About Book Marks
Christopher Frizzelle
Recent Reviews
Garth Greenwell
Rave The Stranger One quality of this extraordinary novel is the way its intensities echo across chapters, flaring up in the life of one character and then another, crossing chasms of experience, illuminating new perspectives ... The novel is full of beautiful writing about the pitfalls of teaching, the violence of politics, and the purpose of poetry, but the sex scenes are the most memorable. Few writers write about sex so well and with so much sensitivity. The brilliance and animal warmth of Greenwell\'s style, the depth of insight, and the range of empathy, confer on even gloomy subjects a kind of radiance ... One of the book\'s many achievements is the way it dramatizes the paradoxes of men, the glowing anxieties they carry and conceal, and the way that roles (in sex, in society) have the power to trap or liberate them.
Garth Greenwell
Rave The Portland Mercury The brilliance and animal warmth of Greenwell\'s style, the depth of insight, and the range of empathy, confer on even gloomy subjects a kind of radiance ... One of the book\'s many achievements is the way it dramatizes the paradoxes of men, the glowing anxieties they carry and conceal, and the way that roles (in sex, in society) have the power to trap or liberate them.
Claire Dederer
Rave The Stranger What emerges, in the course of this vivid, hilarious, daring self-portrait of a book, is a person who has achieved clarity about her own contradictions, or at least has figured out how to use those contradictions as an excuse to bring lively writing into the world ... This knot of contradictions runs like a rip current through the book, but despite her worries that there is something troubled about her nature, this is not a troubling book. The world is troubling, yes, but this narrator's intelligence, her curiosity about the ambivalence that defines interiority, and the unique light cast by her experiences growing up in Seattle the 1970s and '80s yield insight and laughs on every page.
Garth Greenwell
Rave The Stranger The story is compelling in spite of its bareness, compelling enough that, toward the end, I started to resent anything in the outside world that prevented me from continuing to read. You know a book has its grip on you if the world within it is so rich, so exquisitely tense, that you resent the real one for keeping you from it.