About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Michiko Kakutani
Pan Slate \"The chaos of those eras, Kakutani suggests, is suggestive of the chaos through which we’re all living now. But in attempting to limn that chaos, Kakutani reveals the shortcomings of synthesis. It simply is beyond her abilities to evoke the modern era with any kind of individual, creative language. All she has are references, and all her references are basic as hell ... It’s all a gloss, that is to say, names cherry-picked to support trend-piece-level arguments about the evolution of culture ... The buzzwords, jargon, and tired cultural references reach their apogee in Kakutani’s chapter headings, which read like baroque PowerPoint slides for an undergraduate survey course about all the shit we’re already thinking about every minute of every day. I simply cannot decide which of these induced in me the deepest, most soul-weary shudder ... it’s so impersonal, so disheartening, barely a book at all, really. Michiko Kakutani, expert reviewer, has reviewed the past 10 years. She’s read everything there is to read on the internet, and taken extensive notes, and now she’s delivering her take. Well, was it good? No—it was bad.\
Taylor Lorenz
Mixed Slate That this state of things might actually be horrible, a kind of monkey’s-paw curse delivered upon these online savants, is not a possibility that Lorenz brooks. What matters is only whether they can monetize that fame ... I don’t mean that I wish Lorenz was passing negative judgment on such behavior. It’s not exactly that I think Lorenz should...add parentheticals to each paragraph reading...though I confess it might ease my mind if she did it just once ... Bland ... We are not reading Taylor Lorenz for her analysis of early-2000s TV! We are reading her because she has a preternatural talent for informing nonteenagers about people whom millions of teenagers love passionately. Unfortunately, for the most part Extremely Online fails to make use of its author’s superpower ... What’s odd about this is that the book could have been, should have been, Lorenz’s chance to break out of the constraints that have notably chafed her while writing for mainstream outlets.
Paul Murray
Rave Slate \"When recommending Murray’s earlier masterpiece, Skippy Dies, I often tell friends not to be daunted by its doorstop-ness. The book is so inventive, so funny, so extravagantly entertaining, that to worry there’s too much of it is like worrying that one’s marriage might be too happy. What a problem to have! In The Bee Sting, Murray is working in a less fizzy, more portentous mode, and there were times I missed the puckish humor that kept Skippy’s motor running...But if The Bee Sting is a little more serious, well, we live in serious times, and it’s heartening to have a writer with Murray’s energy devoting such attention to contemporary life. The Bee Sting is 645 pages of close observation, encouraging readers to identify the disconnections and miscommunications that plague us all, the small personal disasters that our fear and dishonesty transform into apocalypses.\
Tom Hanks
Mixed Slate At least he’s not doing crypto commercials. Mediocre books hurt no one ... And there are things that Tom Hanks is naturally gifted at writing. Incisive satire, no. Rich, complex characters, no. But charming banter? Homespun coinages? ... There are no nepo babies on a Tom Hanks–written film set, and hardly any assholes. The writers are not on strike. Even the studio suits only show up on the first day of shooting, then make themselves scarce ... But Hanks’ interest in every small part—sorry, small actor—can make for rough reading. Hanks is simply constitutionally incapable of introducing a new character without delivering eight pages of their life story ... Once we’re on set, things liven up a little ... Some readers may find Hanks’ corniness fatal. I admire, I admit, his commitment to this idea of moviemaking, one that ignores the stupid, corrupt, even ugly parts of the process. I admire his relentless good cheer, the good cheer of a guy who, by all reports, has managed to remain a nice guy despite being the priceless object at the center of a multibillion-dollar industry for decades.
Ben Smith
Positive Slate Smith attempts to tell the entire 21st-century story of online media, and quite a bit of that story ends up in the book. Smith’s particularly good when he close-reads a particular publication in its ephemeral context ... Smith identifies what felt new about the site’s merging of intersectional identity with journalism, and shrewdly points out how it paved the way for the mainstreaming of new ways of thinking about feminism—and, not incidentally, laid the groundwork for #MeToo ... It’s a shame that Smith’s book, so focused on its two mad scientists turned CEOs, spends so little time really digging into what it was like for the writers and—perhaps more importantly—the readers of that era.
Michael Pedersen
Rave Slate The language is striking, its second-person construction giving it a near-romantic intimacy. Pedersen, a poet, loves a grand statement, and his memoir is testament to the naked emotionalism with which he views this lost friendship ... Scott, the lead singer of the band Frightened Rabbit, died by suicide in 2018, and Pedersen wrote the memoir in the year following, his grief the engine which drives the book. That explains, in some ways, the fireworks of the book’s language, how overflowing every page is with emotion. But it’s clear that even when Scott was alive, Pedersen was an exuberant friend, because he describes all his life’s friendships this way ... remarkable.
Elizabeth McCracken
Rave Slate The Hero of This Book is a loving, moving portrait of Natalie McCracken that doubles as a wry, helpful guide for any writer to not freak out so much about how to categorize what she is writing ... Her mordant wit ... In its 177 pages The Hero of This Book does sharply capture a remarkable person ... It’s a pointillist portrait, made up of closely-observed detail ... But even these are not enough, and toward the end of the book, McCracken gives us an entire chapter of details, sentence after sentence, a tactic that should be dulling—a daughter throwing everything she remembers onto the page—but instead feels wonderfully overwhelming, our final glimpse of this person we’ve come to love as well ... And at every turn, McCracken puckishly undercuts our expectations about the way a book like this should work.
Hua Hsu
Positive Slate I’ve never read so perfect a description of collegiate friendship as the scenes in Stay True in which Hsu recalls the long days and nights spent with his friends, including Ken ... Hsu’s book is about grief, but it is also an exploration of what friendship means, and how it can mean different things from relationship to relationship, buddy to buddy.
Tom Perrotta
Mixed Slate It’s so disappointing to find Tracy Flick, in Tracy Flick Can’t Win, stuck as the assistant principal in a suburban New Jersey high school ... Of course, my own disappointment can’t hold a candle to Tracy’s. Perrotta, a specialist in suburban malaise, all too plausibly lays out how the aspirations of a talented Georgetown scholarship student can be waylaid by bad luck and economic precarity ... Perrotta has clearly given a lot of thought to who Tracy Flick really is, what she means to readers, and what a new version of her story might accomplish in 2022. It’s a shame that this thoughtful revisiting comes wrapped in such a shoddily plotted story ... Tracy Flick Can’t Win is a mess: Eight different characters share the novel’s focus, with some grabbing the mic to speak to us directly, and others, like Vito, having their thoughts delivered in third person...Characters disappear for a hundred pages only to return at crucial moments, and Perrotta spends inordinate time setting up crucial-seeming subplots...that are essentially abandoned. The result is a novel consisting of dozens of threads, only a few of which are woven together in the novel’s very unsurprising conclusion.
Karen Joy Fowler
Mixed Slate Fowler addresses the issue of writing a historical novel about a historical bad guy in an innovative way. She doesn’t only expand her novel’s palette, telling the decades-spanning story of the entire Booth family, a clan in which John is one among many until the fateful moment he makes himself the family’s—and the nation’s—villain. She makes the audacious decision to bring a historian’s corrective and contextual voice to her historical fiction, pulling the reader out of the 19th century over and over to provide a 21st century perspective on the attitudes and actions of her characters. This makes a bit of a mess of the novel, but also serves as an intriguing new angle at a problem that’s likely to vex historical fiction writers for decades to come ... The Booths are incapable of understanding, but we are capable, and the typical historical novel might take that as a given—or at least merely suggest that note through action or dialogue. Fowler does not. She seems determined at every turn to overtly address the caution and concern she feels about telling this story, about this family, at this time ... This can get clunky. The novel occasionally seems to abjure entirely the imaginative leaps of fiction to deliver nonfiction-style exposition ... is at its most affecting, though, when it’s at its most imaginative.
Jo Ann Beard
Rave Slate ... consistently hair-raising ... bracing ... You can make shit up, but you can still be telling the truth ... The most indelible stories in Festival Days observe just as unflinchingly as Beard’s characters face the extremities of life and death. I can’t think of a writer who puts words to our most difficult moments as adroitly as Beard—who so steadfastly refuses to cut away when things get tough. It never makes Festival Days an ordeal to read, though I found myself needing to take a walk when I reached the final page of each piece. During those walks, I found myself revisiting the stories, feeling invigorated to be in the company of someone who seems so much braver than me, and to soak up just some of that bravery ... Beard’s big-heartedness and plain-spokenness makes death less scary than it seems most of the rest of the time. I think it’s because of a writerly trick that Beard uses in each of these stories, which has the effect of making the deaths proper culminations of the pieces in which they appear ... Beard is fond, as a writer, of finding three or four recurring images in a story and returning to them again and again, worrying over them like prayer beads...It doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels like the work of a writer, taking things that might otherwise become familiar and finding new meaning in them each time they return ... When, in her characters’ final moments, she returns one last time to those images, the effect is comforting. Even when these deaths are frightening, sad, or violent, they have meaning: the order imposed by a writer who patiently, kindly, takes us by the hand and explains how things are.
Elizabeth Knox
Rave Slate I felt that my position in relation to the book’s capacious intellect and imagination and moral purpose was a vertiginous one. It was thrilling and frightening, reading this book ... publishers...should be leaping at the chance to publish something this important, this beautiful, and this much fun ... each time I thought the book was done surprising me, Knox flexed her own golden gauntlet and opened another gate and flung me through it. At the end, I was shaken and grateful for the worlds I’d seen ... When I was finished with The Absolute Book I wanted everyone I knew to read it so I could discuss it with them ... [a] majestic, brain-bending novel[.]
Hermione Lee
Positive Slate Magazine Lee does her best to scour Stoppard’s life and 50-year career for that human fallibility, and while at 750 pages (plus notes) Tom Stoppard can feel as daunting as one of the master’s more vexing theatrical works, it never treats (as so many biographies do) the fame and accomplishment of its subject as foregone conclusions. Instead, Tom Stoppard remains alive to the unlikeliness of Tom Stoppard’s career from the very beginning ... [Tom Stoppard] encourages the reader to return to Stoppard’s work in ways that are richly rewarding. Lee gives wise, learned readings to each major play (and a number of minor ones), teasing apart their themes, interpreting their theatrical gestures, and placing them cleverly in the context of their author’s life and work.
Randall Kenan
Rave Slate Critics have compared Tims Creek to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and it’s true that Kenan’s grasp of his lightly fictionalized home’s history, geography, and culture was as keen as Faulkner’s ... You might argue that Kenan’s treatment of Tims Creek’s white characters is more thoughtful and complex than Faulkner’s treatment of his Black characters ... The 10 stories in the new collection are as rich and provocative and funny as the ones that came before; I particularly liked a tall tale about a Tims Creek plumber who, on a trip to New York with his wife, somehow ends up in Billy Idol’s entourage. Horrible Percy Terrell returns, in a story that explores with a keen eye and true generosity a white man beginning to confront the lies and thievery of his family’s past.
Susanna Clarke
Positive Slate ... abides by limits, and within those limits—thanks to those limits, in fact—it is a wonder ... The House is the world on which Clarke exerts her formidable world-building skills ... What’s unsettling about the book, and what I loved most about it, is that this dramatic irony is not played for comedy or for pity. Instead, it illuminates the unbridgeable gap between us, the readers, and Piranesi, and puts forth an argument that the differences between us may be just as damaging to us as they are to him. He may not be able to see how life in the House has warped him, the way we can—but our understanding of the majesty of the House is nothing like his. His enchantment at the wonders of the House, at the world he lives in, is alluring ... Of course the Other’s stories begin to fall apart, and of course Piranesi begins to understand the nature of the House and of his existence. That he trails us a bit in that understanding means that the book didn’t quite astonish me, the way Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell so often did. Instead, Piranesi is after a quieter kind of magic, exploring the ways human beings can adapt and find meaning in even the direst of conditions. Ought we all be devoting more of our energies to appreciating the beauty of our own lives and less to determining the circumstances of our imprisonments?
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Rave NPR A few months ago, the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan published, for all intents and purposes, the perfect magazine piece ... The bad news is that \'A Rough Guide to Disney World\' does not appear in Sullivan\'s new essay collection, Pulphead. The good news is that 14 other stories do, and they\'re all almost as good — which is to say, they\'re among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years ... The essays in Pulphead ... What they have in common, though, whether low or high of brow, is their author\'s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects\' and his own foibles ... a collection that shows why Sullivan might be the best magazine writer around.
Paul Murray
Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review The extravagantly entertaining Skippy Dies chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel … The ambitious length of Skippy Dies allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography … Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth.
Colson Whitehead
Positive NPR 'New York City in death was very much like New York City in life,' writes Colson Whitehead in his apocalyptic tragicomedy Zone One ... Whitehead, whose previous novels include John Henry Days and The Intuitionist, is concerned with existential loneliness in Zone One, and lampooning contemporary society and its excesses ...the book also means to deliver the visceral satisfaction promised by Whitehead's gruesome adopted genre, the horror story ... Zone One is a smart, strange, engrossing novel about the end of metaphors and the way that, as Mark Spitz knows all too well, no barrier can hold forever against the armies of death.
Lev Grossman
Rave The New York Times Book Review Grossman’s book was not only a cracking yarn but also an exploration of the way fantasy entices the reader — especially the teenage reader — with visions of a majestic alternate future, a place where meaningful quests are handed out to those otherwise at sea. The novel mapped the gulf between Quentin’s ideas of heroism and the scary, awful reality of actually being a hero ... Quentin is restless, indecisive, frustrated and frustrating; Grossman, to his credit, isn’t afraid to explore his protagonist’s rougher edges, but hanging out with ever – dissatisfied Quentin can get a little tiring ... Both plotlines in The Magician King look deep into the well of magic in Grossman’s fictional universe, and both central characters learn it’s assuredly not turtles all the way down ...in keeping with the preoccupations and innovations of this serious, heartfelt novel, turns the machinery of fantasy inside out.
Karen Russell
Mixed New York Magazine Swamplandia! suffers from a tonal disconnect, toggling between Ava’s tale—a spooky journey into a desolate landscape, like Winter’s Bone in steamy Florida—and Kiwi’s, a picaresque satire of modern excess … There’s never a chance that Swamplandia! might go off the rails...for soon the magic of Ava’s hunt for her sister falls away and a weird, dissonant story turns into a familiar, if harrowing, tale of abuse and escape. Too bad, because Ava’s search for her sister is haunting, and Swamplandia! is at its best when it explores the corrosive fear and grief that come with loss.
Chad Harbach
Rave NPR A good baseball coach and a good novelist are a lot alike, according to Chad Harbach's satisfyingly old-fashioned debut, The Art of Fielding … The characters in The Art of Fielding do suffer. They lose jobs, marriages, ballgames. They see their futures snatched away without explanation, and hurt each other without justification. But Harbach is such an empathetic writer — such a good coach — that Schwartz and his teammates suffer in ways suited to them, and feel as smart and human and real as a reader could hope for … Harbach's novel might remind you not of the highbrow writers one associates with n+1 but of John Irving's The World According to Garp in its length, its warmth, its love of sudsy plot twists.
Sonny Liew
Rave Slate [Liew is] a master of basically any style of cartooning—from Pogo-style funny animals to Mad Magazine satire to commercial caricature to wartime adventure to gekiga manga. The result is a multilayered masterpiece of comic-book and real-world history, a portrait of the postwar world made in a thrilling postmodern style. It’s funny and rich and satisfying, and one of the best comics of the year.