RaveThe AtlanticBenjamin knits together a winding history of the island’s geopolitical and domestic turbulence with an accounting of his family’s story ... Makes the case that understanding Haiti’s place in the New World might lead to a fuller accounting of the entire hemisphere’s history—including our own.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
PanThe AtlanticGumbs’s book revels in Lorde’s lush multiplicity, moving through the ebbs and flows of her life with both precision and lyricism and expanding the limits of what a biography can be and hold and feel like ... Like a hurricane, the book rapidly covers enormous ground while also moving in multiple directions at once. The effect is associative and discursive ... A comprehensive biography accounts for a subject’s shortcomings, and Gumbs does not discuss Lorde’s in any depth ... A prismatic work of art that invites more questions.
Vinson Cunningham
PositiveThe AtlanticA thinly veiled political satire cum bildungsroman ... Keen ... Cunningham’s novel reminds the reader that simple solutions—the passage of one just law, the election of a single great leader—are seldom a match for American problems.
Gabriel Bump
PositiveThe AtlanticMuch of Bump’s novel reads as commentary on the hopelessness of contemporary life, as characters react to cascading global crises and the stark, persistent divides among social classes ... Bump spins a Möbius strip of a tale through the perspectives of unrelated characters whose stories eventually converge. He nods to real events and historical figures through the names he gives these characters, which are at once referential and quietly profound.
