‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Emmanuel Carrère, trans. by John Lambert

Rave The Washington Post Moving and masterful ... Magnificent ... I wept many times reading V13, for wildly different reasons. Sometimes I was touched ... Gutting ... Carrère commits everything to the page, omitting nothing, however unbearable.

Lili Anolik

Rave The Washington Post Sparkling ... Those in the market for a detached and measured work of journalism might not fully appreciate this delightful and uncategorizable book, though it does contain a great deal of careful reporting. It is both enormously informative and openly prurient, deliciously greedy for the details of Babitz’s and Didion’s private lives. At times, it is even gossipy ... One of my favorite books of the year, and Babitz, an avid champion of gossip, would no doubt have approved of its tenor.

Mark Haber

Rave The Washington Post \"He favors the lavishly expansive rhythms of continental masters like Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. His sentences unspool for pages, twirling off into an elaborate filigree of clauses and asides. There are few, if any, paragraph breaks. The effect is at once manic and hypnotic. It is not difficult to imagine Haber’s novels narrated by Werner Herzog, who pronounces each word with heavy (and often unintentionally comic) world-weariness. Happily, Haber is funny on purpose ... Lesser Ruins, is the most tragic and exquisite of the lot. It mounts decisive proof that Haber is one of the most rigorous and serious — and anachronistic — novelists working today ... Haber’s novel is at once a remedy for and an instance of its narrator’s true obsession: not Montaigne, but distraction itself. The length and intricacy of its sentences force the reader to concentrate, but what we are compelled to concentrate on is nothing but a tapestry of digressions ... What emerges in the end is an ode to distraction, an entire book composed of distractions that are, paradoxically, absorbing ... It is a glorious distraction, and there is no higher compliment.\

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mixed The Washington Post Framed as a letter to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, and it is not a monograph about Palestine but a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as a kind of travelogue ... This is a book that asks to be evaluated as a piece of writing, and I will pay it the homage of holding it to the standard it sets for itself. In its guise as an aesthetic effort, it is not entirely successful ... It does not unearth new information, or paint much of a portrait of the places Coates visits. It is an aesthetic treatise and a compilation of personal reflections ... Frustratingly abstract, full of personal revelations and grand pronouncements without much in the way of concrete (or especially stylish) observation.

Rebecca L. Davis

Rave The Washington Post Important, ambitious, and entertaining ... Insightful ... In chapters that center on memorable characters, some of them famous and some of them simply private civilians, Davis digs up some truly novelistic — and often truly touching — details about queer life.

Edwidge Danticat

Positive The Washington Post Like the informal but spirited orators she grew up idolizing, Danticat cultivates a style that is diverting and digressive. Her essays are not linear artifacts but webs that spin around ideas or turns of phrase ... Although Danticat’s reflections sometimes give way to clichés at the level of sentences...their poly-vocal profusion is fresh and gripping.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Mixed The Washington Post Godfrey-Smith...is possessed of a prodigious curiosity. His capacity for fascination is both a blessing and a minor curse ... It is easy to get lost in Godfrey-Smith’s thickets of digressions ... Godfrey-Smith makes compelling points about the horrors of factory farming and the urgency of habitat destruction, but these topics are too weighty and complex to squeeze neatly into some 60-odd pages ... Still, Living on Earth is a work of moral philosophy in more ways than one. It is best read, I think, as an ethical exemplar ... Godfrey-Smith is sober, precise and impressively scientifically informed, but even such a no-nonsense thinker cannot resist metaphors of personification when confronted with the riches of the natural world.

Elias Canetti, trans. Peter Filkins

Rave The Washington Post Captivating ... The Book Against Death advances a stray argument every so often, but for the most part it is one long shriek ... If death involves fixity, then life demands movement. The Book Against Death refuses finality by remaining forever on the cusp of transformation.

Charlotte Shane

Rave The Washington Post Shane’s memoir begins with recollections of her adolescence, when she was an avid student of desire, and it ends with a moving account of her marriage to a man she loves. In less than 200 pages, the book manages to be part autobiography, part anthropological investigation and part feminist tract ... A strange and poignant love story.

Elle Reeve

Positive The Washington Post A book of questions, not answers ... Reeve may not have answers, but she does have unbelievable access ... A feat of fearless reporting, and its ambiguities and tensions are not necessarily weaknesses. Instead, they point to essential contradictions at the heart of what was once the alt-right and is now Trump’s Republican Party.

Ray Kurzweil

Pan The Washington Post [Kurzweil\'s] impressive grasp of computing is on display once again in his disjointed and occasionally delusional new book ... Far from the sort of disciplined treatise we might expect from a veteran programmer, this book is a welter of free associations and shameless simplifications ... Unfortunately, Kurzweil rarely restricts himself to claims about the mechanics and history of AI. Instead, he ventures into foreign territory, with unfortunate results.

Anthony Fauci

Positive The Washington Post Eventful ... The relative dearth of intimate writing in this memoir feels apt: For decades, Fauci subordinated his own concerns to the two roles he assumed in the ’80s as a dispassionate scientist and a public servant accountable to the people ... Fauci is not temperamentally inclined toward radicalism — he is mild and measured for much of the book, going so far as to extend perhaps too much courtesy to the likes of Bush and Dick Cheney — but there are moments when competence and conscientiousness are revolutionary.

John Ganz

Rave The Washington Post Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays in his first book. When the Clock Broke is a work of narrative history that is comparatively light on confrontation and polemic ... Opponents of the far right have an unfortunate tendency to caricature it as a coalition of hapless fools, incapable of mustering ideas and therefore beneath serious consideration. Ganz knows better than to take this condescending and intellectually dishonest approach. Instead, he tackles reactionary belligerence with appropriate rigor.

Jill Ciment

Rave The Washington Post Probing ... At pains to remind us that memoirs can easily lapse into mythology ... Ours is evidently an age of reappraisals, but this latest reappraisal itself invites reappraisal, for it is eager to undermine its own authority ... Ciment asks whether her marriage was all \'fruit from the poisonous tree.\' It is a daring question, and she is unsentimental and unflinching enough to answer it convincingly, which is to say, complexly. She shrinks from nothing in her accounting.

Elisa Gabbert

Rave The Washington Post Charming ... The 16 delightfully digressive pieces in this collection are all moods that involve books in one way or another. But they are not just about the content of books, although they are about that, too: They are primarily about the acts of reading and writing ... Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments ... Both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references.

Nellie Bowles

Pan The Washington Post Attempts at scene-setting — a feeble homage to Didion’s magnificently visceral vignettes — fall flat ... The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so. Its chapters are short, flitting and digressive ... Morning After the Revolution is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves ... She is not a liar or a peddler of outright misinformation, but she is fatally incurious about her ideological adversaries and their motivations. At no point does she exert any effort to understand the doctrines she is so quick to dismiss, and she turns a blind eye to examples of sane and effective progressivism, which are ample.

Samir Chopra

Positive The Washington Post Wise, if sometimes circumlocutory ... Chopra’s summaries can sometimes feel rushed. It is hard to do justice to thinkers as thorny and disparate as the vehemently anti-Christian iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche and the Christian existentialist Paul Tillich in a book of this modest size. Still, Anxiety is a useful introduction to the work of thinkers who confront, rather than recoil from, our most fruitfully unpleasant feeling.

Caroline Crampton

Mixed The Washington Post A Body Made of Glass is a product of impressively thorough research, but it is sometimes circuitous and digressive to the point of frenzy. It blends memoir and literary criticism with micro-histories of subjects of varying relevance ... Still, A Body Made of Glass is full of fascinating forays. If it is hard to read for its claims or conclusions, it can still be read for its many sobering observations about sickness.

Salman Rushdie

Pan The Washington Post \"The venerable Salman Rushdie is a vibrant and vigorous (if uneven) novelist, but his latest work of autobiography, though occasioned by great suffering, is meandering and frequently trite. And although Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder treats a dramatic attempt on Rushdie’s life, it is also surprisingly boring ... In one extended sequence about the mental state of his attacker—a fictionalized dialogue between the novelist and the would-be assassin—he makes good on this promise. But this exchange is isolated (and somewhat jarring) in a book that otherwise contains only a handful of well-rehearsed meditations on the plight of persecuted writers ... For the most part, the book is dryly documentary, an unembellished diary ... The best passages in Knife probe the emotional fallout of the attack—and double as considerations of brutality more broadly ... It is not that Rushdie has no larger points to make: It is only that these points are by now familiar and bear little relevance to the rest of his narrative. He is prone, for instance, to hectoring lectures on in the inanity of younger generations ... Unfortunately, perhaps even unjustly, the most acute agony does not always produce the most profound writing. Raw suffering must be reshaped, renovated into something more than itself. Rushdie’s memories as presented here are as unrefined and muddled as a casual conversation. Knife is not worthy of his best work or the pain that occasioned it, though his desire to memorialize his anguish is of course understandable.\

Stefanos Geroulanos

Rave The Washington Post Thorough and sensitive ... Not a history of prehistory, exactly; it is a history of how various accounts of prehistory have been put to political use ... It complicates the increasingly widespread narrative that paints pining for the past as an exclusively conservative pastime.

Anna Shechtman

Rave The Washington Post A book too mischievously multiform to classify. It is in part a history of the crossword puzzle ... The very genre of the crossword relies on the recognition that language is not merely an intellectual instrument but also a substance with material properties. Shechtman, a witty and crisp stylist, evidently relishes its sensuality. She is almost lovingly attuned to all its awkward oddities ... Shechtman is a constructor in the best sense of the word.

Henry Louis Gates

Positive The Washington Post Searching ... Although The Black Box is a work of history, many of the debates it chronicles persist to the present day ... This is a box that can and should never be closed.

Judith Butler

Mixed The Washington Post Not their best ... If only Butler had said less about the piddling quibbles of their small opponents and more about the soaring possibilities of gender itself.

Lauren Oyler

Pan The Washington Post \"Her essays contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality. She is beloved for her unrepentantly implacable persona, but a persona is always at risk of calcifying into a shtick ... The occasional judgments that can be found in this book-length apologia for judgment are predictable and facile. All of the fruit that Oyler picks is so low-hanging that she would do better to leave it rotting on the ground ... Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular ... No Judgment is full of lines with the cadence, but not the content, of zingers. \'I despise a happy ending\' sounds daring until you realize that it means Oyler despises Jane Austen and all of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is not a serious pronouncement: It is just an accessory, designed to present the person who wears it as a provocateur ... For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang ... Oyler is constantly retreating into sarcasm, interrupting herself to remind us of her wry distance from everything she says, squirming in the face of commitment or conviction. Any ugly sentence, jumbled argument or exhausted platitude can be passed off as a bit and thereby disavowed ... She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny ... This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.\

RuPaul

Mixed The Washington Post His most earnest foray into self-fashioning yet ... Strikes a very different and altogether less congenial tone. It, too, is an exercise in self-making, and it, too, ponders the construction of identity, but it does so by way of platitudes culled from self-help ... If the earlier RuPaul was more fun, this one is a better stylist ... And even when it is not lyrical, The House of Hidden Meanings is admirably readable, so long as it sticks to vignettes, particularly those that conjure up the heady days of disco ... Platitudes disappoint because RuPaul is capable of drive-by meditations that pack a punch ... What if I would rather luxuriate in the illusion, in those televised fantasies that are so much more vivid than reality?

Sloane Crosley

Rave The Washington Post If Crosley’s descriptions of love for Russell are often dazzling and unexpected, her meditations on grief are occasionally clichéd. But bromides are par for the course when it comes to bereavement, and this, too, is part of the indignity of loss ... Grief may follow a familiar path in every instance, but Russell himself was fiercely original, and Crosley paints a vivid and moving portrait of a singularity ... Not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life isnot a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is ... Crosley holds Russell in her heart with humor and humanity, and although she emphasizes that writing is not a consolation or an act of therapy, it is nonetheless a testament.

Amitav Ghosh

Rave The Washington Post Sweeping ... Ghosh’s impressive history of the opium industry is an attempt to acknowledge \'the historical agency of botanical matter\' ... Forceful, even thundering prose.

Leslie Jamison

Pan The Washington Post Jamison is unafraid to pillage every last corner of her personality ... A memoir and nothing else. It lacks the intrigue of journalism and the relief of critical digression ... The story...is elusive. The book is arranged into wispy fragments ... The inconsistency of the naming conventions is a minor irritation in a book full of major ones. Splinters is gruelingly and uninterruptedly autobiographical ... Despite its solipsistic streak, the book is often a delight to read. Jamison writes tactile prose, and there are luscious passages on almost every page ... The good sentences handily outnumber the bad ones, but even the good ones do not add up to much. All the little perfections of detail in Splinters are like dots in a pointillist painting that never resolves into a picture.

Sheila Heti

Pan The Washington Post The game that is Alphabetical Diaries has clear rules but no clear objective. The structure is strict, the substance almost uniformly enigmatic ... Never crystallizes into a narrative, but it does induce us to eavesdrop on ourselves ... It is certainly impressive and engrossing to watch Heti navigate the obstacles she has set for herself, the way it is impressive to watch athletes leap over hurdles or savants wrestle Rubik’s Cubes. But does the skill involved in an especially creative escape vindicate the construction of the labyrinth? ... The results are unsatisfying for the same reason that text manufactured by AI is ... We are humans, and we want to be addressed not by alphabetization but by one of our best living authors: by the sparkling Sheila Heti.

Adam Shatz

Rave The Washington Post Nimble and engrossing ... An examplary work ... At times as I read The Rebel’s Clinic, I yearned for a little more insight not into Fanon the brilliant doctor or Fanon the rousing revolutionary but Fanon the person ... Eloquent.

Jill Burke

Positive The Washington Post Burke, an art historian at the University of Edinburgh, is a veritable repository of arcane, entertaining information ... [A] diverting history.

Tim Alberta

Rave The Washington Post If Alberta is no longer surprised by the jingoism that has become rampant in the evangelical community, he is not in the least reconciled to it. Indeed, he is agonized, and throughout this book he proves himself to be an admirably searching and probing narrator, as well as a valiantly conscientious Christian. He submits even his recently deceased father to moral scrutiny ... Alberta is not just a thorough and responsible reporter but a vibrant writer, capable of rendering a farcical scene in vivid hues.

Dan Sinykin

Positive The Washington Post Many academics are clinical prose stylists, but Sinykin writes with verve and narrative flair as he documents the consolidation of the major publishing houses ... Still, sentimental and naive as I am, I cannot quite shake the conviction that literature is more than an emanation of economic circumstance. For all its fragility and susceptibility to material degradation, it continues to strike me as a member of that endangered and embattled species: art ... Happily, Sinykin sneaks in some of the censure that conglomerations so richly deserve ... Ultimately, however, I wonder if conglomeration explains quite as much about contemporary writing and reading as Sinykin sometimes seems to think. Books are material and economic objects, but they are also aesthetic ones.

Tracy K. Smith

Rave The Washington Post Smith...writes prose at once dazzling and exacting. On nearly every page of this book is a phrase or sentence to marvel over ... So luscious that it often reads less like a collection of essays than like a work of prose poetry. Its six long sections and brief coda are not neatly contained narratives or discrete arguments, but threads in one continuous web of reminiscence and observation ... Many of Smith’s flights of fancy are attempts to imagine all that the historical record conceals — to endow skeletal statistics with flesh and blood — and her lively lyricism is an antidote to the slick obfuscations of bureaucratic language ... Nothing could be less like institutional abstractions; nothing could be more lavishly particular.

Joanna Robinson

Positive The Washington Post Scrupulous ... What follows is the kind of underdog story that is common in MCU movies, which are full of plucky outsiders who eventually become unbeatable ... At times, MCU gives its subject too much artistic credit ... This is not to say that they are uncritical of Marvel, but they tend to find fault with the company, not the would-be art.

Athena Dixon

Mixed The Washington Post Doleful ... Most gripping, if most troubling, when it induces in its readers the kind of one-sided obsessions it describes and decries. But Dixon is better at evoking an atmosphere of desperate fixation than she is at analyzing loneliness, and when she stops writing about deaths and depravities and starts writing about her feelings, her prose lapses into cliché.

Werner Herzog, Trans. by Michael Hofmann

Rave The Washington Post The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility ... The book’s oddities will delight devotees of Herzog’s singular cinema, but readers unfamiliar with his tragicomic tirades and brooding philosophical meditations may find his digressions vexing ... I got the impression that Herzog has not only never had a normal experience but that he has never encountered a normal person ... Is any of this true? These marvelously magical remembrances may not be flatly accurate, but childhood is, most essentially, a land of terrors and enchantments, and a sober account of its charms would only serve to distort them.

Benjamin Labatut

Rave The Washington Post Virtuosic ... Most critics tasked with rendering Labatut recognizable liken him to the melancholic German writer W.G. Sebald, whose gently meandering novels contain long, dreamy meditations on destruction and decay ... A work of dark, eerie and singular beauty. It can also be difficult to read. The book is narrated by a cluttered polyphony of characters, among them both of von Neumann’s wives and a number of his teachers and colleagues. But there is a reason for this mad mumble of voices ... A dark tale.

Fredrik DeBoer

Pan The Washington Post How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement... eschews the rigors of social science, relying instead on the approachable yet deceptive consolations of anecdote ... DeBoer follows a long line of pundits in suggesting, without much justification, that elite campuses are reliable microcosms of wider societal trends ... Perhaps most important, it is impossible to assess whether DeBoer is carelessly generalizing when he offers up colorful examples of leftist hysteria ... Time and time again, DeBoer punts on the difficult questions, choosing instead to substantiate sweeping empirical claims by appealing to affect, anecdote and atmosphere.

Franklin Foer

Mixed The Washington Post Although the book is brimming with novelistic details that Foer collected as he interviewed insiders behind the scenes, there are no especially urgent revelations ... Sometimes, however, Foer’s digressions into minutiae can feel like distractions ... In the ensuing hundreds of pages, he rarely discusses the jostling that roils the public sphere.

Marisa Meltzer

Positive The Washington Post [An] astute dissection ... Glossy has been billed as an exposé, but it turns out there is not much about Glossier to expose ... Well worth reading not because it contains any especially juicy revelations, but because Meltzer is such a smart skeptic of Glossier’s myth and such a sharp analyst of the ways in which the brand is a barometer of broader trends.

Jennifer Banks

Mixed The Washington Post [Banks struggles] to break with the established scripts, even linguistically ... Unfortunately, Banks never clarifies which of these many aspects of birth is central, and Natality is unwieldy as a result ... Natality asks long neglected questions but shies away from volunteering satisfying answers.

Clare Carlisle

Mixed The Washington Post Does not tell us much about her philosophy of anything, much less her philosophy of love. The book’s broader claims are largely platitudes ... Luckily, Carlisle’s latest fares better as a work of partial biography than as a work of philosophy ... Eliot aficionados will learn little that they do not know already. That keenly private treasure remains safely behind the curtain after all.

Natalie Beach

Positive The Washington Post Sure, Beach’s debut is sometimes stiff and dutiful ... Yet a more self-effacing brand of charisma emerges over the course of the collection ... Despite its title, Adult Drama is a decidedly adolescent book — sometimes in an irksome way, but mostly in a touching way. Its subject, after all, is the searching tremulousness of youth.

Patrick J Deneen

Pan The Washington Post Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic. The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time ... The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of \'the many\' before making so many confident assertions about \'what most ordinary people instinctively seek\' ... Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities.

Laura Cumming

Rave The Washington Post Part homage to her father and part critical study of Dutch painting, Cumming’s genre-spanning book is first and foremost a biography. Its elegiac meanderings return time and time again to the figure of Carel Fabritius ... [A] tender reading ... Cumming’s gentle, meditative prose is itself an evocation of the hushed world of the art she loves. Her writing is soft and Sebaldian, with long, lulling sentences. And of course it contains a whole gallery of verbal images, in addition to pictures of paintings.

John Vaillant

Positive The Washington Post \"\'It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies … is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves,\' writes journalist John Vaillant in Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World. His book appeals for much the same reason — but the cataclysms for which it prepares us are not fictions ... It is impossible to keep reading, impossible to stop ... Fire Weather” mounts a systematic investigation into all the factors that conspired to wreak such havoc on Fort McMurray. A book about an isolated disaster thereby unfurls into a book about boreal forest ecosystems, the chemistry of combustion, the flammability of modern furniture, the history of environmental exploitation in Alberta, the climactic conditions that are making forest fires increasingly dangerous and ubiquitous, and much more — at times, too much more ... Fire Weather fails when it trades in familiar warnings, which are easily relegated to the dustbin of the mind. It succeeds when it concretizes the unimaginable in terms that seize readers by the throat.\

Susan Sontag, ed. David Rieff, intro. Merve Emre

Positive The Washington Post An indispensable new volume ... Her writing on women is crisp and cutting ... It is a delight to watch such an agile mind slicing through the flab of lazy thinking ... Whether Sontag’s defiant uncategorizability strikes you as subtlety or evasiveness depends on your stomach for uncertainty.

Josh Hawley

Pan The Washington Post He posits that masculinity is, at once, a biological endowment and a personal achievement ... Like a campaign speech, Manhood is an adventure in impressionistic and impassioned disorganization. Chapter breaks may as well be accidental; most passages could be reshuffled into any section without any loss of coherence ... Insofar as it is possible to impose an organizational principle onto Manhood, the book takes up four distinct projects, though not in any particular order. The first is halfhearted biblical exegesis. The second is wholehearted self-promotion ... His autobiographical forays are desperately folksy ... Hawley’s third fixation is liberalism, defined not as a political system but as an all-encompassing ethos that consists, primarily, of the fetishization of choice ... The final strand of Manhood is standard self-help fare, much of it inoffensive ... Ultimately, Manhood differs only cosmetically from the book that Hawley’s liberal straw man would write. The Epicurean liberals of his imagination are invested in self-gratification, and he is invested in self-improvement. Both are invested in the self.

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington

Positive The Washington Post A feat of diligent research and, better yet, blazing argument ... Each chapter of Without Children is vivid and informative enough to fascinate in its own right, but by the end its strands have braided into a broader thesis ... For an apologia for women without children, Heffington’s book is surprisingly silent when it comes to the question of agency ... Then again, her point is that the vast majority of women do not feel they have any choice.

Burkhard Bilger

Rave The Washington Post \"...an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery ... Complex questions of culpability aside, it is difficult enough to establish the basic facts of the case. Gönner is an ordinary person, not a major historical figure, and much of his life went undocumented. Still, Bilger manages to piece together an outline, albeit one riddled with gaps and doubts ... Fatherland is billed as a memoir, but it contains little in the way of self-indulgent soul-searching. Instead of brooding on memory and morality, Bilger reports on Gönner’s contradictions as impassively, methodically and evocatively as he does on high-altitude skydivers and mushroom hunters in the New Yorker. The results are reconstructions of scenes from Gönner’s life that read as fluidly as passages in a novel ... wears its meticulous research lightly. Its prose is not academic but brimming with vivid images.

Brian Dillon

Rave The Washington Post If these pictures appear to have little in common beyond Dillon’s predilection for them, their heterogeneity is in part his point. He is intrigued by the obstinate opacity of affinity, which is so misty as to defy definition ... Dillon’s forays into what he calls \'the mundane miracle of looking\' are both impenetrably personal and so rigorously attentive to the external world that the critic sometimes seems to dissolve into the art. He has an affinity, in effect, for affinities — attractions so pronounced that, far from sequestering us in our private passions, they briefly annihilate us.

Regan Penaluna

Pan The New York Times Book Review Penaluna sometimes seems to agree that there is no such thing as the female mind. She chafes at the suggestion that women are intrinsically caring and rejects the idea that they are naturally ill-suited to rational pursuits. It is suspicious, then, that the main point of connection among the four thinkers she has chosen to write about, or at least the one that she stresses, is simply that each is female ... Of course, How to Think Like a Woman is more than a resuscitation of early modern philosophers who have been unjustly excised from the canon because of their sex ... The weakest sections of the book follow Penaluna’s rocky path through graduate school at an unnamed institution ... If the personal reflections in How to Think Like a Woman are often mushy and maudlin, its portrait of philosophy’s misogyny is more firmly wrought ... These women have strikingly similar stories, but what, if anything, unites their thought? We learn a great deal about the oppression they faced, which was of course considerable, and very little about the content of their philosophies. What Penaluna does have to say about their actual commitments is often shallow and cursory ... In general, How to Think Like a Woman contains a lot of agonizing about philosophy but little philosophy itself ... Reduc[es] four rich philosophers to mere avatars of their demographic ... Not as a woman, but as a person, I think this is not how to think.

Franz Kafka, trans. by Ross Benjamin

Rave The New Yorker Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation... is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness ... As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a \'laboratory for Kafka’s literary production\' and thereby catch the author \'in the act of writing.\' He has succeeded.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Pan The Guardian (UK) Moshfegh’s latest effort reveals the limitations of an approach that trades less in human drama than in seething shocks, quick to titillate and quick to expire ... These characters enact a plot that sounds more exciting than it feels ... Lapvona is written in the flat, schematic tones of an allegory – but if it is a fable, it has neither moral nor message, a void on which Moshfegh apparently prides herself. Right before she kills off almost all of the book’s characters, she writes tauntingly, \'right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by. So find some reason here\' ... But why should the reader care about characters who care so little for each other, or for anything at all? ... Perhaps Lapvona could be read as a parody or at least a deflation of the breathless gothic mode – and indeed Moshfegh’s refusal of sentimentality, along with her many visceral descriptions of mutilations and other abominations, is one of her strongest suits ... it does not take long for the unmodulated peevishness of Moshfegh’s creations to become tiresome, if only because the stakes of their vexations are so low. The inhabitants of Lapvona are so uninvested in their own lives that even their deaths are inconsequential. They are not just unlikable but doggedly, one-dimensionally so. In Lapvona, life is stupid, people are stupid, love is stupid, embodiment is stupid and piety is stupid ... Being a sensible person, I agree that most things are stupid, but their stupidity is of interest only because there are at least a few things that ought to be exempt from otherwise universal contempt. Stupidity matters because it threatens those treasures that aren’t stupid, or at least the few things that we manage to care about despite their stupidity. Making a fetish of unlikability is more novel than making a fetish of affirmation, but ultimately, it represents no more than the same gimmick in reverse.

Lillian Fishman

Rave The Guardian (UK) ... extraordinary ... a work of ferocious moral and sensual intelligence and a masterly defence of sex for its own sake ... Fishman’s elegant novel ventures an alternative sexual ethic, one unconstrained by conventions but nonetheless fiercely attentive to what we owe one another ... In an age of resurgent puritanism, Acts of Service is a rare and much-needed sex masterpiece.

Cathy O'Neil

Mixed The New Yorker ... although it contains its fair share of pseudoscience-debunking, including an admirably lucid explanation of how diet programs massage statistics to artificially bolster their success rates, it is largely a work of social criticism ... Perhaps the most powerful shame machines of all are social-media companies, to which O’Neil devotes the middle (and best) section of the book... The Shame Machine contains no attempt to define shame, much less to distinguish it from neighboring sentiments, and the book’s conclusions can be muddled as a result. Few of O’Neil’s general pronouncements about the emotion of the hour advance beyond truisms ... Despite her book’s premise, there’s no reason to think that companies capitalize more on shame than on the other negative feelings on offer ... And, worse, O’Neil ricochets between characterizing shame as a social state and as a feeling.

Rebecca Mead

Pan New York Times Book Review A book is justified by its quality, not its subject. Home/Land...does not falter by virtue of belonging to the reviled species of memoir; rather, it flails because it is insufficiently interested in the external world. Despite its many arresting images and diverting anecdotes, it reads like a very smart person’s very well-written diary ... Home/Land has no...through-line, and it can be maddeningly discursive as a result ... Nominally, Home/Land chronicles her move from New York to London, but in reality, it is as hard to say where the book is set as it is to say what, exactly, it is about. The text ricochets from reporting to recollection and from past to present ... Though Home/Land advertises its interest in its author’s alienation from the country of her birth, it is so densely peppered with interludes that it seems to be composed almost entirely of asides ... In fairness, Mead’s prose is so dexterous that it can be difficult to summon the will to fault her. She has an exacting eye and a gift for trenchant phrasing ... But for all of her careful attention to the subjects she sketches with such exquisite detail, Mead is often ham-handedly insensitive to political context ... If Home/Land is often pleasant to read, it is because Mead’s writing is locally absorbing. And if we sometimes have the impression that the book is outward-looking, it is because so many of Mead’s digressions amount to piquant micro-articles about the history of London or New York. In the end, however, the memoir’s connective tissue is ineluctably personal: The random assortment of places and persons it treats can be unified only in terms of their meaning for Mead ... Reading a book driven by the sort of personal fortuity that propels Home/Land is like listening to someone recount a dream whose urgency is available only to the dreamer. Home/Land is a casualty not of its genre but of its impregnable inwardness.

Heather Havrilesky

Positive The New Yorker ...wise and mordant ... Unlike the many memoirs that double as thinly veiled advertisements for their authors, Foreverland ventures occasionally unflattering honesty, not just about Bill but also about its author. Havrilesky is unafraid to admit to nursing unseemly sentiments that most of us would go to great lengths to conceal ... What Havrilesky’s bevy of detractors overlook is the rather manifest fact that she is joking. Readers familiar with her exuberant \'Ask Polly\' advice column know that she tends toward playful, wordy relentlessness, and in Foreverland she relies on the same sort of hyperbole to deflate widespread idealization of the romantic dyad ... Occasionally, Havrilesky’s maximalist prose can be grating, too. She favors long, unwieldy sentences and cavalcades of metaphors that can be mixed to the point of confusion ... But, for the most part, Foreverland displays a formidable emotional intelligence despite its chatty tone—and because, in part, of its extravagant rhetoric ... a tender book, full of touching descriptions of falling and staying in love, even in the face of the profound frustrations that inevitably spring from prolonged interpersonal contact ... not a book that will appeal to everyone, largely because Havrilesky, or at least her narratorial avatar, is not especially likable ... Reading Foreverland is good practice in learning to love a person who can be difficult and demanding.

Hanya Yanagihara

Pan The Times Literary Supplement (UK) To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution. It is too juvenile to attract serious adult readers and too obtuse to aspire to popular appeal ... it is hard to summon the will to enumerate To Paradise’s thematic or even stylistic shortcomings, for its basic construction is so irretrievably botched as to eclipse the rest of its defects. The fundamental problem is simple and devastating: the book does not make any sense ... Aside from its sheer incoherence, its most notable feature is only its punishing length. On and on it goes, sprouting new subplots, amassing new contrivances. Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.

Emily Ratajkowski

Positive The Guardian (UK) ... thoughtful and accessible ... what is striking about My Body is not how different a renowned supermodel’s experiences are from those of an everywoman, but rather how continuous. At first, I suspected this made the book boring. My Body is more of a non-linear memoir than a compendium of essays – though Ratajkowski’s musings are nominally organised into discrete sections, they seem to bleed into a more general autobiographical jumble ... As I rifled through accounts of inappropriate advances and catcalls, I wondered why Ratajkowski chose to devote so much space to relatively common degradations, rather than focusing on the more exotic indignities that she endured as she became famous...But as I read on, I realised that the depressing familiarity of the abuses that Ratajkowski chronicles is precisely the point. The anecdotes in My Body dramatise what is always true, if often implicit: that women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating ... Still, for all her self-awareness, Ratajkowski stops short of exploring the full implications of her alienation ... What My Body neglects to explore is Ratajkowski’s elaborate stylisation and its social foundations ... in a book about female desirability and injustice, it is worth emphasising that beauty requires time, skill, money and effort.

Amia Srinivasan

Mixed Boston Review [An] exhilarating title essay ... The thesis of The Right to Sex is both persuasive and daring, and Srinivasan does not shy away from the difficult tensions that it throws into relief ... Dwelling in this [ambivalent] place for the span of one essay, or even two or three, might have been productively provocative—especially when the place is as astutely imagined and as beautifully described as it is by Srinivasan. But an approach that initially titillates begins to madden when it is extended over the course of an entire collection. Though the book’s version of its title essay carries a new coda, the fresh material represents more of a scattershot response to Srinivasan’s critics than an attempt to resolve the dilemmas fleshed out in the original essay. It paves no paths toward less ambivalent places ... Ultimately, The Right to Sex provides little guidance as to how we should actually respond to the moral quandaries that it so perceptively sketches ... This statement does little to clarify what concrete alternatives to carceral feminism we should seek in the immediate future, given that we live, regrettably, under conditions of grave inequality.

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The Atlantic ... for Franzen, if not for his characters, an inward focus is the ticket out. It is by way of smallness that he at last achieves monumentality, by way of entrapment that he at last promises escape ... surprising to Franzen’s detractors, who often accuse him of writing flat female characters, will be the extent to which Marion crackles with humanity. She is the most memorable Hildebrandt, if not the most vividly living of all Franzen’s creations ... Some of the finest passages in Crossroads, which brims with agile writing, evoke Perry’s intensifying quest for oblivion ... a testament not to the singularity of the ’70s but to the decade’s continuity with our own. The novel’s emotional dishevelments—and its aura of apprehensive urgency—feel viscerally contemporary. If not for the resounding absence of the internet, we could almost forget that the year is supposed to be 1971 ... Whether this insight and others like it are evidence of maturity or resignation, I am not sure, but I know that it is one of many tiny treats that add up in the end to a marvelous novel—and sometimes even offer the thinnest glint of grace.

Meghan O'Gieblyn

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... nimble ... O’Gieblyn’s loosely linked and rigorously thoughtful meditations on technology, humanity and religion mount a convincing and occasionally moving apologia for that ineliminable wrench in the system, the element that not only browses and buys but feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self ... a hybrid beast, a remarkably erudite work of history, criticism and philosophy, but it is also, crucially, a memoir. O’Gieblyn knows that personal writing is \'often dismissed as unserious or egotistical,\' but her \'I\' is not the indulgent \'I\' of the confessional foray, nor the strident \'I\' of liberalism: It is the humble \'I\' of human scale and perspective.

Diane Johnson

Pan The Nation ... the parts never cohere into an elegant whole. Instead, Lorna Mott Comes Home feels cluttered with events, like a TV series with so many subplots that we scarcely have time to take stock of one arc before we are catapulted into the next. Of course, a disjointed novel could suit our agonized and atomized moment, when it is so difficult for individuals to discern their place in a broader community. Indeed, much of Lorna’s disaffection stems from her suspicion that she no longer fits into American society, which in any case appears to be unraveling. But Lorna Mott Comes Home is less a self-consciously fragmented commentary on America’s fragmentation than a confused compendium of scattered characters and dramas. Johnson has often managed to enlarge even the smallest lives, but in her latest, the lives at stake are so hastily sketched that they remain diminutive and difficult to believe in ... the erotic energies directed at married Frenchmen in the rest of Johnson’s corpus are redirected toward the pursuit of desirable real estate.

Patricia Lockwood

Positive The Baffler ... does not read like a glorified timeline or a series of blogposts strung together into a chatty necklace, but like a work of a full-fledged literature. It gets the right things wrong, for which reason it may be one of the first works of contemporary internet fiction to get the important things right ... The plot inches, but the writing whirls ... On the whole, and much to her credit, [Lockwood] avoids the stale snideness that often characterizes online interaction, opting instead for absurdist elation. Many of her funniest and most exuberant meditations are gleeful ... Writing so evocative could not be more unlike the usual online slurry, for which reason No One Is Talking About This seems to go some ways towards extricating Lockwood from the hivemind and restoring her authorial agency ... Lockwood is not hostile to the sapphires of the instant, but she is not hostage to them either—and as a result, her novel is not hostage to the world in its current incarnation ... No One Is Talking About This is a good novel because it is more essentially about the brief life of a baby than about time spent browsing a website. It does not really answer the question of how a book about the internet should be, except to suggest that the best books about the internet will be about the people who resist it. I hope we will read them on paper.

Joan Didion

Mixed The Times Literary Supplement (UK) Not much unifies the twelve pieces in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, which treat everything from underground newspapers to a reunion for Second World War veterans, except their glossy style – and the fact that they have all gone previously uncollected ... a somewhat self-important cluster about the art of writing; a cluster of canny essays in reportage, clawing at the smooth façades of power, and including a quietly scathing profile of Nancy Reagan and an unexpectedly sympathetic homage to Martha Stewart; and a miscellany, including a moving reminiscence about a dead friend and an excellent meditation on Ernest Hemingway ... By far the most successful essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are, in effect, captions that serve to invoke their attendant pictures. Didion is not an analytic but a visual writer, trading in image and insinuation more than argument ... Didion’s studious aloofness is less suited to moral instruction, and she flounders when she attempts to dispense advice or muster sympathy for those who lack poise or composure ... whether Didion is at her sharp best or her haughty worst, her touch is light – not superficial so much as glassy, free of density and effusion.

Franz Kafka, tr. Michael Hoffman

Rave Bookforum Translated with characteristic verve by Michael Hofmann ... Like the hallways forever unfurling (and unfurling forever) in his stories, Kafka’s sentences grow longer and more unwieldy, sprouting clauses and asides. Some pieces in The Lost Writings consist of single sentences as overgrown as vines ... wreathed in elongations, but they are also dense with contractions and confinements ... many of the slivers and shards in The Lost Writings are unfinished in a less satisfyingly dissatisfying way. They are not like The Castle, which was developed to incompletable maturity and broken off in what strikes me as apt desperation. Nor are they as self-contained as Kafka’s endless yet economical parables. Instead, they often seem like musings that someone abandoned in a fit of disinterest or distraction ... Deflating endings nonwithstanding, Kafka excels at beginnings. His openings burst through our expectations like bombs...there are many first lines so good that no ending could really match them ... Kafka himself stays well enough afloat. Even when he fumbles, he never falls wholly flat: at his worst, he is provocative yet provisional. But at his best, he is hilarious and mordant, mired in the impossibilities that he could neither live with nor without.

Susan Taubes

Positive The New Republic The text streaks from Sophie’s memories of her childhood in Hungary to her drab days in drizzly Paris. At one point, the prose fragments into a play ... We know to doubt the whirl of pictures and fantasies that flit through Divorcing in part because we know that it is a fiction, and a dizzyingly hallucinatory fiction at that ... defiantly ambitious ... Divorcing was ahead of its time not only because it dares to suggest that marriage blinds and blinkers, but also because it is an early exercise in something as anhedonic as autofiction ... Kenner is right that Divorcing is a little too frenetic and a little too abstract. For all her meditations on epistemology, Sophie reveals little about her day-to-day life. We learn next to nothing about what she is reading or working on, and we never actually catch her in the act of writing or theorizing ... Though Divorcing is lamentably sketchy on so many of the workaday details, Kenner fails to appreciate that it is also sublimely scathing in its indictment of the male blowhards so endemic to academic philosophy ... Divorcing shines when it retires its feverish reveries and simply records things as they were. At its most vividly summoned moments, it reconstructs Ezra’s tyrannical outbursts or recalls Sophie’s childhood in scenes that seem excerpted from a quieter and better book.

Namwali Serpell

Rave The New York Times Book Review ... sharp ... Perhaps despite itself, [Serpell] collection performs an ethical gesture in treating such faces as objects of attention and pleasure. The essays that follow are wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging...Her clear prose unknots a dense tangle of academic concepts along the way ... But Serpell may be at her most thrilling when she interrogates the very humanity of the Ideal Face ... Stranger faces refuse to signify or symbolize, which may be exactly why we try so hard to read them — and why it is so fun to read about them, at least when Serpell is doing the writing.

Heinrich Von Kleist, trans. by Michael Hoffman

Positive The Baffler Perhaps the most inscrutable of all his works ... His sentences, hypnotic and exquisitely controlled, span entire pages, rippling into ever wider and ever dreamier rings ... oxymorons abound in Michael Kohlhaas. Even Kleist can’t seem to make up his mind about his \'righteous and appalling\' protagonist ... Kohlhaas resembles many of Kleist’s most memorable characters, who are riven by an irreconcilable doubleness.

James Wood

Rave Bookforum James Wood, haters claim, is a hater ... In fact Wood’s talent for appreciation far outstrips his gift for denigration. Of the twenty-eight essays collected in Serious Noticing...only two are negative. And even when he is hating, Wood remains eager to discover something to admire ... Even in his hit pieces, Wood is a designated (and frequently endearing) enthusiast. He frowns over the fiction he censures like a disappointed father. His disapproval is only a correlate of his abiding love ... Serious Noticing is two parts pan and twenty-six parts panegyric ... What makes Wood such a formidable opponent? The most obvious answer is the crackling sensuousness of his prose. He writes unusually tactile criticism, thick with images you can almost reach out and grasp ... Even when Wood’s points are theoretical, his writing is novelistic ... Wood’s writing is lush, but a wire of rigor runs through it, and the exactitude of its argumentation stings. The results are as agile as they are inspired ... And there is more to admire. When Wood is vicious, he is funny. Little can compete with the exhilaration of his hatchet jobs or even his throwaway jabs ... Wood’s style is distinctive, but it is hard to generalize about his taste, and perhaps the best thing about him is that he reinvents his approach to accommodate the exigencies of each book he reviews. Though his judgments are always meticulously justified, they are also consistently unpredictable, for Wood is willing to meet each work on its own terms ... He has stained my vision indelibly, and I can pay him no greater tribute than to read him (and to ask you to read him) as generously, justly, and gorgeously as he taught me to read.

Magda Szabo trans. by Len Rix

Rave The New York Times Book Review The English edition of Abigail is as welcome as it is overdue. Len Rix’s translation is deft, but Szabo’s frank, conversational prose takes a back seat to her sinuous plotting: The novel unspools its secrets over many pages, and the resulting tour de force is taut with suspense ... at once harrowing and mesmerizing, all the more so because we glimpse its dramas through the uncomprehending lens of Gina’s youthful simplicity. Nothing could ruin a book so humane — but to resolve the novel’s central mysteries, especially the enigma of Abigail’s identity, would be to diminish some of its breathless urgency. To learn the truth, you must consult Abigail herself.

Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hofmann

Pan The Times Literary Supplement In The the ageing narrator writes himself...out of reality ... The moves, from here, are familiar and formulaic. First comes the fraying of the boundary between truth and fiction ... Next comes the obligatory hint that the book we are reading may be the very book the narrator wrote ... But he is confirmed by his unreality: if he is a fiction, then his book exists after all ... This is a neat and unsatisfying trick. Stamm’s characters, like his narrators, can only exist because they do not exist.

Ben Lerner

Positive The Wall Street Journal [Lerner\'s] least embarrassed and most ambitious ... For the first time, he narrates from perspectives other than his own ... Mr. Lerner too was a high-school debate champion, and he sometimes writes as if he still wants to score political points. At times, he spoils the vivid picture of masculinity he has constructed by theorizing it for us: I lost track of the number of times the word \'masculinity\' appears directly in the text. Mr. Lerner’s other novels are pristine, but The Topeka School is looser and messier, in large part because it is so frantic to project its social virtues ... Still, Mr. Lerner’s prose is too rich to stoop to sanctimony for long. Sometimes, when Adam is debating, his words accelerate until they seem to speak themselves. Embarrassment becomes irrelevant: Every phrase acquires the weight of necessity ... Mr. Lerner can get away with writing so many books that are autofictional because a spirit speaks through him—because his language takes on a life of its own. He manages to shed himself when he marshals enough empathy and eloquence to imagine the worlds of others.

Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

Pan Jewish Currents Plotlines fray and fail to cohere. Characters make a single appearance before dropping out of the book altogether. Worst of all, where [Grossman\'s] Life and Fate is vitally personal, Stalingrad borders on propaganda ... it does not smack of freedom ... it is largely the state-sanctioned \'truth\' that Grossman defends ... Much of Stalingrad’s dialogue could have been lifted from the script of a blockbuster action movie ... Often, Stalingrad’s paeans to the quiet heroism of the workers are transparent glorifications of uncompensated labor ... It is a testament to the chilling strength of the Soviet regime that the author of Life and Fate signed his name to Stalingrad, too.

Gregor Von Rezzori, Trans. by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel and Marshall Yarbrough

Mixed Bookforum ... too discursive to summarize, and I’m sure that Rezzori, or at least his narratorial ambassador, would accept the charge of plotlessness with pride ... fat with cliché-curdled reflections on the violence implicit in fiction ... There is no doubt that Rezzori is an important writer, maybe even a great one. He is well worth reading for the pleasure of his tangled language alone. Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, his best-known book, merits its reputation as a tour de force. But Subicz is a mean-spirited mouthpiece ... The book is salvaged, insofar as it is salvaged, by its occasional outbursts of love—and by the feats of observation that love can sometimes occasion ... a nine-hundred-page book can vindicate its self-importance only if it succeeds as an aesthetic exercise. As Rezzori noted with despairing jealousy, Musil’s tomes pass the test. But Abel and Cain cannot justify the demands that it makes on its readers. It is often beautiful, but it is frequently as kitschy as a cuckoo clock. Subicz shamelessly mythologizes \'a Europe that might still be European\'—but I doubt if this European Europe was really so golden for everyone. Better rain than the brutal—and banal—luminescence of Hitler weather.

Uwe Johnson, Trans. by Damion Searls

Positive Bookforum Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated ... But Johnson’s rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly meticulous ... Anniversaries...is something between a diary, an autobiography, and an exercise in free association. Many of Gesine’s entries amount to love letters to her adoptive city ... Her meditations are dense with diatribes—so dense with diatribes that they begin to try a reader’s patience—against the Vietnam War, which she likens with great sanctimony and little subtlety to the Holocaust. But Johnson’s heroine is alive to the dangers of hollow outrage and dry documentation ... Unlike her borrowed reportage about the atrocities in Vietnam, her direct accounts of Nazi and Soviet brutality are relentless and rending ... Johnson is at his best when he personalizes an aching, anonymous history. Anniversaries’ engagements with the past can be palpable and piercing ... Anniversaries is less a work of plot than a map of human relationships ... Anniversaries is often difficult to follow: It demands an involved knowledge of German, Soviet, and American politics and a careful attention to what seem like marginal characters, who are apt to disappear for several hundred pages only to crop up again. Its content, in contrast, can be ethically easy. All of its protagonists are implausibly brave ... But ... How does Johnson know...about everything? How does he absorb so much so hungrily? His writing is inhuman, godlike in its immensity.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Positive The New Republic \"The 76 pieces amassed in the newly (and deftly) translated Collected Stories are, for the most part, portraits of consummate comfort ... The milieu of the Collected Stories is dazzling, but their author remains unimpressed. His high-society chronicles adopt the formal yet familiar tones of an indulgent father toasting a spoiled child. And despite his occasional surges of lyricism... his voice is dusty with Latin locutions and dense with allusions to Schiller, Montaigne, and Augustine. A reader could be forgiven for assuming that Machado is a native of the ballrooms he describes with such facility ... some of the Collected Stories, masterful works of shrewd sadism, rival even the Brazilian giant’s best-known novels ... Despite the refinement of its setting, Machado’s fiction inflicts unlikely tortures on its characters and cruel suspense on its readers ... It’s only apt that the Collected Stories are so repetitive: The book is organized just like an obsession, with manic motifs that nag and gnaw ... As [Machado] picks not only his characters but also his readers apart, dangling us over the open flames, he can already see into our suspicious hearts: He already knows that we will spasm, not just with fear but with a rhapsodic rush of misery. The crowning cruelty is that we will enjoy it.\

Helen DeWitt

Positive The Nation Some Trick is understandably despondent and often crisply acerbic, but it rarely tips over into bitterness. DeWitt is a hot-blooded intellectual, and her contagious passion for the life of the mind can redeem even the bleakest lamentations ... In the world of Some Trick, the best words are so acute they lacerate.

Ben Lerner

Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books One of the problems with the essay is that Lerner does not explain why poetry’s failure is any more spectacular than our broader failure, endemic to all art and perhaps all interpersonal interactions, to communicate with absolute clarity ... [what] Lerner intuits beautifully and compellingly in The Hatred of Poetry, is that art’s failures matter precisely because its task is so vital.

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