RaveLibrary Journal... brilliant ... reveals sobering depths beneath its flashing surface ... Long a cult rarity owing to Tonks’s subsequent religious conversion and renunciation of her writing, the revival of this beguiling 1967 novel restores a truly original voice to the shelves; a must.
Harry Crews
RaveLibrary JournalIn rough-hewn speech fluent as a river and forceful as a hammer blow, Crews captures the warmth, dignity, and brutality of his people and their fierce and awful devotion to home. This is his masterpiece.
Johanna Kaplan
RaveLibrary JournalThe latest addition to Ecco’s eclectic and reliably rewarding \'Art of the Story\' series revives Kaplan’s Jewish Book Award–winning 1975 collection Other People’s Lives, now with two more essays. Dropping readers into those lives as they unfold in all their messy, egoistic imperfection, Kaplan offers sly glimpses of human foibles and vulnerabilities, often through the penetrating eyes of young misfits ... Francine Prose’s preface aptly praises Kaplan’s \'paradoxically scathing and compassionate insight\' into characters revealed in the midst of an uncertain present, poised between Old World and New. A rare gem, recovered.
Lucille Clifton
RaveLibrary JournalClifton (1936–2010) distills centuries of family history with the same potent, easy eloquence that has placed her among the first rank of American poets ... Clifton then considers her own parents with a voice beautifully poised between her commanding father’s loquacious swagger and the egoless embrace of her selfless loving mother, who burned all of her own poems ... Clifton is one of our great truth-tellers, and this work stands among her best. Elegiac and celebratory, unfussy and profound, full of pain and healing and thanks for the ties that hold, this slim memorial contains multitudes, and every word of it is true, \'even the lies.\'
G. Willow Wilson
RaveThe Seattle Times\"... an enchanting historical fantasy adventure that combines an unconventional love story with a thoughtful exploration of faith and religious tolerance ... Although there is plenty of earthy banter along the way, Wilson relates [Vikram\'s] narrative with a spare lyricism that leaves much to the reader’s imagination, in a style that more closely resembles an exotic fairy tale than the elaborate world-building and magical lore of much fantasy fiction ... Moving beyond simplistic conceptions of good versus evil, The Bird King is ultimately a story of acceptance of self and others. It’s precisely the kind of fable we need right now.\
Valeria Luiselli
PositiveThe Seattle Times\"[Luiselli\'s] most ambitious work yet ... The result is an engaging prismatic blend of essay, travelogue and narrative that sensitizes the reader for the magnitude of what is to follow when, at the halfway point, we turn a corner, and the lost children take the wheel ... In her own more oblique, associative way, Luiselli brings to bear on our present moral crises all the ambition and humility of James Agee’s landmark Depression-era documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As with that brilliant and challenging book, Luiselli’s singular narrative may not resonate with every reader. But for many, it will prove uniquely rewarding — and even life-changing.\
John Larison
RaveThe Seattle TimesAs in Charles Portis’ classic True Grit, much of the appeal of the telling hangs upon the distinct voice of its narrator, and Jesse’s narration combines folksy vernacular with an easy loping gait, punctuated by the ringing cadences of the Good Book ... It is comfortable, burnished Western prose that goes down smooth with hardly a false note. Yet for all its wistful cowboy poetry, the story told here is decidedly unromantic, piercing the heroism of the Old West and highlighting the experiences and identities of marginalized people who were traditionally written out of the script. Larison strikes a fine balance between satisfying and surprising our expectations, in an enjoyable addition to the ever-evolving literature of the American West.
Tom Rachman
RaveThe Seattle Times\"If you’ve found yourself wondering lately whether you can love the art while hating the artist’s behavior, Tom Rachman’s moving tragicomic novel “The Italian Teacher” provides savory and satisfying food for thought ... Novels about second chances can be as cloying as they are reassuring, but Rachman avoids this by always returning to that wistful minor key, sensitizing us to loss yet surprising us with joy. Exploring the heart-rending rifts between life and art, Rachman gradually reveals the graceless beauty of one man’s most inartful life.\
Akwaeke Emezi
RaveThe Seattle Times\"Akwaeke Emezi’s bewitching and heart-rending Freshwater is a coming-of-age novel like no other ... Whereas many works of magical realism gradually weave otherworldly elements into familiar reality, Emezi reverses this process. Magic is the base reality, and the reader is plunged at once into a murky liminal space of blood, smoke and snakes ... For all its sheer invention, Freshwater feels more like an interpretive journey through uncharted territory with an experienced guide. Potent and moving, knowing and strange, this is a powerful and irresistibly unsettling debut.\
Jesmyn Ward
RaveThe Seattle TimesJesmyn Ward immerses the reader in a mesmerizing, cathartic family story, steeped in the painful legacy of American racism ... Ward’s spellbinding prose has a fervid physicality, teeming with the sights, smells, tastes and textures of her native Gulf town of DeLisle, Mississippi, rechristened here as Bois Sauvage. Her images pulse with stunning intensity, seeming to peer into the hidden nature of things, while laying bare the hearts of her characters. More powerful still is the seemingly boundless compassion that Ward demonstrates toward even the least lovable of her creations, expressed through lines that course with pain and love. The result is a profoundly moving and redemptive novel that sounds the depths of our nation’s abiding sorrow and shame, and a fitting shelf-mate to such Southern Gothic masterworks as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulker’s As I Lay Dying.
Richard Flanagan
RaveThe Seattle TimesIn his youth before the war, Dorrigo fell desperately in love with young Amy Mulvaney, the wife of his uncle Keith. In describing their all-consuming affair, Flanagan seems at times to have turned the pen over to his besotted hero. Memories of their superlative passion provide a respite for the reader in the horrors that are to come, as they do for Dorrigo himself … There are passages toward the middle of Flanagan’s book that rival Dante in their unrelenting depictions of nightmarish atrocity and degradation and of staggering futility. It is in describing this crucible of suffering that Flanagan’s own poetic mastery is most keenly felt and appreciated. One could not wish a more capable Virgil to guide our steps through this hell.
Kevin Canty
RaveThe Seattle Times...Canty’s masterly, affecting The Underworld, is less about an abysmal hell than the purgatory of survival in a spiritually and literally toxic small town ... As vivid as his descriptions of the Silver Valley are, Canty’s real genius lies in his subtly drawn depiction of the emotional and psychological landscape of this 'big incomprehensible thing' ... In spare, moving prose, Canty brilliantly captures the tragic contradictions of this dark spring, and of lives stubbornly laid down for profit in tainted earth that daily reclaims its own.
Colm Tóibín
RaveThe Seattle Times...a brilliant and challenging reinvention ... Each generation created its own version of the story, and Tóibín fulfills this ancient expectation by both drawing on and departing from these varied classical sources, inventing fresh episodes that invite new questions ... Tóibín taps into the main vein of Greek tragedy, providing a stunning and intensely satisfying immersion in bloody vengeance that would do Aeschylus proud.
Michael Chabon
RaveThe Seattle Times...[an] intoxicating new novel ... Reading Moonglow feels like unpacking an old trunk packed with forgotten family heirlooms, each uniquely precious object held to the light where it glows with its own secret significance ... In less masterful hands, this pell-mell assortment of anecdotes and digressions might seem indulgent, but Chabon is a virtuoso storyteller who quickly allays any uncertainty about our destination by engaging us in an utterly captivating journey.
Alexander Weinstein
RaveThe Seattle TimesThe timely, nuanced stories in Children of the New World are some of the most brilliantly disconcerting fiction in recent memory ... As with George Saunders or Ray Bradbury, Weinstein’s satiric ingenuity seldom overpowers his deep compassion for our wayward species. To this he adds a keenly observant sense of the everyday ... superlatively moving and thought-provoking, imbued with disarming pathos and a palpable sense of wonder and loss.
Donald Ray Pollack
RaveThe Seattle TimesReaders venturing into this grim territory, out beyond Cormac McCarthy and Patrick DeWitt, in the bizarre vicinity of Harry Crews’ manic intensity and the depraved noir of Jim Thompson, are apt to be startled and disturbed by what they witness, and not least of all by the sound of their own laughter ... While this unpredictable menace drives the story, it is in the vividness of Pollock’s descriptions of sordidness and depravity that his dark genius shines ... All of this is leavened by brilliant turns of phrase, profane jokes and folksy aphorisms, resulting in a kind of irresistible vision of a foolish, fallen world.
Larry Watson
RaveThe Seattle TimesIn the virile, enigmatic character of Calvin, Watson both indulges in and reworks the romantic myth of the American cowboy in ways reminiscent of Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy or Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By. He is a man capable of seemingly anything except sticking around, destined to be a catalyst for other people’s stories, but with no resolution to his own...A master of spare, economical storytelling, Watson sweeps us up in a captivating family drama that departs as quickly as it came, leaving us gratified yet hungry for more.
Joshua Hammer
PositiveThe Seattle TimesThere’s no need to reveal here just how these brave librarians and citizens managed to smuggle 377,000 intact manuscripts out of harm’s way past a brutal totalitarian regime, through lawless wilderness and war zones to Mali’s capital city of Bamako far to the south. Suffice it to say that they earn their 'bad ass' sobriquet several times over. Riveting skulduggery, revealing history and current affairs combine in a compelling narrative with a rare happy ending. So far.
