About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Richard Price
Positive Booklist A memorable scene in which a woman spins an unnecessarily elaborate tale while begging for money brilliantly illustrates that we are natural storytellers, none better than Richard Price.
Will Self
Positive Booklist A deft character study that balances social criticism...with the strive toward personhood.
Yuval Noah Harari
Rave Booklist Harari draws on history, philosophy, science, psychology, and political theory to present a plethora of examples of information as the current running beneath all human endeavor. Indeed, it is Harari’s genius to untangle complex patterns to reveal complicated structures while illuminating the connections to our everyday lives. An important and timely must-read as our survival is at the mercy of information.
Camille Peri
Positive Booklist An epic love story, rivaling that of the Fitzgeralds.
Evan Friss
Rave Booklist A lively history.
Colm Toibin
Rave Booklist Tóibín is a philosopher of the soul. He understands the complex emotions, the dreams, fear, doubt, and hope that drive human activity. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator.
Andre Dubus
Rave Booklist In a conversational style that disguises its structure and solidity, Dubus’ sentences glide on a level pitch before seamlessly dovetailing into the poetically poignant.
James Marcus
Positive Booklist Psychologically astute ... Marcus’ deeply personal interpretation illuminates an iconic prophet who discovered that seeking the meaning of life turns out to be the meaning of life.
Russell Banks
Rave Booklist Each tale bears the unmistakable imprint of a true literary giant, who will be dearly missed.
Michael Crummey
Rave Booklist Masterful ... Crummey has quietly established himself as one of our best writers.
Alexander Sammartino
Positive Booklist His attention to craft is evident on every page (he studied under George Saunders). A sobering tale full of heart.
Jonathan Evison
Positive Booklist Evison imbues his big-hearted narrative with sumptuous mystery and intrigue tracing Eugene’s quest for love amid undiminished hope. Though Eugene has traversed multiple lands and time lines in different forms, his path is ultimately a map of the human heart.
Tim O'Brien
Positive Booklist The fantastical comedy of errors, the lauded O’Brien’s first novel in many years, blends rom-com, caper, and buddy story into a relentless, skewering tale of greed, capitalism, betrayal, and ultimately, redemption. A sound bet for Elmore Leonard fans.
Daniel Mason
Rave Booklist Inhabitants reinforce the dual nature of the human condition, simultaneously serving as minuscule collections of molecules against the inevitable march of time while also contributing to a collective, quasi-supernatural consciousness. Truly triumphant.
Tracy Daugherty
Rave Booklist Daugherty blends authoritative research with resplendent prose, providing absorbing detail to illuminate how McMurtry’s childhood, academic career, domestic life, and friendships shaped his personality and work. This flowing, even avuncular portrait definitively situates McMurtry’s oeuvre in the American canon.
Chuck Palahniuk
Positive Booklist Palahniuk expresses a coal-black humor that unsparingly and brilliantly satirizes contemporary society. The uninitiated reader might find some content objectionable—the very same satirical content Palahniuk’s legion of fans has come to expect and relish.
Andre Dubus
Rave Booklist Dubus subtly shifts registers and Tom begins to explore his interiority. Dubus is a scribe of the blue collar, the downtrodden, and the destitute, with an uncanny ability to capture guilt, shame, and anger while also infusing his characters with resilience, strength, and hope. Few writers paint three-dimensional characters with such verve and humanism. Dubus is the Botticelli of Beantown.
Richard Ford
Rave Booklist Ford’s prose attains a rare combination of exquisite beauty powered by dialogue that has the casual familiarity of a jocular Everyman gifted with a winning, sly wit. Be Mine ultimately charts the journey of the human condition and the strivings, failings, and resiliency of the human heart. A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford’s best.
Andrew Krivak
Rave Booklist Krivak’s prose is earthy, assured, and exquisitely rendered in evocative descriptions of the natural world juxtaposed with visceral combat scenes. The language is lush, alternating in cadence to reflect the action and settings. The accounts of survival in war-torn countries are particularly striking, illustrating the dichotomy of beauty and death. Krivak is equally adept at exploring the emotional sinews connecting family, community, and country.
T. C. Boyle
Rave Booklist Extreme climate events and myriad endangered and invasive species all point to an inevitable environmental collapse, yet humans seem more interested in willfully adapting than preventing impending doom, like Nero playing the fiddle. Boyle’s genius lies in his ability to blend the horrific and the humorous, to slowly ratchet up the tension while crafting a gripping yet eerie narrative that forecasts a disaster of our own making.
Thomas Brussig, trans. Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson
Positive Booklist Brussig’s farcical satire is full of heart, with humor permeating every page, documenting the indomitable human spirit.
Alan Lightman
Positive Booklist Lightman writes with passion and panache about how the search for knowledge need not inhibit moments of transcendence, offering a poignant reminder that wonder is everywhere, if we only look.
John Sayles
Positive Booklist Sayles blends his wide-ranging narrative skills to great effect in this sprawling historical epic ... Sayles’ grand vision yields a rollicking yarn that will satisfy the discerning historical adventure reader.
Mark Dawidziak
Rave Booklist Dawidziak’s thoroughly researched investigation meticulously explores the various theories surrounding Poe’s death while vividly capturing the public’s ongoing fascination with this quintessential tortured soul.
Colm Toíbín
Positive Booklist A hallmark of Toíbín is his uncanny ability to deftly express the emotional undercurrent in his writing, be it loneliness, anger, or nostalgia.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive Booklist The format of Stella Maris is as bold as it is simple, consisting entirely of the conversations Alicia has with her doctor at the facility. Few authors would attempt to present the dialogue of a math genius, yet McCarthy clearly knows his way around Fermat’s Theorem. McCarthy demonstrates a unique ability to discuss complex mathematical and philosophical content in literary prose that somehow braids the two cultures. Alicia is a complex and compelling character, who reminds us that the word prodigy comes from the Latin word for monster while she also plumbs her own subconscious. Pair with The Passenger for an optimal reading experience.
Russell Banks
Positive Booklist Banks’ prose is languid and melodic, the work of a seasoned raconteur. The characters are nuanced and three-dimensional, simultaneously full of pride and doubt. The story is loosely based on actual events, with the narrative conceit that Banks salvaged Harley’s audio recordings from a flooded library basement. An elegiac and introspective portrait of a young man and how his fear of loneliness manifests that of which he is most afraid.
Cormac McCarthy
Rave Booklist Plot is secondary to McCarthy’s expert exploration of each character’s interiority, plumbing the depths of their subconscious ... His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts.
John Irving
Rave Booklist Irving’s majestic latest...is a multigenerational portrait as colorful and varied as it is complex and quirky as it echoes and pays homage to the author’s own rich literary history ... Irving infuses the narrative with countless comedic set pieces, some farcical, others wistfully tender. The emotionally resonant result is sweepingly cinematic, reminding the reader that Irving has a screenwriting Oscar. Autobiographical snippets and splashes of brilliance buttress the themes of death and aging, memory and identity, in an elegiac testimony to the many facets of familial love.
T C Boyle
Rave Booklist Forty-plus years into his stellar career, the prolific Boyle retains his signature charm and wit while mining the human condition for its many intrinsic foibles. His latest story collection displays a breadth of subject matter ... Boyle’s genius lies in his ability to describe characters through the eyes of other characters, adding nuance and depth. There’s a rich musicality in Boyle’s prose that frequently calls to mind his beloved blues recordings with a hearty rhythm section creating a vital heartbeat to echo a character’s plight. His language can also take on a free flowing, jazz-like improvisational feel. Once again, Boyle’s virtuosity shines.
Anthony Marra
Rave Booklist Marra skillfully alternates between Hollywood and Italy, dexterously weaving the two threads together when a young man, Nino Picone, arrives at Mercury Pictures fresh from San Lorenzo with news of Giuseppe. Marra’s prose is fluid and sprightly; each sentence is imbued with wit and heart and dances to its own internal rhythm. The dialogue is crisp and filled with ripostes and underline-worthy bon mots. The characters are simultaneously larger than life and all too human, utterly memorable. The historically iconic settings are brought sensuously to life by Marra’s cinematic eye. Marra has ascended to the top of the literary ranks.
Patrick Radden Keefe
Rave Booklist ... a collection of New Yorker pieces of astounding variety, each more riveting and extraordinary than the last ... The pièce de résistance is the closing profile on chef turned television star and provocateur Anthony Bourdain, whose humanity and vulnerability are shown with incredible sensitivity. Many of Keefe’s subjects exemplify greed, power, and self-delusion, but he also illustrates with remarkable nuance the stigma of mental illness and the compulsion toward ethical principles, reminding us that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend towards justice.
Bill Roorbach
Rave Booklist Roorbach is a consummate raconteur skilled in breathing life into his characters. His prose is well-suited to the Montana landscape, capacious yet created with poetic economy, evoking the splendor of nature in language that sparkles like crystal clear mountain water ... Roorbach’s understated, luminescent novel beautifully evokes an idyllic world created when two hearts are braided together.
David Shields
Rave Booklist The breadth of these queries speaks to the wide range of human activity, thought, and introspection on which Shields is expected to have particular insight. More often than not, the questions provide deeper insights into the interviewers’ pretensions ... The collective inanity, banality, and redundancy of the interviewers’ questions serve to make Shields’ point. By cleverly juxtaposing the questions and reframing the context, Shields exposes the artificiality inherent in literary discourse, resulting in a though-provoking, hilarious, genre-defying work.
Jeff Deutsch
Rave Booklist ... an eloquent and inspiring paean to the community bookstore. He is a philosophical ambassador for this embattled cultural institution, a veteran of the book business who clearly understands the stark realities of profit margins and the compromises that bookstores must make to stay afloat, such as selling coffee and other ephemera. A deeply read and engaging guide ... Give this a prime spot on that Front Table.
Dan Chaon
Rave Booklist This strange and compelling plot features Chaon’s signature imaginative flair and brilliant pacing to create an ominous tension infused with sly wit. Chaon expertly provides vague science fictional notes that imply a slightly futuristic, dystopian setting that further amplifies intrigue. Oblique references to animal experimentation and devastating climate disasters add a chilling tone, but is it the emotional verisimilitude that provides heft. Will Bear is a tender mercenary, a microdosing Big Lebowski whose off-the-grid life parallels his disconnection from humanity. A consummate storyteller, Chaon imbues the darkly comic with colossal heart.
Joel Agee
Positive Booklist The story is loosely based on Agee’s own childhood, and he dexterously establishes the curious, imaginative, and innocent narrative voice of his young narrator ... Agee’s languid, poetic prose masterfully builds Pira’s seemingly bucolic world while subtly hinting at the inevitable loss of innocence. He brilliantly plays with language, employing multiple meanings to indicate the inherent dichotomy of childhood and experience ... Agee agilely keeps the political strife on the periphery but hints at the labor conflicts and the ideological foment that will soon seed the Cold War divide. A portrait of the artist as a young child.
Steve Paul
Positive Booklist ... absorbing and thorough ... Paul’s impressive research and close reading of Connell’s oeuvre illuminates the many autobiographical connections between the artist’s life and work. This should reestablish Connell in the pantheon of literary arts.
Jonathan Evison
Rave Booklist Evison has published a string of superb novels...so it is thrilling to see the talent, ambition, and execution coalesce in this masterpiece ... Each character displays the fierce fortitude and stubborn resilience that define the American spirit. The sweeping panorama is the perfect canvas on which Evison explores the diversity of the nation’s character while limning contours and adding textures to bring to vivid life his memorable characters. Such masterful strokes seem to qualify Small World as the quintessential Great American Novel as Evison eloquently shows that perhaps the most authentically American ideal is the ongoing, blended palette of stories.
Thomas Keneally
Rave Booklist Keneally liberally and seamlessly integrates Dickensian allusions, references, and quotes as he weaves his tale and positively delights in spinning the local vernacular into his own Shakespearean yarns. Keneally brings authority and insight to his depictions of his homeland and its people, striking a perfect balance of the historical and poetic while also addressing race issues obliquely yet thoughtfully. The \'guvnor\' would approve.
James Hannaham
Positive Booklist Whether read as prose poems or short aphoristic thought experiments, the pieces are infused with Hannaham’s distinctive dark humor, biting social commentary, and ever-present exuberance. Hannaham excels when exploring the intersection of art and reality ... Calling to mind a blend of Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, David Markson, and Steve Martin, the result is daringly original and uninhibitedly inventive, born aloft by subversive verve.
Claire Keegan
Rave Booklist Keegan’s languid and crystalline prose is surprisingly powerful, poetically describing a Thatcher-era Dickensian village of financially struggling citizens preparing for the holiday while hinting at grim secrets just below the surface ... Keegan deftly reveals the pernicious complicity behind Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and their part in Ireland’s tragic history of the abuse of young women by the church. Keegan’s psychologically astute characterizations subtly convey the dual pressures of culpability and fear felt by the faithful ... A trenchant and plangent work asking at what cost does one remain silent.
Kevin Birmingham
Rave Booklist Birmingham’s riveting dual narrative provides a multifaceted exploration of nineteenth-century thought and society. His deep reading of Dostoevsky’s journals and drafts provides penetrating insights into the artistic process and how Dostoevsky sought to write from the killer Raskolnikov’s perspective (raskol is Russian for schism). The cultural and literary influence of Crime and Punishment is incalculable, introducing a character both brilliant and chilling, who is perhaps best illustrated by a question posed by one of Lacenaire’ s doctors, \'How is it your intelligence did not protect you from yourself?\'
Claire Tomalin
Positive Booklist ... as literary biographer Tomalin engagingly elucidates, Wells was a man of many interests, talents, and, indeed, foibles ... Tomalin is a consummate storyteller, illuminating myriad absorbing details to show the many dimensions of this complicated icon of twentieth-century literature.
Tom McCarthy
Rave Booklist ... brilliant, multilayered ... Each scene, each frame, is evaluated with an exactitude both fascinating and ludicrous to satisfy overzealous geekdom ... Pynchonian asides are filtered through a Joycean love of language, etymologically rich...yet imbued with wry humor and devastating satire approaching profundity ... McCarthy’s is a prodigious intellect, keenly tuned to the \'aestheticization of technology,\' frenetically Feynmanian, joyously Kafkaesque, yet distinctly a category of one.
Gary Shteyngart
Rave Booklist [A] clever Chekhovian satire ... Shteyngart’s big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity. Above all, Shteyngart artfully exemplifies love in its many registers—parental, brotherly, romantic—in what is ultimately a \'super sad true love\' story.
Matthew Sturgis
Rave Booklist Sturgis takes full advantage of his subject’s outsize personality and employs to superb effect previously unknown letters and a full transcript of Wilde’s libel case. Sturgis’ voluminous research and erudition are evident on every page. Quotes are abundant, and anecdotes abound, all serving to bring Wilde even more fully to life. Readers of nineteenth-century history and literature will relish this richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling work about an artist whose life touched many aspects of society, including literature, fashion, and home design. This work replaces Ellmann’s literary biography of Wilde (which has been shown to contain inaccuracies) as the definitive life of an irrepressible genius.
Carole Angier
Positive Booklist Accomplished biographer Angier has undertaken the formidable task of capturing the notoriously private and enigmatic Sebald. Drawing on a close reading of Sebald’s oeuvre and countless interviews with childhood friends, classmates, and colleagues, Angier dexterously untangles the autobiographical from the fictional ... Angier deftly allows this meditative and elegiac genius to emerge naturally from his self-created spectral persona in the first major biography of an artist once considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Jon McGregor
Rave Booklist McGregor...artfully and subtly shifts registers in each of the three titular sections, moving from languorous and ominous to a staccato, adrenaline-fueled frenzy in \'Lean,\' while \'Fall\' fills in the background of Robert’s life and marriage. Finally, \'Stand\' is a tour de force of observational writing, masterfully capturing the struggle, frustration, and determination of Robert’s healing process and recovery. Whether describing the majestic beauty of the natural world or the heartbreaking nuances of neurological deficit, McGregor’s luminous prose brings the world brilliantly to life.
T. C. Boyle
Positive Booklist Boyle eloquently lays out the philosophical and ethical debates of raising chimps in a human household ... Boyle poignantly exposes our anthropocentric biases while exploring the nature of consciousness and reminds us of the adage about the most dangerous species in the zoo being the humans.
Caleb Scharf
Positive Booklist Scharf’s argument, [...] inspired by Richard Dawkins’ \'selfish gene,\' is that data want to ensure their own propagation. While there is clearly an evolutionary advantage to this symbiotic relationship with data, Scharf suggests that information may alternately determine life’s function and trajectory. One is reminded of T. S. Eliot’s prescient line, \'Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?\' For readers of James Gleick and George Dyson.
Jonathan Franzen
Rave Booklist \"[A] masterful, Tolstoyan saga of an unhappy family. Members of the dysfunctional Hildebrandt clan are deeply flawed, insecure, cringe-inducingly self-destructive, and, in Franzen’s psychologically astute rendering, entirely authentic and human ... This masterpiece of social realism vividly captures each character’s internal conflicts as a response to and a reflection of societal expectations, while Franzen expertly explores the fissions of domestic life, mining the rich mineral beneath the sediments of familial discord. In this first volume of a promised trilogy, Franzen is in rarified peak form.\
Colm Tóibín
Rave Booklist Tóibín renders with nuance and grace Thomas’ conflicted heart as he is fiercely loyal to his homeland yet forced to flee Nazi Germany and a devoted but emotionally unavailable father whose diaries contain his repressed fantasies of young men. Employing luxurious prose that quietly evokes the tortured soul behind these literary masterpieces, Tóibín has an unequalled gift for mapping the interior of genius. In Mann, Toibin finds the ideal muse, one whose interior is so rich and vast that only a similar genius could hope to capture it.
John Tresch
Rave Booklist Tresch’s luminous study situates Poe’s life and work in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century scientific revolution ... Tresch brilliantly illuminates the process by which Poe synthesized his scientific knowledge in his works of the imagination ... As Tresch so trenchantly establishes, Poe was a towering genius who somehow dwelled in the shadows of his own creations.
John N MacLean
Positive Booklist In this hybrid memoir, ecological history, and love letter to the meditative wonders of fishing, Maclean charts his Scottish ancestors’ arrival in Montana, his minister grandfather’s building of the still-standing lake cabin, and the tragic death of his charismatic uncle Paul, whose brief life was so poignantly memorialized by John’s father ... His Hemingway-esque prose is as clear as a mountain stream, flowing with a poetic cadence and lyrically describing the many splendid natural treasures to be found under the Big Sky. A sure bet for readers who enjoy American and natural history and a must-read for fishing enthusiasts.
Ross King
Rave Booklist ... magnificent ... King’s meticulous research provides an immersive reading experience as he expertly weaves the political intrigue of families vying for power and currying favor with the pope into a riveting intellectual history covering the evolution of books, Renaissance Italy, classical philosophy and literature, and the invention of the printing press. A profoundly engaging study of a time when books were considered essential to a meaningful life, and knowledge and wisdom were cherished as ends in themselves.
J. Robert Lennon
Positive Booklist ... many of these stories explore familial and marital relationships, adroitly capturing subtle aggressions and emotional manipulations with a perceptive, penetrating wit. Some can serve as brief thought experiments, providing just enough carefully crafted phrases or ominous hints to invite the reader to interpret the meaning. Even the more absurd entries have the sheen of authenticity, owing to Lennon’s cerebral style buoyed by an astute observational eye that captures human nature in all its quirky tendencies and embarrassing eccentricities. These stories offer a uniquely satisfying mélange of reality-adjacent truth and mordant wit that will appeal to readers of George Saunders and Dan Chaon.
J. Robert Lennon
Positive Booklist ... deeply philosophical and surreal puzzle-like tale ... Lennon cleverly employs symbolism and literary echoes to create a dark fairy tale rich in imagination and sly intelligence that will appeal to the intellectually curious reader. A thought-provoking work that somehow successfully brings to mind Alice in Wonderland and Kafka as reimagined by manga animator Hayao Miyazaki. 
Jerome Charyn
Positive Booklist Charyn offers a fresh perspective by focusing largely on Salinger’s time in the Counterintelligence Corps in Europe during WWII. This proves to be a nuanced and acutely perceptive approach as Charyn artfully renders the many battles and atrocities Salinger witnesses ... Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject.
Jonathan Lethem
Positive Booklist Todbaum is a quintessential Lethemian protagonist; whip-smart, with an endless vocabulary, he can deploy said verbal acumen with devastating effect ... Lethem cleverly builds on and subverts the tropes of postapocalyptic dystopias, mixes in a metafictional element, and expertly mines the nature of storytelling and its power to enchant. An inventive and intelligent speculative tale.
Salar Abdoh
Rave Booklist Descriptions of the show’s story line, which provide incisive and blistering commentaries on the conflict, also reveal essential truths about the nature of narrative, cultural politics, and history. The theme of memory is also threaded through the story as Saleh uncovers a copy of Proust buried during a firefight. As Saleh contemplates the human desire for meaning and how this informs a willingness for martyrdom, he is baffled by the irony of humankind’s propensity for repeating the same mistakes throughout history. A devastatingly profound catch-22 of modern conflict.
Phil Klay
Rave Booklist National Book Award-winner Klay displays his signature virtuosity in this richly textured, masterful mosaic of modern Colombia ... The struggle for survival is deftly juxtaposed with the struggle for power, and the varying gradations of each are explored through multiple perspectives with nuance, grace, and poignancy ... Each character is rendered in psychologically astute moral complexity and must interrogate his or her own complicity in a corrupt and often violent system ... As the characters’ lives begin to intersect in a rewarding, yet tension-filled denouement, the author’s prodigious skill and deep understanding of the region provide the scaffolding to explore essential questions of human dignity and sacrifice. A triumphant achievement that elevates Klay to the top echelon of contemporary writers.
Martin Amis
Rave Booklist Amis’ autobiographical novel finds him lamenting the inevitable decline of the intellect, the loss of those powers that nourish a rich interiority and fuel the creative life. This brilliant hybrid work is proof positive that his fears are ill-founded and premature ... He writes poignantly about Saul Bellow and the Nobel laureate’s slide into dementia. He explores the rich terrain of how matters of the heart (and loins) inform art, and shares an account of his dysfunctional yet riveting relationship with the truly memorable Phoebe Phelps. The nonlinear structure abounds with entertaining anecdotes ... Stylistically, Inside Story is most reminiscent of Dylan’s Chronicles, a master artist following his muse to create a genre-defying and career-defining work.
Chuck Palahniuk
Rave Booklist ...inventive, lacerating satire ... Palahniuk expertly balances skewering of cultural institutions with profound insights into the nature of authenticity and the myriad ways we become damaged. The sheer abundance of creative ideas buoyed aloft by the vibrancy of the prose signal a master storyteller energized by delight in his own ingenuity.
Michael Gorra
Rave Booklist ... transcendent ... Gorra expertly mines his own deep reading of the Faulkner oeuvre to serve as our Virgil and guide us through an exploration of how the Civil War influenced Faulkner’s work and how, in turn, Faulkner’s writing helped shape modern literature. Gorra adroitly and poignantly portrays Faulkner at war with himself, juxtaposed and entwined with the history of a cleaved nation, to provide a compelling and necessary reexamination of a towering literary figure.
Nicholson Baker
Rave Booklist Baker’s effort to share his extensive knowledge has resulted in an awe-inspiring quest that reads like an adventure, a war story, and a scientific mystery of psychological suspense rolled into on. He uses a diary format, with daily entries from March 9 through May 18, 2019, that typically begin with brief asides about Baker’s beloved dogs or the mundane household chores he undertakes before launching, once again, into the world of biological warfare and his country’s ongoing attempts to hide its secrets. This approach proves to be an inspired choice as Baker’s formidable narrative skill and tenacity provide for a thoroughly riveting account and powerful testimony to the need for truth.
Norman Lock
Positive Booklist Lock’s facility with language and sharp ear make him a worthy mimic of the likes of the Master and other literary luminaries. Lock nimbly explores race, gender, and identity through a historical lens while displaying a joyous love of language.
Erik Larson
Rave Booklist What Larson brilliantly provides are the finer details of the effects on England as he focuses on the family and home of its dynamic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable leader ... Larson’s skill at integrating vast research and talent for capturing compelling human dramas culminate in an inspirational portrait of one of history’s finest, most fearless leaders.
Andrew Krivak
Rave Booklist Krivak’s...spare, lyrical latest is a meditative fable set in a near-future, post-civilization world ... The sentences are polished stones of wonder and the setting deliberately vague, likely several generations since humans were earth’s dominant species. Nature has reclaimed its dominance. The elegiac tone reflects what is lost and what will be lost, an enchantment as if Wendell Berry had reimagined Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Larry Brown
Rave Booklist Brown’s fiction shows the early influences of authors he read voraciously, including Flannery O’Connor, Charles Bukowski, and Cormac McCarthy, but his own style emerged during his evolution as a writer who eventually set up shop near the intersection of Carver and Faulkner ... Threads of humor and grace run through the tales of violence, infidelities, and alcoholism, masterfully introducing an unexpected compassion. Brown excels at capturing psychological complexity with spare, humane prose in an original voice that was sadly lost to us far too soon.
Philip Caputo
Positive Booklist Caputo knows something about combat and violence and the devastating toll it takes. The setting here is the vividly rendered Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but the battlefield nonetheless remains that of men’s souls ... The linked stories introduce a cast of memorable, three-dimensional, recurring characters, but it is the larger themes of love and sacrifice and the fraught bonds of male relationships that provide the real connective tissue. Caputo expertly crafts his psychologically astute narratives to explore how fathers and sons, combat veterans, and old high-school pals attempt to navigate their own subtly complex emotional terrain to find peace, forgiveness, and hope. As in every battle, some survive and some do not, but Caputo does suggest, at the end, that healing is possible.
Rick Moody
Positive Booklist Moody balances this emotional adversity with poignant digressions regarding his involvement with a \'theatrical entity\' that designs productions for an audience of one and his shrewd yet entertaining observations of his Brooklyn neighbors. Moody’s sheer delight with language and his clever turns of phrase hint at a sense of wonder and hope, while his Knausgaardian introspection leaves him contemplating the intersection of fate and magic, recognizing that good fortune seems preordained while transcending tragedy requires something magical, namely, the power of love.
Zach Powers
Rave Booklist In his debut novel, Powers masterfully evokes postwar Russia and his inventive plot offers moments of tenderness and grace along with interjections of dark humor. Themes of family, home, and identity are explored with great pathos and psychological acuity. The dichotomy of national ambition versus the day-to-day heroism of citizens is a timely and timeless reminder of what makes a nation great. For fans of Anthony Marra.
Jonathan Coe
Rave Booklist ...[a] politically charged comedy of manners ... Coe’s singular achievement is the dexterity with which he illustrates the generational conflicts and the nuanced experiences of aging, loneliness, declining health, and the seemingly irreversible march toward obsolescence as the inevitable cyclical counterpart of youthful idealism and romanticized enlightenment. Timely and timeless, this plaintive, clarion call is an acerbic, keenly observed satire peppered with the penetrating wit for which Coe is so justly admired. Like his protagonist, who receives a surprise Booker Prize nod, Coe too should be similarly rewarded.
Mike Freedman
Rave Booklist This hyperliterate, darkly comic skewering of modern masculinity pits the two combatants in a battle for supremacy via quasi-military tactics and uproariously funny, cringe-inducing high jinks ... Freedman masterfully blends humor with thought-provoking and poignant insights. The dialogue hums and the two main characters are colorful, memorable, and thoroughly human, each on his own treacherous path toward the discovery of what it truly means to be a man.
T.C. Boyle
Positive Booklist ...[a] spellbinding fictionalized take on the now-infamous Harvard Psilocybin Project, which Leary began in 1960 ... Cameos by Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and Ken Kesey further capture the time period, while Boyle’s trenchant cultural observations slyly depict how establishment gives way to antiestablishment in this engrossing, mind-expanding trip ... Boyle’s latest work of countercultural, biographical fiction will lure his devotees and the newly curious alike.
Salvatore Scibona
Rave Booklist Scibona’s lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice ... Scibona’s greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership.
Brendan Mathews
Positive Booklist Mathews demonstrates in these stories an uncanny ability to inhabit characters with just a few well-crafted sentences. A master impersonator, Mathews employs a variety of voices, capturing the subtle nuances of dialect and pop lingo to explore with psychological acuity the doubt and insecurities that plague these varied individuals ... Mathews excels at portraying the emotional pain felt by those without a clear place in the world and the universality of self-doubt. The versatility of literary techniques shows a writer in the process of sharpening his unique voice.
Edward Humes
Positive Booklist The narrative heats up as Humes uncovers the inherently flawed, self-regulating process in which forensic labs are under the jurisdiction of law enforcement ... In this riveting overview of forensic science, Humes goes on to note that similar longstanding \'evidence,\' including fingerprints and bite-mark analysis, are of equally dubious merit, relying more on opinion than science. Hume’s fascinating account is perfect for the many readers interested in crime-scene investigation.
Genie Chipps Henderson
Rave Booklist The once-scenic Dutch elm–lined main streets of the Hamptons serve as both a reminder of a more genteel time and an omen of things to come in Henderson’s keenly observed and skillfully structured historical novel ... As Henderson subtly and cleverly ratchets up the suspense, she presents a richly textured exploration of class and society filtered through the lenses of several characters whose lives are thrown off course ... For readers of Richard Russo and Elizabeth Strout.
Marina Perezagua, Trans. by Valerie Miles
Positive Booklist Rich with symbolism and recurring motifs, the story folds in on itself like origami. We learn that H has committed a crime, followed by her confession, and that she has been both victim and witness to acts of state-sponsored violence, yet is able to find hope amid the wreckage. Although the letter \'H\' is often silent, this thought-provoking novel charting the aching distance between the heart and tongue gives voice to the mutability and resilience of the human spirit.
Randy Kennedy
Positive Booklist Online Itinerant car thief Troy Falconer has little need of possessions, yet his rootless existence consists of stealing clothes out of the seedy Texas motel rooms of similarly sized men before absconding in the victim’s car. When Troy and his reticent, bighearted brother, Harlan, set out on an ill-fated car trip across the Panhandle in late 1972, hoping to locate Harlan’s scheming wife, who has skipped town with his life savings, they inadvertently kidnap an 11-year-old Mennonite girl who is in the back of the stolen station wagon ... This deceptively polished confessional imbues the three-dimensional characters with humor, cynicism, and considerable pathos in artful contrast to the moonlike landscape of West Texas.
Andre Dubus III
Rave Booklist \"Dubus evokes a dazzling palette of emotions as he skillfully unpacks the psychological tensions between remorse and guilt, fear and forgiveness, anger and love. Susan, Daniel, and Lois are fully realized and authentic characters who live with pain and heartache while struggling to fill the tremendous void created by the tragedy. Heartrending yet unsentimental, this powerful testament to the human spirit asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable and to empathize with the broken.\
Norman Lock
Positive Booklist Online The fifth in Lock’s consistently excellent American Novel series follows army chaplain Robert Winter as he navigates the tumultuous mid-nineteenth century while serving in the Mexican War and, later, at the Mormon Rebellion. He has witnessed man’s inhumanity to man, and his faith is challenged, but he retains in his heart a tenderness for a young, spirited woman back in Amherst, Emily Dickinson ... Although Emily does not return Robert’s affections, Lock skillfully hints at the exuberant and tempestuous mind that will produce hundreds of poems, most of which were not published until after her death.
Paul Broks
Positive Booklist In this meditative investigation into the nature and history of consciousness, Broks is an engaging Virgil to the reader’s Dante as we tour the Jungian labyrinth of the mind, successfully blending Greek mythology, philosophy, allegory, memoir, case studies, and thought experiments… Broks plants seeds that flower pages later as he explains that our mental landscape seems to extend far beyond the confines of our skull-sized kingdoms, or as Hamlet keenly observed, ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.’”
John Connolly
Rave Booklist \"Connolly’s love is evident in his impressive amount of research on and deep knowledge of his subject. The golden age of Hollywood is vividly and authentically drawn, with asides about the gossip, bed-hopping, drug use, untimely deaths, and subsequent obituaries that began with the phrase, \'Formally in Pictures.\' This dazzling and altogether wonderful book sets a new standard for the biographical historical novel.\
Chuck Palahniuk
Positive Booklist One of our most visionary and fearless literary “equal opportunity offenders” is back with what is perhaps his darkest, most biting satire to date ... Palahniuk’s razor-sharp insights and boundless imagination are matched only by his ability to make even the most stomach-churning scenes somehow vividly entertaining.
Jonathan Evison
Rave Booklist This tender bildungsroman follows Mike from one setback to another, each interaction involving slyly observant and brilliantly witty dialogue that also poignantly conveys vulnerability. Evison skillfully weaves the American Dream into a subtle social novel to illustrate how race and class can thwart aspiration. In his bighearted portrayal of Mike Muñoz, Evison has created an indelible human spirit content to live authentically, which just might prove to be the true American dream. For readers of Sam Lipsyte and Jonathan Tropper.
Bruce Holbert
Positive Booklist ...[a] bleak yet emotionally authentic chronicle ... Resplendent descriptions and quick-witted dialogue serve as necessary counterpoint to visceral depictions of violence. The titular libation is both the catalyst of the destruction wrought by each family member and the balm with which each seeks reprieval from pain.
David Mamet
Rave Booklist Mamet offers a master class on dialogue as the witty repartee and newsroom banter mimic the syncopated pop of the infamous tommy gun while adding rich visual texture. The prose is economical yet lustrous, perfectly capturing a time when facility with language was prized. In brilliantly staged vignettes, reporters and cops share stories peppered with humorous anecdotes about unfortunate souls. As Hodges unravels the mystery surrounding Annie’s death, leading him deeper into the underbelly of greed and power, his journey offers subtle commentary on class, religion, race, and politics.
Mark Helprin
Rave Booklist It is the fluidity of Helprin’s prose that makes this novel of ideas so utterly captivating and Jules a lovable if flawed hero. Helprin’s principal achievement lies in his subtle, often profound exploration of religious intolerance, capitalism, and technological advances in stark contrast to Jules’ inspiring humanism. These themes are never didactic but instead build on the metaphor of the Seine with its treacherous current, whirlpools, and half-submerged tree trunks churning just below the surface while Jules glides skillfully along in his delicate 'shell.'”
Jon McGregor
Rave Booklist McGregor masterfully employs a free, indirect style that forgoes quotation marks and seamlessly blends narrative, dialogue, and wonderfully observant, poetic musings. McGregor excels at breathing life into characters with brief phrases or quotes that add up to deep, three-dimensional creations. Longlisted for the Man Booker, McGregor’s novel’s subtly devastating impact ultimately imparts wisdom about the tenuous and priceless gift of life. For fans of Elizabeth Strout and Richard Russo.
Brendan Mathews
Rave Booklist As everything rolls toward an adrenaline-fueled finale, Mathews brilliantly creates characters who embody the esprit de corps of immigrants and movingly explores themes of class, society, race, and family. For fans of Michael Chabon and E. L. Doctorow.