About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Meghan O'Gieblyn
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Instead of a cri de cœur, O’Gieblyn gathers, analyzes, and disseminates a broad swath of theological, intellectual, and technological history to offer some sense of the intellectual condition in which we find ourselves today...The strength of O’Gieblyn’s book rests on her ability to distill the arguments of a number of great thinkers on questions surrounding this technology, and she traces her ability to plumb these depths and emerge with something coherent to her time as a Christian in Bible school, when she learned to debate for hours ideas such as predestination and covenant theology ... While O’Gieblyn’s book strikes me as compellingly broad and rigorous, it’s impossible for me to read it and not ponder more imaginatively what digital heaven might be like ... offers a captivating portrait of how digital technology has fundamentally transformed both intellectual and religious thinking.
Kevin Barry
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books With this new collection, the author seems especially keen on bridging the gap between lyrical and narrative concerns—in other words, creating something beautiful while also making sure the reader cares ... True, Barry’s tales are often romantic from a male heterosexual point of view, and most of them eventually break from the familiar tropes associated with the form [of romance] ... Barry’s knack for evocative prose is his best tool for carving out romance where little ostensibly exists ... If what Barry writes in That Old Country Music is romance, it’s romance of the most fraught and resonant kind. A blade going in has never felt sweeter.
Asako Serizawa
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Serizawa renders with deftness the portent of the doctor’s chronic psychological unease as he attempts to take any angle on his wartime actions that might allow him to skirt his undoing ... With her collection, Serizawa has made a point to pull together the emotional pieces of these devastating regional and world events for anyone who, like Luna, might require clarity. It’s a noble undertaking, and one that feels necessary to remove some of the teeth from the horrors of that time for those who inherit it.
Emily Beyda
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books ... haunting ... Beyda seeks to give you the dirty underbelly of the L.A. facade—the obsessive mindset it takes to render the illusion of an easy life with stylized friends at fashionable places, wine drunk from fishbowl-sized glasses as the sun sets into a pristine—from this angle—ocean ... I kept wanting Rosanna to be an actress, someone whose skills extend beyond charisma and therefore merit at least some of the attention she gets. This absence of ability outside comeliness and conversation skills left a hole for me at Rosanna’s center, from which she might have shined. The hole in Max, however, feels all-too-real, precipitous, its dark gravity pulling the narrator toward it.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books From this single boy’s experience, Whitehead shows the racist methods of an entire society in their power to destroy hope ... The novel form allows him to render the individual struggles of these characters in ways that are more evocative ... It is impossible not to feel differently for the Dozier School students after reading The Nickel Boys, and this grants Whitehead’s novel a purpose beyond mere entertainment. The tale reemphasizes the heinous crimes committed against African Americans far too often in this country. Through a reimagining of the facts, Whitehead creates a deeper, more universal truth, which is the noblest of fiction’s many tricks ... Whitehead creates individual portraits that are all the more evocative for their singularity. His focus allows us to fill in the rest of the world with our imaginations. Any real expansion happens one soul at a time.
Heather Havrilesky
Positive Kenyon Review \"... Havrilesky is expert at associating the feelings derived from these elements and showing how they feed her—and our—quest for things that don’t fulfill. Her book offers a reminder of just how deep our denial goes, and it suggests that the common ways we receive our messages today preclude our best chances at seeing through it ... In this book, Havrilesky is, at heart, an aesthete and for her, the shining beacon of Art is where denial gets swept away.\
Oyinkan Braithwaite
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books \"... darkly compelling ... This is expert storytelling ... All this ratcheted, externalized tension and pathos makes it easy to imagine a film version of the novel, but to suggest that the story is merely an elaborate screenplay diminishes what Braithwaite has accomplished here. The prose is as deft, personal, and economic as it is evocative ... There’s a compelling intimacy to the writer’s style, a sense that Korede is taking you into her confidence, almost whispering her confessions into your ear ... [Braithwaite] combines the comparatively lighter tropes of Jane Austen with a dark tale of murder, familial complication, and moral compromise, and thereby redefines both tropes for a new generation.\
Merve Emre
Rave The Kenyon Review Emre’s book expands on other twentieth-century psychology and personality theories, especially those focused on what might be described as the psychology of middle class white males. This description makes clear some of the limits of MBTI.
Julie Schumacher
Positive The Kenyon Review \"Schumacher also uses the more patient form of the novel to offer in-depth renderings of characters. This grants them the time needed to become more likable and emotionally resonant ... Romance, eroticism, books with actual pages—it’s like 1974 all over again. With the more nuanced path the novel form allows, Schumacher offers windows into the hearts of her characters, and we’re granted enough space to entertain empathy for them ... Medium aside, some words are more beautiful, more true—just plain better—than others, and Schumacher reveals her verbal alacrity through the dispatching of tropes in ways that convey the specific and universal simultaneously ... Thankfully, we still have novels like The Shakespeare Requirement to remind us that there’s this thing called excellence, and sometimes people actually attain it.\
Rob Roberge
Rave The Rumpus After a half century’s glorification of, shall we say, creative mindsets, it seems the least we can ask of a work loosely dubbed an 'addiction memoir' is that no one reading it will want to switch places with the author. Liar succeeds in many ways, but especially in this one.