the ridiculous. What ties it all is the utterly believable, complicated character of Carney ... Part of the suspense—and what sets this novel apart from so many others in the hard-boiled crime genre—comes from wondering whether Ray’s better angels will prevail ... countless beautifully written, erudite passages ... Whitehead takes us inside Ray’s head as he considers the relationship between fathers and sons, and the question of whether genetics is destiny.
Clare Sestanovich
PositiveThe Associated PressSestanovich is an elegant writer whose stories deftly capture the foods, clothes and customs of contemporary life ... Over the 11 stories, told in a variety of different voices, we meet a large, angsty, mostly privileged cast of characters who nonetheless seem to reflect a society that’s been knocked back on its heels.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe Associated Press... a brilliant but flawed allegory filled with ravishing descriptions of nature set in an unidentified land after an unspecified global financial collapse that has rendered travel almost impossible ... Cusk’s decision to model her book after the earlier work came with risks. On the one hand, it gave her ready-made plot points because of Luhan and Lawrence’s tempestuous relationship. On the other hand, it also gave her the baggage of a white woman’s beliefs about Native American culture in the 1920s ... Thus, M. speaks to Jeffers in an archaic voice, which Cusk renders in the text by using lots of distracting exclamation points. Also, M.’s second husband, Tony — based on Luhan’s fourth husband, a Taos Pueblo Indian named Tony — is a caricature of a Native wise man, in tune with the rhythms of nature ... Oddly enough, while Cusk is extraordinarily adept at depicting the shifting alliances among the secondary characters, the relationship at the center of the book — between M. and L. — never makes much sense. The fact that it doesn’t matter is a testament to Cusk’s astonishing skills as a storyteller and a writer.
Jenny Diski
RaveAssociated PressA lot of criticism doesn’t age well because it’s tied to ephemeral moments in our cultural life. Jenny Diski’s is likely to stand the test of time because it offers readers a bracing mix of razor-sharp analysis and wrenchingly honest autobiography ... The most gripping have to do with her own extraordinary life ... It’s as good an account as any for what she’s up to in these mordantly funny and brilliant essays.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
PanThe Associated PressMurakami Man is more like a walking encyclopedia who has a problem with women—mainly, that he can’t seem to get past their physical appearance ... In \'Carnaval,\' the one story where a woman has agency, we are told over and over how ugly she is ... At first, you are carried along in the slipstream of bizarre but plausible detail—a feat Murakami achieves through the use of banal, if not clichéd, language ... But if you’re not a fan of Murakami’s dreamy vibe and magical realism, if you think that life is confounding and interesting enough without needing to add fairy dust, then this probably isn’t the book for you. You might ask yourself, why a Shinagawa monkey and not a tiger or leopard? In Murakami World, the answer would seem to be, why not?
Alexander Nemerov
RaveAssociated Press[A] vibrant, sympathetic portrait ... It\'s good he finally undertook the project because Frankenthaler, one of the five women artists profiled in Mary Gabriel\'s highly regarded 2018 Ninth Street Women is a fascinating subject ... Nemerov is a thoughtful and judicious writer. He does a good job of sorting through various criticisms leveled at Frankenthaler over the years ... But brevity can be a virtue. In just over 200 pages, Nemerov takes us on a fast, exhilarating ride through the formative decade of her career, providing a lucid introduction to an artist we\'re likely to hear more about in the near future.
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
RaveThe Associated Press... the 14 stories in the book are mesmerizing, addictive. Each one is just a few pages, written in an oblique, poetic style that arrives at its conclusion through indirection ... Nors has an uncanny ability to capture the way the human mind works, with disparate memories and ideas running simultaneously along different tracks ... captivating stories.
Janice P. Nimura
PositiveUSA Today3/4 stars ... [A] fascinating dual biography that restores the two sisters to their rightful place in U.S. history and illuminates a period riven like our own with bitter disagreements over race, public health and medicine, and the role of women in society ... Nimura shoehorns a lot of history into this carefully researched, briskly paced narrative.
Joan Didion
PositiveThe Associated PressDidion’s critique seems more prescient than ever ... Others haven’t aged as well. Another piece from 1968, about Gamblers Anonymous, quotes the people at a meeting in ungrammatical English, speaking \'as if from some subverbal swamp.\' In A Trip to Xanadu, she sneers at tourists at the Hearst Castle in their \'slacks and straw hats and hair rollers\' ... But when she punches up instead of down, the results can be devastating ... The best of the bunch have to do with the subject Didion, 86, knows and cares about most — being a writer. In essays like Why I Write, whose title she borrowed from George Orwell, Telling Stories and Last Words, she makes it clear why she has been an essential voice in American arts and letters for more than half a century.
George Saunders
PositiveAssociated Press... billed as a master class in how to read and write, is effectively two books in one: seven classic Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol paired with funny, lively, profound essays by Saunders explaining their art, craft and enduring appeal ... the best possible guide to have on this invigorating tour through FictionLand because although he thinks like the MacArthur \'genius\' that he is, he talks like the guy sitting next to you at the bar.
Harvey Araton
PositiveAssociated Press,.. a deeply moving memoir about their extraordinary friendship, as well as a look back at an earlier era of sports journalism and fandom, when evening newspapers thrived and ordinary folk -- not just the 1 percenters -- could afford courtside seats.
Danielle Evans
RaveUSA Today... a new collection that is so smart and self-assured it’s certain to thrust her into the top tier of American short story writers. Evans’ stories feel particularly urgent at this moment of national reckoning over race. While they aren’t specifically about being Black any more than Alice Munro’s are about being white, many of the characters are shaped by the social, economic and cultural conditions unique to African American life ... she brings an anthropologist’s eye to the material conditions of her characters’ lives ... The hands-down masterpiece of the collection is the title novella ... Reading these stories is like [an] amusement park ride—afterward, you feel a sense of lightness and exhilaration.
Ayad Akhtar
RaveAssociated Press...brilliant ... At various points of the book, you may be tempted to go online to see if they’re really true. But as you get swept up in the sprawling story, you begin to realize that the Akhtar of the book is a blend of many voices and characters ... a searingly honest, brutally funny, sometimes painful-to-read account of being a Muslim in America before and after 9/11.
Eula Biss
RaveThe Associated Press... enthralling ... Her allusive blend of autobiography and criticism may remind some of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, a friend whose name pops up in the text alongside those of other artists and intellectuals who have influenced her work. And yet, line for line, her epigrammatic style perhaps most recalls that of Emily Dickinson in its radical compression of images and ideas into a few chiseled lines ... Biss wears her erudition lightly ... she’s really funny, with a barbed but understated wit ... Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she’s accomplished rests on the labor of others.
Natasha Trethewey
RaveUSA Today... an exquisitely written, elegiac memoir ... she combines the jewel-like concision of [poetry] with the propulsive drive of narrative nonfiction ... Memorial Drive is Trethewey’s gorgeous exploration of all the wounds that never heal: her mother’s, her own, and the wounds of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation.
Loretta Lynn
PositiveABC NewsLynn is, above all, a great storyteller, and this book is filled with warm and funny stories, as heartfelt and true as any of her songs. But underneath the folksy veneer is an unvarnished view of what it took for her and Cline to make it to the top. “I love seeing women be good friends to each other,” she says.
Benjamin Taylor
RaveThe Associated PressIn eight lyrical chapters Taylor moves back and forth in time, presenting a series of vignettes and remembered conversations that offer an unvarnished view of a brilliant, driven man who was controversial almost from the start of his career, largely for his portrayal of his fellow Jews and women ... while he recognizes Roth\'s flaws—chiefly, an unending sense of grievance and sometimes unseemly desire for revenge—he loves him anyway ... In the end, Roth emerges as a funny, philosophical, even tragic figure, raging toward the end against \'the stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away\'— a quote from The Human Stain that Taylor uses at the front of the book.
Adam Hochschild
RaveThe Associated PressHochschild is among the most readable of historians ... Given their wildly different backgrounds, perhaps it\'s remarkable the marriage lasted as long as it did. Hochschild has done a brilliant job of bringing it to life and in doing so, illuminating the complex social and economic history of a generation whose rabble-rousers and dreamers bequeathed us such reforms as Social Security, Medicare, child labor laws and the eight-hour day.
Ottessa Moshfegh
RaveAssociated PressDark doesn’t even begin to describe Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, Death in Her Hands. Try horrifying, macabre, fashionably self-referential, and exceptionally well-written ... As Vesta forces herself to imagine what might have happened, the writing has a tendency to become forced as well. Yet other passages are lovely, filled with lyrical descriptions of the natural world and dead-on observations of rural, small-town life ... If you’re a fan of gothic fiction, Death in Her Hands might just be your cup of tea. If not, come for the dread — and stay for the dog.
James Shapiro
PositiveThe Associated PressJames Shapiro makes the case that arguments about the Bard’s plays have long reflected our conflicted beliefs as a nation about hot-button issues like immigration, adultery, homosexuality and interracial love ... Shapiro, who serves as a consultant for the Public Theater, which stages the free Shakespeare in the Park festival every summer, is uniquely qualified to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at what happened [when Trump supporters disrupted the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in New York City\'s Central Park]. It’s a fascinating story—one of many in this entertaining and accessible book—that underscores Shapiro’s key point: Shakespeare never goes out of style.
Elizabeth Tallent
PositiveThe Associated Press... a harrowing story of overcoming perfectionism, leavened by [Tallent] dry wit and precise, poetic use of language.
Martha Ackmann
RaveThe Philadelphia Inquirer...a short, highly readable telling of [Dickinson\'s] life and the extraordinary, pathbreaking body of work she left behind ... Ackmann aims to convey a sense of the poet’s rich interior life and her evolution as an artist by dramatizing 10 formative moments of her life on the day each occurred. Remarkably, she pulls it off ... Readers may quibble with some of her choices ... But by the end, you’ll be a believer, in part because of Ackmann’s grasp of her subject — both the mountains of scholarship on Dickinson as well as the poet’s historical and cultural milieu — and Ackmann’s own formidable gifts as a storyteller.
Martha Ackmann
RaveThe Associated Press... a short, highly readable telling ... Ackmann aims to convey a sense of the poet’s rich interior life and her evolution as an artist by dramatizing 10 formative moments of her life on the day each occurred. Remarkably, she pulls it off. Readers may quibble with some of her choices—beginning each day’s account with a detailed weather report, for instance, or her premise that on each of the days selected, the poet was different at 10 p.m. that night than she was at 10 a.m. in the morning. But by the end, you’ll be a believer, in part because of Ackmann’s grasp of her subject—both the mountains of scholarship on Dickinson as well as the poet’s historical and cultural milieu—and Ackmann’s own formidable gifts as a storyteller.
Eric Foner
PositiveThe Associated PressFoner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor emeritus at Columbia University, has written many books about the Civil War, Reconstruction and slavery, but this one seems particularly attuned to the current political moment ... with this book, we have a compact, cogently argued and only occasionally dense history lesson. The last chapter summarizing key Supreme Court decisions that significantly undermined the amendments can be tough sledding, but well worth the effort.
Cathleen Schine
RaveThe Associated PressCathleen Schine\'s captivating new novel, The Grammarians, centers on a pair of identical twins named Daphne and Laurel, after the Greek myth of transformation, and their obsessive love of language. It\'s also about their family, and what happens to them as they grow older and some die. In short, it\'s about everything and nothing, written with the tender precision and clarity of a painting by Vermeer, had that 17th-century Dutchman portrayed scenes of middle-class Jewish life in mid- to late 20th-century New York ... Schine...knows a thing or two about words herself. She moves the plot forward from decade to decade, evoking entire neighborhoods, social and economic strata, and fads and fashions, with just a few strokes. The point of view shifts seamlessly...And even though Schine herself is not a twin, she writes convincingly about twinship ...[a] wry and elegant novel.
Jacqueline Woodson
RaveThe Associated Press... dazzling ... Woodson\'s inimitable style — jazzy, melodious, allusive, at times bordering on poetry or music ... Miraculously, Woodson manages to use this one particular Brooklyn family as a prism through which she explores profound generational differences in attitudes toward race, class, gender and sexuality.
Candace Bushnell
PositiveAssociated Press...it would be a mistake to dismiss this book as romantic fluff. Bushnell’s style may be arch and breezy, but many of the characters deal with disappointment, heartbreak, and perhaps just as lethally, resignation ... From Cosmos to rosé, her current beverage of choice, Bushnell may drink pink. But she knows how to write dark.
Gabriel García Márquez
PositiveAssociated PressWhat’s particularly striking is how timely and relevant many of the dispatches are today, even though the most recent was written 35 years ago ... As in any anthology, some of the pieces are better than others. His style can be baroque. He repeats himself ... But taken together, the writing here offers readers a splendid opportunity to sit for a few hours in the presence of a storyteller of spellbinding genius and humanity.
Janet Malcolm
RaveThe Associated Press\"It would be frightening to be interviewed by Janet Malcolm. But the same qualities that make her such a fearsome interlocutor also lend her essays an uncommon clarity ... Malcolm brings [the] same moral seriousness to every topic she addresses ... Yes, Malcolm can be unforgiving. But her calm, brilliant essays are the perfect tonic for our troubled times.\
Nathan Englander
PositiveAssociated Press\"... a marvelous comic fable ... Englander’s expansive imagination is such that he can convincingly write the part of a secular Jewish hipster and a born-again Jew - and do it with the Yiddish inflections of a Borscht Belt comedian ... [a] delight of a novel.\
Jonathan Franzen
PositiveAssociated Press\"[Franzen\'s] graceful, trenchant essays are a joy to read even when the subject is terrifying.\
Lucia Berlin
PositiveAssociated Press\"Dozens of passages offer up similarly vivid images of sky, weather, birds and flowers. [Berlin] does humans well, too, with a sharp eye for social, economic and regional differences ... Some of the 22 stories here are wonderful; others nothing more than a collage of shimmering images. All feature her distinctive voice, which operates in the space between free verse and prose.\
Gary Shteyngart
RaveThe Associated Press\"Lake Success is a big-hearted book about many things. It\'s a brilliant satire of hedge fund managers, their trophy wives and gaudy apartments; a heart-rending but ultimately hopeful account of raising a child on the spectrum; and a raucous celebration of racial, ethnic and gender identity in America today. It also explores the ways large and small that Trump has changed the country, rupturing relationships and forcing people to take sides.\
Donald Hall
RaveThe Associated PressA few years ago, Donald Hall wrote a book called Essays After Eighty ... His follow-up collection...comes just weeks after his death at 89 and roughly three months shy of his 90th birthday. And it\'s a beauty, brimming with stories, confessions and faded snapshots in time in which he muses about life, settles a few scores and brags a little about his accomplishments ... Fellow writers will enjoy his observations about writing, including more than a dozen short profiles of poets he’s known and admired—or not ... It’s odd that a book whose subject is loss could be so uplifting. And yet it is. Hall may be telling us what it’s like to fall apart, but he does it so calmly, and with such wit and exactitude, that you can’t help but shake your head in wonder.
Keith Gessen
RaveThe Associated Press\"[This] hilarious, heartbreaking second novel, A Terrible Country, may be one of the best books you’ll read this year ... One of the pleasures of the novel is listening to Andrei’s hyper-intelligent, wry and ironic voice. At times he can be petty and arrogant, self-righteous and ingratiating, not to mention slightly clueless about women ... The other unforgettable character is Andrei’s grandmother, an indomitable force of nature. Gessen’s portrait of her is tender, and readers will be hard-pressed to find a more nuanced and poignant depiction of what it means to lose your memory ... Gessen’s genius is in showing us how and why Russia is and isn’t a terrible country. And how, in its ruthless devotion to market capitalism, the former socialist state bears a striking resemblance to our own.\
Julia Van Haaften
PositiveThe Associated PressJulia Van Haaften...attempts to grapple with Abbott’s life and legacy in a comprehensive new biography that is absorbing and exhausting ... Van Haaften marshaled a tremendous amount of research to produce this 487-page volume, and you sometimes feel she didn’t want to leave a single moment of Abbott’s long life — she died in 1991 — unaccounted for. Even so, Abbott’s integrity and sense of honor, her restless and fearless nature, and her absolute devotion to telling the truth of her experience, come through loud and clear.
Lionel Shriver
MixedThe Associated Press\"Shriver is a brilliant satirist and virtuosic writer. But too many of these stories read like fables designed to illustrate a point. Too many characters are empty vessels, engineered to deliver sneering diatribes on modern life. Still, even if Property isn’t your dream house, it’s a diverting enough place to spend an afternoon or two.\
Shobha Rao
MixedUSA Today\"The plot unfolds briskly, alternating between the girls’ points of view. But the story is told in an operatic key that sacrifices plausibility. The bad characters are monstrous. The girls are angelic. The misogyny is unrelenting ... Once Rao learns to dial down the melodrama, she’ll be a formidable writer.\
Ian Buruma
PositiveThe Associated PressBuruma, who went on to have a brilliant career as a journalist, succeeding Robert Silvers last year as editor of The New York Review of Books, where he was a longtime contributor, is an unusually lucid writer ... While the book occasionally gets bogged down in excruciating detail about movies only the most ardent cinephile would care about, Buruma paints a vivid portrait of his often mind-boggling encounters with the motley collection of artists, expats and eccentrics he befriended over his six years in Tokyo. And his honesty is disarming.
Matthew Weiner
PositiveThe Associated PressAt 134 pages, Matthew Weiner's Heather, The Totality is best consumed in one bite like those exquisite pastries that line the cases of the French bakery/cafes on Manhattan's Upper East Side ... Weiner writes with maximum economy. The book practically reads like a screenplay, down to its eccentric capitalization. Characters are sketched in quickly, with just the right amount of detail to delineate a type ... Beyond its chilling portrait of America's social and economic divide, the novel raises a number of thorny questions: whether a 'good' man could be a killer. Whether a 'bad' man might be transfigured. How everyone, rich and poor alike, is complicit in their fate and trapped in their delusions. And how no one ever gets off scot-free.
Don DeLillo
PositiveThe Associated PressAlthough the plot of Zero K doesn't always hang together, DeLillo has written a profound and deeply moral book. His outrage at the mess we've made of the planet comes through loud and clear.
Diana Athill
PositiveThe Seattle TimesIn this collection of astute and sparkling essays, Athill tries to identify 'the things that matter' after living to almost 100...One of the most powerful essays recounts a pregnancy in her 40s, a brush with death that left her profoundly grateful to be alive.
