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Recent Reviews
Jennifer Niesslein
Positive Cleaver Niesslein is a nuanced thinker, and she honors the tremendous complexity of nostalgia in the nine essays contained within this book ... I won’t spoil the pleasure you will take in these collected essays by sharing with you her final words. Trust me that she lands in an interesting place, a place that asks us to think about the past we are creating right now.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Rave Cleaver Magazine A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion ... how much I love this book, how I clung to it as proof that there is still something new in the literary world, still something worth shouting about ... I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields. It has given us the genuine miracle of A Ghost in the Throat.
C. E. Morgan
Rave The Chicago Tribune But here was a first novel so self-assured and unto itself, so unswerving in its purpose, so strummed through with a peculiar, particular, electrifying sound, that I found myself reading in a state of highest perplexity, and also gratitude and awe ... It\'s a novel that makes you think on all of that anew, and that spares nothing and no one in the process ... This is the story, and it\'s a very good story. But it\'s the language that gets you. Austere and full of losses.
Rosellen Brown
Rave The Chicago Tribune The story ... offers one bravura sentence upon another ... Her single sentences delivering more character insight than many authors can achieve in entire scenes ... Brown has reconstructed late-19th-century Chicago with astonishing skill. She has made the vanished World’s Columbian Exposition, with its vaudevillelike Midway and its mammoth Ferris wheel, acutely alive ... a timeless story about why and how and at what cost we take care of one another.
Leslie Jamison
Rave The Chicago Tribune \"Memoir’s purpose is to embrace discoveries about common human truths, and so as a reader of this most consuming book, I celebrate Jamison’s deep openheartedness, deliberate unselfishness, immaculate, inculcating vision and her language — oh, her language ... The Recovering is a long book and in places, especially toward the end, loses some of its pace as it sweeps through perhaps too many \'other\' stories. Jamison is an immaculate chronicler of her life of abusing; one might have wished for a glimpse or two of how she managed, despite the self-abuse, to achieve so much as a writer and a student throughout the stumbling shame. But the fact is that the last thing we want from memoir is perfection: Memoir is life, and life is lived raw. For her intelligence, her compassion, her capaciousness, her search, her deep reading, her precise language, Jamison must be honored here.\
Jesse Ball
Rave The Chicago Tribune You could say this is the story of Census, but Census is a fiction of shattering impact in part because its fabulist tendrils erupt from the author’s own love for a brother: Abram Ball was born with Down syndrome and died, in 1998, after becoming quadriplegic and requiring a ventilator ... Ball’s greatest genius in Census is given over to the supreme humanity that outlasts the ugly things that people do and say. Goodness prevails: It prevails in Ball’s imagination, it outlasts words. Don’t turn to the final pages until you have arrived at this journey’s end. And then stay right there and dwell.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Rave Chicago Tribune In Winter, his mind turns to owls, coins, chairs, mess, toothbrushes, hollow spaces, bonfires, manholes, even Q-tips, even ears. The nouns are triggers. They are pursued. They set Knausgaard off into his signature swerves — long sentences, full-page paragraphs, free associations, basic facts, leisurely hypotheticals ... There is a density to Knausgaard’s work, a potential tedium that the author avoids by regulating the rhythms within and across the pieces. Just when we’ve had enough of his transcending omnipresence, Knausgaard delivers a personal, date-stamped scene. Just when we begin to lose ourselves inside his ranging, clever clauses, he slams on the brakes — leaving us out of breath on some unexpected landscape ... Knausgaard has, it seems, given himself the task of making the once-strange strange once more — not just for his daughter, but for us. He buckles his language. He pivots his thoughts. We follow where he leads.
Jennifer Egan
Rave The Chicago Tribune Egan builds her story with the countless particulars of her chosen era — America at war, Americans at nightclubs, gangsters and sailors and union workers all fighting for a slice of a diminished post-Depression pie. She percolates the story with Flossie Flirt dolls, a '28 Duesenberg Model J (Niagara blue), the charitable ladies of the New York Catholic Protectory, Benny Goodman-style swing, and such a profusion of details regarding big-ship construction and underwater repair that you'd expect to be just slightly inclined to read a little faster through those pages, but you are not. Egan makes dressing for a dive a matter of high suspense and metaphor ... Manhattan Beach is a whole story sprung from a whole imagination. It yields a world that, with all its mystery, its shades of dark and light, its yearnings and its satisfactions, feels most resplendently true.
Geraldine Brooks
Rave The Chicago Tribune I believe Geraldine Brooks' new novel, March, is a very great book. I believe it breathes new life into the historical fiction genre, the borrowing-a-character-from-the-deep-past phenomenon, the old I-shall-tell-you-a-story-through-letters tradition. I believe it honors the best of the imagination. I give it a hero's welcome … The book's protagonist, one Mr. March, has, in other words, been borrowed twice--first from a beloved novel (a novel that was extrapolated from Alcott's own life) and second from history. He is, however, no mere pastiche; Brooks has magnificently wielded the novelist's license, shifting some facts and superimposing the demands of story over the sometimes less-compelling signposts of the past … However brilliant it is, the conceit of March is only part of its glory. It's the story, as it always must be the story, that qualifies March for supreme (forgive the adjective) greatness.
Julia Fierro
Positive The Chicago Tribune Fierro is a writer capable of glorious sentences. She recalls with fastidious care the songs and lip gloss and fashions of the early 1990s, has an ear for weather and landscape, and moves her story briskly through its many cohering parts. Avalon is far from a hospitable place. Its inhabitants, monied or not, are often vulgar. Excess is its own devastation; excess is tragedy. Too much of too much — cash, sex, greed, bugs — rarely does end well.
Sherman Alexie
Rave The Chicago Tribune You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a marvel of emotional transparency, a story told with the fewest possible filters by a writer grieving the loss of a complicated mother ... Alexie's memoir is deliberately ragged, deliberately inflated, deliberately redundant. Alexie is a writer who will use a single word again and again in a single sentence or scene, like a drum beat; he is a writer who will, unabashed, present the same facts inside new frames. There are 160 numbered sections over the course of more than 450 pages, and sometimes the most poignant moments are contained in the chapter titles. Sometimes poignancy arises in the ways Alexie breaks out of a poem and into prose and back again, and sometimes in the juxtaposition between Alexie's pain and his mother's.
Roxane Gay
Positive The Chicago Tribune The book is essayistic, built of clipped personal stories and cultural observations. We find repetitions and stutter steps, a deliberate circling of the truth to get to the truth. There are, in fact, few full-blown scenes; instead we encounter mere touches of landscape, spare indications of weather, little recorded dialogue and few dominating characters … But there is more one senses, so much more, and if one grows slightly frustrated by that which remains off the page, one must remember as one reads that Gay is focused on her body, that she is writing about hunger, about violations, about the sanctity and sanity of resistance, that she has something to say about seeing and being seen … She deserves the final word.
Vaddey Ratner
Positive The Chicago Tribune As Ratner leads her readers to the ultimate collision of guilt and forgiveness, darkness and song, she offers instruction in history and Cambodian culture, some of which is seamlessly interwoven into the lush narrative and some of which feels interruptive, perhaps didactic. There are places, too, where the language overreaches, where a single descriptor might have been more powerful or a simpler word might have gotten the job done ... The deeper I read into Music of the Ghosts, the more engrossed I became in the tangled skeins that define her characters' lives, in the history that her fiction illuminates, in the perceptions that could break a reader's heart.
Kristen Radtke
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...one of the most haunting graphic memoirs I've ever read ... [Radtke] has forsaken and been forsaken, she is audacious and vulnerable, she takes risks and she is wounded by what the world is and how it bends back upon itself. As we turn the pages on her journey, we are ravaged and ravished ... With time and its doings as her subject, rot and decay, she does not adhere to strict chronology. She renders mold and splotch and broken things as both terrifying and lovely ... her work is as wonderful and heartbreaking the second time through. I'm still scooped out, but I'm still deeply grateful for the towering power of Radtke's vision.
Kathleen Rooney
Rave The Chicago Tribune While the novel's structure can at times feel claustrophobic — this one-to-one correspondence between the triggering present and the recalled past — Lillian's voice is anything but. Highly energetic and supremely self-knowing, not a little boastful and perpetually clever, Lillian slices the world with bright blades of humor. She makes it her business to say precisely what she sees ... Rooney proves herself to be a tireless puppeteer in Lillian Boxfish — a writer with no apparent end of the cleverly turned phrase, the thoughtful insights into advertising, the intelligent musings on the process of creation. Rooney is marvelously self-aware as well, anticipating readerly responses right there in the pages of this book ... a perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal, voice and voice.
Angela Palm
Positive The Chicago Tribune ...there is volumetric power here. Sizable intrigue in the sentences. Bold declarations that (as all memoir must) destabilize the reader and paralyze easy judgment on both the life lived and the words chosen. Angela Palm has left the river and returned to it. Angela Palm has arrived.
Mark Haddon
Rave The Chicago Tribune I read the nine stories in Mark Haddon's new collection, The Pier Falls, over nine consecutive days — one bracing plunge every 24 hours. Anything more would have amounted to a violation of my own imagination. Anything less would have registered as disrespect for the devastating power of these eerily precise and dangerously suffusing episodes in the lives of mostly lost, lonesome, or abandoned people ... It's one thing to know and write brilliantly about how the world works. It's an entirely different thing to write with deep assurance about what happens when conventions are broken, relationships are scrubbed of ordinary decencies, and the mind shatters. Reality, in Haddon's stories, is endlessly decaying.
Hope Jahren
Rave The Chicago Tribune Jahren contains multitudes. Her book is love as life. Trees as truth.
Mary Louise Parker
Rave The Chicago Tribune I am a memoir connoisseur. I teach the form. I read dozens upon dozens of 'true' stories every year, and only two or three stand out. Dear Mr. You stands out.
Paul Kalanithi
Rave The Chicago Tribune We ache for this man, we hurt for this marriage, we cry when this couple decides that yes, a child, their child, will be born; their daughter, Cady, will carry Kalanithi forward in the ways that children do. We think of all the patients who benefited from Kalanithi's sheer humanity (not to mention those admirable surgical skills) and all those who will never have the honor of having him stand by their bedside.
Suzanne Berne
Rave The Chicago Tribune Berne is exceedingly good at social commentary. She captures the anxiety that seeps in through the young affluents, the unhappiness that attends those who are supposed to be happy.