About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Hugo Hamilton
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books A novel narrated by a novel — it’s a conceit that could easily devolve into kitsch. But in Hamilton’s hands, it does not ... It helps that Hamilton chose his vehicle well. Rebellion and the story of its author’s life — both of which play prominent roles in The Pages — each contain themes that echo recursively across the near-century since the book’s publication.
Richard Wright
Rave The New Republic The Man Who Lived Underground is constructed of the precise, often terse, sentences that are a hallmark of Wright’s work, and its prose, thrumming with energy, has many pleasures to offer. Its story, in contrast, contains none. Simply put, it’s a work of horror ... Wright explains the character’s genesis and his purpose in creating him. The novel, he says, was written as an exploration of his grandmother’s religious convictions ... Wright thought of Bolden as maddening and inscrutable. But in The Man Who Lived Underground , though he remains sober about the limits of faith, he finds meaning in her desire to set herself apart from society. In his telling, Daniels is hapless but content before his arrest, then freer when he descends into the sewers and forsakes his faith but also adrift and lonesome.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Rave Washington Independent Review of Books Of all the writers currently working on the American scene, there are few capable of producing prose I admire as much as Hanif Abdurraqib’s and none whom I have less interest in trying to emulate. His perspective is idiosyncratic and coolly confident. He gives the impression that he can transfer his entire self onto the page and remain completely at ease while doing so. His store of knowledge is intimidating, and his style inimical ... It shares much with Go Ahead in the Rain—sharp reasoning and keen observation, moving lyrical passages, and confessional sections of memoir—but its scope is more ambitious and, as it turns out, the author’s talents are well suited to a large canvas ... no single thesis, but Abdurraqib revisits a number of themes within its pages, folding new meaning into his observations each time he adopts a fresh perspective ... Abdurraqib possesses both a conversational narrative voice and great faith in his readers, the combination of which can be deceptive. Often, it seems that he’s meandering along with no terminus in mind, slipping from subject to subject and latching onto stray details as his curiosity dictates. But just when it appears that he’s hopelessly lost in his narrative, he’ll deliver an insight of such clarity that he stops you dead.
Abdellah Taia, Trans. by Emma Ramadan
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books Impressionistic and digressive, A Country for Dying has no plot nor consistent perspective. The narrative moves through time and space in a manner that can be disorienting, one character’s story blending into the next—their fantasies, fixations, and traumas merging. There are points where these transitions feel jarring or overly tenuous, and in that way, this book is challenging. But the patient reader will be well rewarded—the book has no omniscient narrator to act as a guide, but neither does it contain any contrivance or false emotion. Its prose is forceful and direct—this, no doubt, is thanks to Emma Ramadan’s fluid, responsive, and economical translation—and it becomes clear, by the book’s conclusion, that the author’s vision is cohesive and elegant ... it feels true and correct that his narrative is fragmented and littered with jagged edges, and that his characters are at once violent and rageful, remorseful and dreamy.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Rave Washington Independent Review of Books Moshfegh is among the most talented writers working. I can think of no one who writes with greater insight about isolation and the often-macabre manner in which it warps the psyche ... Vesta is a...beguiling character, but it was not the murder mystery she perseverates over that drew me in. The question of how she ended up alone at the end of her life—so isolated that there is nothing and no one to prevent her from receding into a complex imaginative world—is far more engaging ... the account of her life that appears in the form of reminiscences slipped between long fictive digressions tells a darker and more poignant story than the account of any murder.
Mark O'Connell
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books ... full of wry humor, and O’Connell is an earnest, self-effacing narrator wise enough to employ filial love as recurrent theme to give his book emotional ballast. His greatest virtue, however, is his talent as a critic and interpreter ... might seem like unsettling reading at the moment, given the great suffering we are collectively experiencing...But there is, counterintuitively, something bracing about reading the book in this context ... will strike some as a deeply cynical insight, but it can also be read as a comforting one — a means of making sense of seemingly uncontrollable forces ... Fortunately for his readers, O’Connell himself adopts a more optimistic perspective near the end of his book. After more than 200 pages of despair and bleak prognostication, he concludes his narrative with a sentiment of great maturity.