About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jeff Jackson
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books \"... Jeff Jackson’s novel is compulsively readable, with the driving energy one would expect from \'the last rock novel\' ... Jackson’s novel is a kind of mutant, featuring a world that is recognizable, but not quite our own ... Jeff Jackson’s Destroy All Monsters delivers a similar sensation, combining the deformed sound of an obscure, proto-punk band with the energy of a monster movie battle royal. It maintains a cryptic intrigue, while pursuing the possibilities open to the novel as a form, particularly its ability to incorporate elements from other media. The novel’s use of an A-side and B-side structure is both suited to a warped rock novel, and another reason to reread the work ... Jackson’s book itself is an interrogation of our culture (digital and otherwise), and a successful attempt to make the novel matter again. Destroy All Monsters is a double-sided work looking in two directions at once: toward a history of rock music, and toward the future of the novel.\
Amelia Gray
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Much like Isadora’s performances, one gets the sense that the novel itself is deliberately structured, despite the entrancing associative quality to many of the passages ... Isadora is a portrait of a revolutionary artist who endures extreme misfortune and the flow of history, a novel whose depiction of a world on the brink of horror and atrocity feels utterly contemporary, but it is also a novel about writing, about the creation of literary art ... This suggests repetition until logic and thinking are gone, until the act of movement appears effortless. This is what is known as 'making it look easy,' which Amelia Gray has accomplished to the utmost.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle This highly literary novel does contain elements of speculative fiction — exotic technology, Joan’s otherworldly abilities and a future humanity’s radically altered biology — yet Yuknavitch does not just speculate, she extrapolates, and sheds light on our current predicament. The disasters endured by the Earth in The Book of Joan differ from our potential future only by a matter of degree ... The Book of Joan is a novel that embodies rather than explains its philosophy of writing. Yuknavitch exquisitely renders pain, terror and ecstasy with prose that feels incised. If this novel is about our present moment and our potential future, it is also about the present and future of writing.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Rave The Millions ...the stories in Homesick for Another World are screamingly funny. Though cohesive in a way few collections are, the work is a polyphonic one whose author fully inhabits a range of narrators of differing ages, genders, and geographies. It is also superbly arranged, with an almost musical variation to its progression ... Not only is this collection remarkable for its engagement with the body, ingestion, elimination, intercourse, aging, darkness, and decay — the horror and beauty thereof — it appears as if in relief against a contemporary literature largely rid of such fixations ... For the reader sick of the familiar, the staid, the banal, Ottessa Moshfegh presents an otherworldly alternative.