About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Maggie Nelson
Positive Chicago Review of Books Insightful as they are, I’m not sure the essays and conversations in Like Love offer the same feelings of risk and vulnerability that characterize Nelson’s more well-known books ... But I don’t expect it to have the same level of personal exploration as The Argonauts or Bluets ... It’s a credit to Like Love that its essays and conversations consistently recognize the nature of these roles and play them so well.
Don Paterson
Positive Chicago Review of Books Like Paterson’s poetry, Toy Fights constantly doubles back on itself and questions its ability to produce meaning ... Toy Fights has no expectations and makes no demands. It knows there’s no guarantee that it will connect with readers, and that it has flaws and blind spots. As I’ve tried to suggest, it doesn’t just say these things—it embraces them and makes them core principles.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Mixed The Brooklyn Rail Explor[es] not only the way that people can build spaces or shelters out of personal connections but also the way that spaces shape lives ... Feels thinner than Open Water at some points, most notably in the way it incorporates visual arts and music into its pages ... [This] focus on language’s limits helps avoid overconfidence—as though any of these feelings or experiences could be fully expressed—but it feels misplaced ... Small Worlds also has words, and it achieves a great deal with them. Nelson’s writing of summer is fantastic.
Martin Riker
Positive Chicago Review of Books Riker’s novel is in good literary company as a book in which \'nothing happens\' ... What begins as a statement of absence transforms into a positive construction of an alternate world: one that questions our inherited sense of reality and shows how much we take for granted in our everyday lives ... The Guest Lecture performs this transformation partly through Abby’s analysis of John Maynard Keynes ... The voice is not disembodied.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Pittsburg Post-Gazette The resulting style has been praised by a wide range of readers and critics, and it deserves every word and more ... If there’s one thing that distinguishes Lucy by the Sea from the other Lucy Barton novels, it’s the way it draws Strout’s previous novels together into a separate literary world.
May-Lee Chai
Rave Star Tribune ... deftly dramatizes the complicated ways that histories and identities intersect for members of the Chinese diaspora, in this case to create boundaries that forbid meaningful connection ... These two stories bookend this moving, well crafted collection perfectly, as they explore ways in which the human capacities for resilience and imagination, so obviously on display in immigrants\' lives, shape our lives more broadly — and how essential they will be in determining forms of life in the future.
Teddy Wayne
Pan Boston Globe Its plot follows a central male character and its narrative voice never strays far from that character’s thoughts ... In his past work, Wayne has been able to create complex, engaging novels within this framework ... But I’m not sure the same is true this time ... Maybe it’s because Paul represents everything I try to avoid in life (I’m a 48-year-old white English professor), but the more time I spent with him, the harder I found it to take him seriously. And the less I wanted to ... I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that Paul’s takeaway after executing his plan seems so delusional that when I went back and reread the novel from the beginning, it occurred to me that it might all be narrated from a psychiatric hospital ... Of course, it’s possible this is the point.
Maggie Nelson
Mixed Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The essay on art pushes back against calls for art to contribute to social justice. The chapter on sex asserts the possibilities of sexual liberation against what Nelson sees as a current trend (which she links to the #MeToo movement) toward \'detailing the gruesomeness and pervasiveness of (hetero)sexual power relations.\' In other words, both chapters primarily fight against restrictions instead of exploring new possibilities. The final chapter on climate looks outward, but only tentatively ... [a] limited conclusion may disappoint some Nelson fans, particularly those (like me) who were so moved by The Argonauts. But the author is more focused on creating a practice of freedom with her style than on any triumphs her style might produce ... Nelson’s most remarkable achievement, not only in On Freedom but across all her books, is that she consistently makes good on this wager to enact a form of care through her style. Of course, readers may recognize this achievement and still be left with a feeling of disappointment at the book’s modesty.
Brandon Taylor
Positive PIttsburgh Post-Gazette The vision on display in [one] paragraph—the way it surveys genders, races, sexualities, and fashion choices in the room and haphazardly mixes and matches them—is one of Brandon Taylor’s major achievements ... There are not many writers who represent such a wide range of identities in their fiction, nor are there many who weave them together so effortlessly. But Taylor’s fiction is no multicultural paradise ... Both Real Life and Filthy Animals focus on characters who struggle to create meaningful connections amidst this array of identity ... Both books offer moments of possibility, but never any deep connections.
Blake Bailey
Positive The Pittsburg Post-Gazette Everyone who reads Blake Bailey’s 912-page Philip Roth: The Biography will say it is well researched, and they will all be right ... Part of the value of Mr. Bailey’s biography comes from the wealth of information it provides about Roth’s early years ... Mr. Bailey does not condemn Roth for these actions. Nor does he defend him. Instead, he presents his research as evenly as possible, without making judgments ... voluminously researched, good-humored, and honestly written. Readers will discover new information about Roth’s personal life and probably even learn about written works of his that they didn’t know existed. But if Roth wanted it to turn him into Emma Bovary he’d only be disappointed. Again.
Patricia Lockwood
Positive The Pittsburg Post-Gazette To her credit, Patricia Lockwood doesn’t write this experience as though it will awaken her character to what \'really matters.\' She also doesn’t use it to paint her character’s prior life as shallow. Rather, she explores whether the two worlds can co-exist, and how they change each other when they meet.