‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Peter Ames Carlin

Positive The New York Times Sensitive and well-made ... Makes for sometimes dull reading ... R.E.M.’s music does for me what it always has — it adds a shivery sense of the mythic to the ordinary and everyday. And it still sounds good loud.

Oliver Sacks

Mixed The New York Times The first 200 pages of Oliver Sacks’s letters are among the best things I’ve read all year. He was new in America, not long out of Oxford University, writing to family and friends back home, and his observations were electric — wild and funny and befuddled and frank ... The entire book is worthwhile, but only the first third sings. After a certain point, by the early 1970s, fame sneaked up on Sacks and his letters became more decorous, professional and bland.

Robert Hilburn

Pan The New York Times A toothless hagiography packed with obvious filler, notably extended quotations from song lyrics and panegyrics from admirers ... This book demonstrates little feel for Newman’s music. I wanted it to contain memorable ideas and sentences, but it does not ... A better-reported and more critical biography will probably have to wait until Newman, and others central to his story, are no longer with us.

Michel Houellebecq

Pan The New York Times It gets off to a slow start, so slow that I debated abandoning my copy on a subway seat so that it could depress another passenger. That seemed cruel and random, so I hung on and finished it ... Tedious and disengaged ... Slack ... As if Houellebecq’s heart were not in it. There are many failed epigrams. He’s an arsonist who has lost his matches.

Tony Tulathimutte

Rave The New York Times This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it ... I read Rejection during a week when I felt down, and it almost stubbed me out, like a cigarette ... But Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity ... He’s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife ... Tulathimutte’s writing about these matters is sophisticated, circumspect, impossible to pin down. He’s an elusive anatomist of culture-war provocations ... This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’ve scraped myself up off the floor to be able to write: Tulathimutte is a big talent and he is clearly just getting started.

Sally Rooney

Rave The New York Times I admire Intermezzo almost without reservation ... Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work...is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive ... Wise, resonant, and witty ... There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea ... A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you ... Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading ... This book charmed and moved me.

Garth Greenwell

Pan The New York Times The good news about Small Rain is that medical sagas, like heist movies, have layers of built-in drama ... The bad news is that, in its slow piling on of medical minutiae over more than 300 pages, Small Rain listlessly drifts ... There is little humor, and this lack gives the book a passive quality. (Gallows humor is frequently the best part of illness stories) ... It gives me no pleasure to find so little pulse in “Small Rain.” I’m a Greenwell fan. Can a misfire be a blessing in disguise?

Rachel Kushner

Rave The New York Times Sinuous and powerfully understated ... Consolidates Kushner’s status as one of finest novelists working in the English language. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration ... Pointed comic observation in this novel blends with her earnestness in vinaigrette harmony.

Danzy Senna

Rave The New York Times Feels more like a summer blockbuster ... Funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart ... The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition ... In the end, Senna delivers a mostly inspired, and mostly happy, series of narrative double axels that will make you reconsider who the true sellouts are.

Carrie Rickey

Positive The New York Times Book Review Perceptive ... Rickey’s narrative threatens at times to turn into an annotated filmography. But I devoured A Complicated Passion happily.

Joy Williams

Rave The New York Times Book Review Practically a book of poetry ... Williams distills a lot of learning — about philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics and morality — into her vignettes ... Running almost silently below the loneliness and the silky comedy in these stories is the sense, down on earth, of acidifying oceans, species loss and space junk crashing Muskily down from the cosmos.

Kevin Barry

Mixed The New York Times Let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Heart in Winter is not top-shelf Kevin Barry. He never quite gets a handle on these characters ... Because Barry is Barry, moments of comic wonderment sneak in through the pantry door ... Perhaps fearing he would give his readers too little, Barry has given them too much. It’s a great quality in a host, except when it isn’t.

Francine Prose

Mixed The New York Times This memoir, which despite its darts of insight and many flashes of good writing remains lukewarm and distant ... If this quarter-life crisis memoir were a stool, the third leg — after Russo’s story and Prose’s own — would be the author’s attempt at a group portrait of her generation, not the baby boomers writ large but a sophisticated subset of them. This material is the least successful.

Rachel Cusk

Pan The New York Times Skippable for all but her most devoted tier of readers ... Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, Parade is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently...interesting ... Airless and abstract ... The art talk that consumes this novel is leaden. It is the way you might begin to speak if you were raised solely in the Tate and the Whitney and had never eaten a hot dog.

Carrie Courogen

Positive The New York Times Casual, sympathetic and compulsively readable ... It’s an awkward title that, as the book goes on, begins to seem apt ... This is Courogen’s first book, and she relates it as if over Negronis. She casually drops a lot of f-bombs. At times, she rambles ... The author is an ardent fan who’s read everything and talked to whomever she could. Her intensity shines. Sometimes you’d rather ride along with a fan than with a professor.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Pan The New York Times Book Review Ambitious but uneven and exhausting ... Hallberg is an intelligent writer, but he’s a wild and frequently sloppy one. His narratives don’t click into gear; his curveball only sometimes makes it over the plate ... There is little sense of momentum; the pages never turn themselves. It is so intensely written that it gave me a headache, as if I had been grinding my teeth. I was glad when it was over.

Honor Levy

Mixed The New York Times We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in My First Book, a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan ... She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she was encouraged to publish My First Book too soon. The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones, a few of which I suspect were typed on a MacBook a long time ago ... In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort.

Glenn Loury

Positive The New York Times Unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read ... The annihilating level of detail in Loury’s book convinces you that he is aiming for straight talk, even if candor and honesty aren’t quite the same thing. It’s among this book’s drawbacks that the two Glenn Lourys aren’t persuasively synthesized. Late Admissions is also about 100 pages too long. The writing can be haphazard ... You don’t finish Late Admissions particularly liking Loury, or admiring him. He’s sorry about a lot of the things he’s done. But it’s to his credit that he doesn’t gin up a false catharsis, a ready-made Today Show moment of abiding contrition.

Hari Kunzru

Pan The New York Times Overwrought ... Put a few thousand sentences like these between hard covers, add wooden dialogue...and you have Blue Ruin ... I was surprised to find so little to admire in this novel.

Joseph Epstein

Mixed The New York Times Book Review The essays are, by and large, as tweedy and self-satisfied as these lines make them sound. There are no wild hairs in them, no sudden deepenings of tone. Nothing is at stake.

Delmore Schwartz, ed. Ben Mazer

Positive The New York Times Book Review Schwartz’s poems, especially the later ones, are dated ... There is something more important to talk about. Unearthed here is Schwartz’s masterpiece, a two-part autobiographical poem in free verse, \"Genesis,\" which he worked on for more than a decade. It’s so squirming and alive that it will, I suspect, be the rock upon which future considerations of Schwartz will stand.

Sonny Rollins, ed. Sam V. H. Reese

Mixed The New York Times Book Review Alas, Reese does not explain his editing process — how he winnowed six boxes of material down to a 152-page book that still contains a lot of filler and close-to-meaningless verbiage ... As an editor, Reese writes sensitively about Rollins’s music but somehow never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. His introduction does not mention Rollins’s drug use and other troubles. His endnotes are sparse.

Salman Rushdie

Positive The New York Times \"...candid, plain-spoken and gripping ... I’ve rarely read about worse physical trauma ... This is not, it must be said, the most elegant book. It does not have the emotional, intellectual and philosophical richness of the journalist Philippe Lançon’s memoir Disturbance (2019), about surviving the 2015 Charlie Hebdo magazine attacks by thugs claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda. But Rushdie was wise to largely stick to the details and stay out of his story’s way. To paraphrase Roy Blount Jr., I put this book down only once or twice, to wipe off the sweat ... Humor bubbles up organically from pain ... Knife is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for.\

Percival Everett

Rave The New York Times \"Because this is a Percival Everett novel, we are not surprised that he tears down and rebuilds a cultural landmark ... Because this is a Percival Everett novel, too, it luxuriates in language. Everett, like Twain, is a master of American argot; he is the code switcher’s code switcher. In James, he puts his skills to incandescent use ... What sets James above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being ... My ideal of hell would be to live with a library that contained only reimaginings of famous novels. It’s a wet-brained and dutiful genre, by and large...James is the rarest of exceptions. It should come bundled with Twain’s novel. It is a tangled and subversive homage, a labor of rough love ... Everett shoots what is certain to be this book’s legion of readers straight through the heart.\

Rita Bullwinkel

Rave The New York Times It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as Headshot ... Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice ... To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement ... There is no whimsy in Headshot. Instead, there is astringency ... The impact of this novel, though, lasts a long time, like a sharp fist to your shoulder. It is so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.

Tricia Romano

Rave The New York Times Book Review A well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip ... Romano, who worked at The Voice for eight years in its later stages, clearly asked good questions, and she has a snappy sense of conversational rhythm ... The tone of The Freaks Came Out to Write is a symphonic kind of anarchy.

Mary V. Dearborn

Positive The New York Times It is competent and professional, as if built from solid pine and good plaster. It is dispassionate and well researched. Reading it is brutal because McCullers’s life was brutal to endure ... earborn’s style is clean; we’re in a doctor’s office or a museum, and McCullers’s life is in a lighted display box ... A necessary book, though. It builds on Carr’s work and considers newly released material, including letters and journals and, most tantalizingly, transcripts of McCullers’s late-life psychiatric sessions with the female doctor who would become her lover and gatekeeper.

Calvin Trillin

Rave The New York Times This book is buoyant and crunchy from end to end ... Trillin’s understatement matters because through it he resolves the traumas of life into humane comedy ... Maybe he included this lesser stuff for the same reason he once proposed that The New Yorker intentionally print one cartoon in each issue that isn’t funny.

Lucy Sante

Rave The New York Times Book Review Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens ... Vividly written ... One of the things that make this memoir convincing is that it is, on a certain level, unconvincing. Sante is a writer with a lot of peripheral vision ... It’s a story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring. Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal.

Sheila Heti

Rave The New York Times Powerful and intimate ... The book is made up of Heti’s frank, funny, filthy and casually philosophical diaries, 10 years of them ... The effect is riveting ... Heti is wrestling openly with the things that matter.

Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer

Rave The New York Times Not wet but dry. It is also short, strange, spiky and sublime. It’s a historical novel, a great speckled bird of a story, set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. Empires are in collision and the vibe is hallucinatory ... Enrigue wears his influences on his sleeve.

Blake Butler

Mixed The New York Times An atrocity exhibition. Butler taps a vein of garish and almost comic malevolence that keeps flowing ... It’s a disordered book, almost Lovecraftian at times in its airless luridness. By the end, the writing has become both tedious and odious. But the first 125 pages or so are electric and sharply observed ... He is unsparing about Brodak’s flaws, but his tone is warm and sympathetic. If you squint, you can see this tell-all, train-wreck memoir as an act of love ... My feelings about this book are mixed, but I won’t forget reading it. It makes you look up at the sky, fearful of what might fall out of it.

Judith Tick

Pan The New York Times Fitzgerald has proved to be a difficult subject for biographers ... Academic language creeps like mold into this biography ... Tick clearly reveres Fitzgerald’s music, but her prose is buttoned-up. She can’t quite transmit her enthusiasms or make her distinctions stick ... It’s poor sportsmanship, perhaps, to write about what isn’t in a book as opposed to what is. But even browsing a Sotheby’s catalog of Fitzgerald memorabilia auctioned in 1997 gives you a deeper sense of her personal style than Tick manages to convey.

Fuchsia Dunlop

Rave The New York Times Masterly ... Robust ... If you don’t live within 100 miles of a real Chinese restaurant, or an H Mart, this book will not only entertain and instruct you — it might make you go mad with longing.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave The New York Times Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception ... This one comes across as a Covid diary, with a light scaffolding of incident to hold its meditations up. The narrator’s interactions with the parrot are funny and moving ... I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. But Nunez is a closer observer than most, and she is wittier ... Like certain storms, this novel churns intensely in one place. There is a bit more plot ... I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny — good and strong company ... You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.

Thurston Moore

Rave The New York Times The first 150 or so pages of Sonic Life describe this childhood and his early years in downtown Manhattan. Mostly, though, the opening chapters are about his listening habits ... This section is too long and impersonal, and I might have put the book down if I weren’t getting paid to keep going ... But the book gets much better ... Excellent ... One reason Moore is a good observer of the early years is that he’s a good observer of other people, always a good sign in a memoirist.

Werner Herzog, Trans. by Michael Hofmann

Positive The New York Times I don’t believe a word of the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s new memoir ... But then, I’m not sure we’re supposed to take much of it at face value ... The bulk...consists of Herzog’s thoughts on the subjects that interest him, about which he has made movies or would like to ... This book has been translated from the German by the superb Michael Hofmann. But every so often the language is awkward ... This book will be a boon to those people who, after dinner, sometimes like to unwind by reading choice morsels from books aloud. There are some instant classics here.

Jonathan Raban

Rave The New York Times A book I would have tracked down even if this weren’t my job ... Lively and bittersweet ... This is really two books that are stacked, like mozzarella and tomato, in one pile. The first is a sharp memoir about illness and recovery ... The sections about his parents are most alive as a love story.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Pan The New York Times Sludgy, claustrophobic and pretentious. Each succeeding paragraph took something out of me ... When the Jorie Graham-like gauziness dissipates, when the fog lifts, what’s left are sentimentalities and near banalities ... Maybe Phillips’s early books were simply there when I needed them. But I need them still, and I didn’t need this one.

J. M. Coetzee

Positive The New York Times Gravid ... A simple thread on which to hang beads of perception. Coetzee, who is 83, retains a sure touch. This is a convincing late-period novel. If it doesn’t rank with this Nobelist’s finest work, it is no embarrassment. It’s a pared-down book that avoids the excess philosophizing that has dragged down some of his more recent novels.

Tracy Daugherty

Rave The New York Times Episodic this biography is. It’s also vastly entertaining ... Reads a bit like one of McMurtry’s novels. Elegy and humor bleed into each other. This biography contains many sentences that verge on the humorous ... He rakes his material into a story that has movement; he’s a good reader of the novels; he has an eye for anecdote and the telling quote ... Comprehensive.

John Szwed

Rave The New York Times The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus. It tours his life without ever quite penetrating it. But it’s a knowing and thoughtful book ... He wrestles this material into a loose but sturdy form, as if he were moving a futon. He allows different sides of Smith’s personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity to his task ... here’s a lot of material to tap into, and you’ll want to. Smith added a great deal to the national stock of peculiarity. He was the worm at the bottom of American culture’s mezcal bottle. You slam the glass down, because his experience still makes you feel alive.

Patti Hartigan

Mixed The New York Times [Hartigan\'s] book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful. It lacks ebullience and critical insight. The writing is slack and, by the second half, the clichés are falling so heavily you need a hat ... This book couldn’t have been easy to write ... Hartigan is adept at keeping the lines straight ... An imperfect book.

Steven Millhauser

Positive The New York Times Several of the stories are among his best; a few are midlevel Millhauser; a handful of others don’t rise above craft. So it goes with books of short stories ... Millhauser’s stories are often about cracks in everyday life, cracks that reveal other possibilities and other modes of living. Sometimes one soul journeys through them; sometimes there are hundreds ... When Millhauser is on, he hands you a periscope of his own unique design, and he allows you to really look and feel. You can bring your own allegory.

Khaled Khalifa, trans. by Leri Price

Pan The New York Times The sensuality of his fiction is frequently related to olfaction. Few living writers pay as much attention to smell as Khalifa does ... A tension between faith and reason plays out in each of these stories. This is a secular novel about religious madness. Lives are at stake ... Nadine Gordimer said in her Paris Review interview that she didn’t mind being puzzled when reading a novel. I don’t either, generally. But Khalifa goes to great lengths to frustrate his readers. This narrative shifts back and forth in time ... The intricacies of Khalifa’s plotting, and his occasional vagueness, have led critics to compare him to Faulkner. But Faulkner’s characters feel more real than those in No One Prayed Over Their Graves. They’re earthier. Khalifa’s too often flop between stereotypes — saints or sinners, lovers or fighters ... Khalifa buries his story under a late-Rushdie-like muchness, with embellishment upon embellishment. There are prophecies and rising souls and forbidden loves; every tear is bitterly wept. There are conversions and renunciations of conversions. Your eyeballs begin to glaze over, as if they were ceramic plates. Everything is desperate, to paraphrase the old Adam Ant song, but somehow not serious.

Ann Beattie

Rave The New York Times Her best in more than two decades ... The stories are about instability and shattered certainties ... An almost comically wide cast of characters ... The rap against Beattie, in sum, is that her work can be aimless, \'twee,\' lacking in political and other convictions, plotless, a bit draggy. All feathers and no bird, marginalia in search of a thesis. She is too alert to the tender souls of the bolshy bourgeoisie, stirring groats on their Viking ranges. All these things are true at times, even in Onlookers. This book reminds you, more often, of why readers cared about her in the first place. She’s a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy ... She takes notes on her species, as if she were a naturalist observing robins. She pries at the mystery of life. There’s a strong feeling of convergence in her best stories.

Lorrie Moore

Mixed The New York Times Fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent ... I did sometimes think about how I’d rank it ... Moore is a consummate user of the English language; her moisture-wicking sentences confirm and reconfirm your sanity. So many of them you want to frame and hang. But when her books don’t work, they can seem especially futile ... In terms of the other fiction published so far this year, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home is an easy A. In terms of Moore’s own high standards, it’s a C at best ... You settle into the tone of this story. Move over, Hilary Mantel. That’s how good the opener is. There’s a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s recent cosmic-circus high jinks. Then a different story comes along to replace it. It’s as if you are a child again, and someone has stolen your hot dog ... Moore stretches for deeper themes in this novel, and of course they’re there: It’s a book about loss, and about the patience and endurance it takes to treat the dying with respect, and about the shaggy and multiform varieties of love. But it’s more about the jokes.

Richard Ford

Mixed The New York Times Be Mine is not unlike a welcome late-evening phone call, two scotches in, from an old friend. Ford’s readers have been through a lot with this man ... And yet ... Be Mine isn’t shoddy, exactly, but it’s the thinnest and least persuasive of the Bascombe novels. The seams in these books have begun to show ... There’s a long, odd, uncomfortable interlude in Be Mine during which Frank falls half in love with a much younger Vietnamese woman ... The Bascombe novels have never felt especially up-to-date, culturally. Not everyone cares about pop culture, and Frank has a right to be among those who don’t. But what culture Ford does tuck into Be Mine feels random and unlikely ... God forbid he loses his sense of humor, but to paraphrase late-career Leonard Cohen, I want it darker.

Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann

Rave The New York Times A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early ... If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory ... She is writing more closely to her own unconscious ... I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did ... Profound and moving.

James Campbell

Rave The New York Times Book Review NB skewered pomposity in its many forms ... NB is the sort of column that people looked at and thought, \"I could do that.\" Turns out they couldn’t. I still read NB every week with pleasure, but absent J.C., the column has lost a sliver of its freshness and nerve.

Henry Threadgill

Rave The New York Times Book Review Easily Slip Into Another World is so good a music memoir, in the serious and obstinate manner of those by Miles Davis and Gil Scott-Heron, that it belongs on a high shelf alongside them ... A lot of attention is paid to Threadgill’s own failures, large and small. This is among the reasons that this memoir is the kind of book I’d want to place in the hands of young musicians ... Threadgill writes ardently about the barriers Black composers and classical musicians have faced. He also refuses, most of the time, to ratify the borders between classical music and jazz.

Jonathan Eig

Rave The New York Times The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently ... It’s a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current. He does not dispense two-dollar words; he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum; he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him ... This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait ... Eig is adept at weaving in other characters, and other voices. He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC ... Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.

Ava Chin

Positive The New York Times Old family stories are hard to revivify, even when they’re good family stories ... This is the problem Ava Chin is up against in her sensitive, ambitious, well-reported, heavily peopled yet curiously remote memoir-cum-history ... It’s a book that has everything going for it except that intangible spark that crisp and confident storytelling throws off. The air is a bit still in this book, as if one is walking behind the docent on a long museum tour ... The story has a certain pageantry ... This memoir evokes emotion but, as with the made-up dialogue, Chin sometimes doesn’t trust her readers to absorb it on their own.

Robert "Mack" McCormick, ed. John Troutman

Positive The New York Times Book Review The funny thing about Biography of a Phantom is, after you wade through the trigger warnings, how earnest and low-key and appealing McCormick’s manuscript is ... This is a human and humane book, an insightful exploration of the biographer’s craft ... McCormick’s book is no longer unseen, nor is it a masterpiece. But, reading it, you feel as though you’ve met a real writer, one who had a lot going for himself and let it all slip away.

Robert Greenfield

Positive The New York Times Judge a party not by who’s there, the old credo goes, but by who isn’t. The missing voices include those of O-Lan Jones, Shepard’s first wife; his longtime partner, Jessica Lange; his lovers Patti Smith and Brooke Adams and Joni Mitchell ... Greenfield’s book is faithful to Shepard’s life, while it skips like a stone along the surface. Shepard spent much time laying down cover, and tending to his own mythology ... Greenfield is a prolific journeyman biographer who has written the lives of Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary and Burt Bacharach, among others. His Shepard book lacks a certain density, and a critical sensibility, but it’s well organized and cleanly written. It neatly covers the bases ... Shepard’s is a hard life to screw up, and Greenfield doesn’t. His writing about the playwright’s final years is detailed and moving.

Jaroslav Kalfar

Mixed The New York Times Book Review A Brief History of Living Forever has an electric start, but after about 80 pages I wanted to slide it under a pile of magazines ... Kalfar’s dystopia feels thirdhand. Happily, he has other things to work with ... He has a Kurt Vonnegut-like satirical touch, at his best, as well as Vonnegut’s interest in science. He also has an old-world melancholy, beneath the humor ... The rest of the novel combines flashbacks to Adela’s past... with scenes of her two children trying to rescue her body from a black-ops warehouse in Florida, in order to give it a proper burial. There are bad guys with guns, and suddenly we’re in a Jason Statham movie. Kalfar’s wit has burned off entirely.

Catherine Lacey

Positive The New York Times \"The narrator of Biography of X...has a cool tone and a lonely intelligence; she’s a solitary spirit. Her voice is clear but worn, like beach glass. There’s some early Renata Adler in it, and some Janet Malcolm...C.M.’s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined. Biography of X reimagines the American century while tapping into our evergreen fascination with the downtown art world between 1970 and 1995. It’s a hard book to get a handle on ... This is a magpie novel, one that borrows snatches of text, that tinkers with reputations, that moves historical figures around in time ... By its second half, Biography of X has begun to drag somewhat. We follow C.M. on interview after interview, and the form is too conventional; all that’s missing is a Peter Coyote voice-over ... But you will already be locked in. This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir...This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.\

Yevgenia Belorusets, trans. Greg Nissan

Positive The New York Times Book Review Humanizing details pile up ... This book’s self-consciousness, as an art project, saps some of its immediacy. Belorusets’s prose, in this translation by Greg Nissan, lacks depth and grain ... It’s interesting to witness the way Belorusets thinks about the enemy. She despises what’s happening to her country, and she deplores some Russian soldiers who are drunks and louts. But she’s aware that so many of them have been lied to about what they’re doing in Ukraine. She considers compassion and its limits.

Eleanor Catton

Rave The New York Times A big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wreching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humor. The result is thrilling. Birnam Wood nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles, like hair drawn through a pocket comb ... Catton has felt like the real thing out of the gate. One reason is her way with dialogue. Her characters are almost disastrously candid. They talk the way real people talk, but they’re freer, ruder, funnier. Alongside the wordplay and in-jokes, and the topping of those jokes, unexpected abrasions pile up. You sense the world being thrashed out in front of your eyes ... Another reason is her knowingness — her thinginess. Catton is at home in the physical world, and her details land ... Finally, there is Catton’s generosity, to her characters and to her readers. She turns her men and women around and around in appraisal, allowing the available light to alternately flatter and roast them ... An ardent ecological novel, but it’s not a softheaded one. That’s another reason it’s a rarity.

Kira Yarmysh, trans. by Arch Tait

Pan The New York Times Verges on becoming an insanity trip ... An unusual prison novel. The stakes are low throughout ... What is Yarmysh up to here? At moments the tone verges on the comic...and you sense the author gently pushing the material into satire. But it’s hard to say, because her abilities as a fiction writer are, at least in this translation, rudimentary. Anya may be filled with irony and ambiguity, but Yarmysh’s writing is not. The characters are two-dimensional; the prose offers few, if any, fresh perceptions; the tone never deepens. From nearly the start, it’s as if Yarmysh is trying to light a green log. If only the most impressively brave among us were the best writers! The world seldom works that way ... It must have hurt to translate something that seems as flat as Yarmysh’s novel does. As the clichés piled up...I began to wonder if Tait had let fidelity trample generosity and sensibility. Another translator might have reached out to Yarmysh and, assuming the clichés were in the original, asked if she really wanted to hang onto them.

Priscilla Gilman

Mixed The New York Times Nesbit, the super agent whose clients have included Joan Didion... is portrayed so coolly in this book that the pages about her almost shatter as you turn them. It’s a devastating portrait ... At its best, this memoir evokes a shaggy lost world.

Martin Riker

Positive The New York Times Light, charming and shyly philosophical ... In The Guest Lecture, Keynes is a prop for a novel that’s barely a novel. (The other characters are sketched, as if they were James Thurber drawings, in a gentle line or two.) Riker pulls it off because he’s observant, and he has a grainy, semi-comic feel for what angst and failure really feel like ... In Riker’s hands, Abigail is good company, and sometimes for a novel that’s enough.

Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

Positive The New York Times A bit chaotic, as oral histories tend to be. But the chaos feels true to the experience of prison; this impressive book throws a lot at you, and much of the reading is difficult ... Intensely moving.

Franz Kafka, trans. by Ross Benjamin

Rave The New York Times The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It’s an invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre ... This edition scuffs him up and returns him to earth, in an intimate manner that does no injury to our sense of his suffering, or his profound and original gifts.

Deepti Kapoor

Mixed The New York Times A luxe thriller...that rides the line between commercial and literary fiction so adroitly that it will almost certainly move a lot of units, as I’ve heard publishers say about their best sellers ... It’s easy to see why attention has been paid. As a storyteller, Kapoor is a natural. Her novel offers the pleasures of narrative dexterity. It moves — early on, at any rate — as if on rails ... She does not offer, except rarely, the pleasures of subtlety. Over more than 500 pages, the book’s sleekness bends toward slickness and the magic toward tricks. Its length really hurts it. What might have been a crisp and moody entertainment, in Graham Greene’s elevated sense of that word, distends ... The characters (conflicted journalist, wealthy man’s dilettante son, wide-eyed boy from the sticks) are familiar. The politics are not delicate. A Mercedes rams into five poor people, including a pregnant woman, on the first page ... On Audible, the book might really lift the burden of a cross-country car trip. But it doesn’t make you a snob to want more from a novel than you would get from a good evening of Netflix. I kept reading, sometimes admiringly, but mentally I checked out around page 75 ... Kapoor has a cinematic eye. This novel has a lot of moments that feel lush and screenplay-ready ... She can be a perceptive writer, one who has plenty to say about modern Delhi and the conditions that spawned and that sustain the Wadia crime syndicate ... But as Age of Vice rolls on, the exigencies of plot trample whatever flowers, in the form of complexities, attempt to bloom.

Cormac McCarthy

Positive The New York Times Cormac McCarthy, who is pushing 90, has arrived with a pair of audacious linked novels, one a total banger and the other no embarrassment. If this is what it sounds like to be on your last legs, young writers should ask their server for whatever he’s having. If McCarthy’s voice is any indication, he’s still limber enough to outrun an aggrieved cheetah in his drawers and stocking feet ... Novels aren’t made, generally, to be filled entirely by talk. But that’s what Stella Maris is — transcriptions of therapy sessions with one of the hospital’s shrinks. This is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you’ve already read The Passenger? Absolutely ... Stella Maris is, by comparison, a small and frequently elegiac novel. It’s best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home.

Jason McBride

Positive The New York Times Smart and sympathetic but hardheaded ... McBride’s book follows Chris Kraus’s 2017 biography, After Kathy Acker. Kraus is a powerfully original writer, and her book is quirkier ... McBride is more dispassionate.

John Le Carre

Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... is — how to put this gently? — not a good book of letters. If le Carré had close friendships, they’re not on display here. His tone throughout is bluff but guarded and ambassadorial. Nearly everyone is kept at arm’s length. He has an epistolary gift for writing much but saying little ... Many are bread and butter notes, a hard form to shock to life ... The book is, to echo James, thicker than it should be, as if to justify its steep ($40) price point at Christmastime. The margins are wide, the typeface large. There are many chapter breaks, and many pages with only a sentence or two on them. Le Carré’s baronial address, repeated at the top of his letters, eats up a lot of space on nearly every page by itself ... The editor is cagey about whether le Carré wanted his letters published. He did curate them, choosing which ones to file. He also burned many. He wrote them by hand, in the afternoons, after writing fiction in the morning and taking a midday walk ... There are memorable details ... Le Carré and his wife, Jane, kept a guest cottage on their property, and the letters to prospective visitors are worthwhile ... The only time these letters got to me was at the end. Both le Carré and his wife had cancer during Covid lockdown.

Bob Dylan

Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... devious ... These riffs, which he flicks like tarot cards through a distant cactus, sound a lot like his own song lyrics, so much so that part of me wanted this to be a new record instead, wanted to hear these lines come croaking up from Dylan’s 81-year-old lungs and past his buckshot, barb-wired uvula ... Who else sounds like this? Dylan slits open the underbelly of American life; he pokes at the entrails; he draws a lot out of these songs. It’s total warfare against the humdrum, and it’s completely great, except for when it isn’t. The tone becomes repetitive. In a lot of the cases, you could switch Dylan’s commentaries around, apply them to different songs and not know the difference. By the end he seems spent; he’s phoning some of the language in ... You keep reading because it’s Dylan, because there’s always an eerie little gas station, an Indian casino, an itinerant preacher or a syphilitic old madam around the next corner. You want to know what condition Dylan’s condition is in. Probably he’s about to release a bladderful of P.B.R. on somebody’s grave ... God, this book is sly ... Dylan is helplessly epigrammatic ... The humor in The Philosophy of Modern Song trips over, often enough, into full-on gaslighting ... It’s been art-directed to its back teeth. The photo researcher deserves all the best legal drugs for Christmas. It’s filled with vintage movie stills and Life magazine covers and car ads and pulpy detective images, some more clever than others, the kinds of things you might find on the walls of a self-consciously retro diner ... I respect the work that went into it, but the photos sometimes crowded me out ... This book is about a genius recognizing unfiltered genius in others, when he can find it. Often enough it’s an argument for simplicity.

Alan Rickman

Pan The New York Times Book Review ... fantastically dull ... It’s unclear if Rickman wanted these diaries published. I bet he would not have. They aren’t embarrassing, but the entries are rarely fleshed out. Much of it reads like an aide-memoire, quickly jotted notes one might return to later for a different sort of book ... Nothing here can be held against him, but they’re a bit depressing, these diaries ... Not a lot of light shines through the windowpanes ... He saw so much but described so little ... It’s possible to go through this book, as if with a metal detector, and retrieve shreds of tabloid coin ... Rickman isn’t good at capturing his fellow humans in a few crunchy words. He’s better on other topics ... In the manner that it takes a large ground crew to put a single fighter pilot in the air, it takes a large company of humans to move a famous actor through his days: makeup and clothing and sets and black cars and interview requests and tickets and reservations and all the rest. I wish Rickman had something, anything, to say about these people, and these processes. He glides as if on a magic carpet ... The last months of entries are moving not because Rickman relates much about his treatment, or his hopes and fears. They are moving because he realizes he’s lived so fast and hard that he’s never had time to look back, to savor it all ... a reminder that, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, \'What an odd thing a diary is: The things you omit are more important than those you put in.\'

Louise Glück

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... exists in a liminal zone between poetry and prose. It can resemble a sophisticated children’s bedtime story ... This dichotomy, the idea that the world can be divided neatly into people who lead with their hearts and those who lead with their heads, can feel reductive. Yet Glück, in shrinking the world to the size of a pair of blankets inside cribs, manages to gently pack her narrative with feeling ... Glück wrings more emotion than you might imagine out of a father’s going and coming home from work every day ... A cynic might call this a children’s book for very pretentious children. You can imagine it with red and black illustrations by Barbara Kruger, with oracular phrases printed in that artist’s signature typeface ... This is a delicate, minor-key book. It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück’s poetry.

Charles Leerhsen

Positive The New York Times Grittier than anything we\'ve read about [Bourdain] before ... Here are exact, disturbing details about his suicide. His heroin habit is recounted. So is his frequent coldness to many who loved and worked with him ... Leerhsen’s book...has a lot of people trying to join Bourdain on the couch, ideally without his trousers, and thus has more adrenaline and feels truer to life ... He’s not here, though, to discredit or dismiss his subject. His admiration for Bourdain is nearly always apparent. It’s hard to say if Bourdain would have liked this book. Either way, I suspect he would have admired the author’s guts ... Down and Out in Paradise is not the most subtle thing you’ll ever read ... His Bourdain book goes down like a mass-market rock bio ... I’d have loved it if I were 17 ... The older me, the one who prefers wine to fizz, wishes Leerhsen had more to say about things like: a) the elite and vernacular food worlds pre- and post-Bourdain; b) how Bourdain walked a moral tightrope across the conventions of travel writing and reporting, no mean feat for a wealthy white man in skinny jeans; and c) the sense that he was at the vanguard, more so than even the most scrutinized actors, of a new type of American masculinity ... You can’t have everything. Leerhsen sacrifices weight for speed ... This book doesn’t merely light candles but scuffs him up. I doubt it will be the final word.

Annie Ernaux, trans. by Alison L. Strayer

Positive New York Times The sex is torrid, and described with a lemony eye for detail ... The almost primitive directness of her voice is bracing. It’s as if she’s carving each sentence onto the surface of a table with a knife. She is, in her writing, definitely not the sort of girl whose bicycle has a basket ... Not tweaked in postproduction ... The bedroom scenes are bulldozing ... This book is an anthology of her projected anxieties. Her heart is some sort of nocturnal beast ... Getting Lost is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle. Is it a major book? Probably not. But it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.

Namwali Serpell

Pan The New York Times ... the book is so laden with odd convergences and there are so many brushes with demons that it does leave you feeling tiny and weird ... This book review is going to have a disappointed tone that probably isn’t fair to Serpell. She so thoroughly raised expectations with her first novel, The Old Drift (2019), that The Furrows can’t help but seem to follow halfheartedly in its wake ... an atmospheric literary novel not so different from others of its kind ... Serpell is interested in effects here more than in truth dealing. With its scrutiny of doubles, of doppelgängers, of déjà vu, of parallel existences, of the transmigration of souls, of hints of incest, of shifting points of view, the book is a mind-twist (The word I am after isn’t printable) ... It may make you think of the work of filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan and Jordan Peele and, in her latest, Olivia Wilde — alas, not always in a good way ... Serpell intelligently appraises race and class ... These spaces are emotional amphitheaters; they turn me into an eager groundling, waiting to see what news a writer has to bring. In the case of The Furrows, I was let down every time, doubly so because I know what a shrewd observer Serpell can be ... has stuck with me for three years. The Furrows mostly vanished a few hours after I put it down. But I can’t imagine picking up her next one with any less eagerness.

David Milch

Rave New York Times Life’s Work is one of the best books about television I’ve read. It’s funny, discursive, literate, druggy, self-absorbed, fidgety, replete with intense perceptions ... Anyone who works in mass culture should read it... probably ... Writing dialogue as sharply as he does, his book suggests, requires a heroin habit straight out of a Denis Johnson short story, a ruinous gambling addiction, an ability to stretch deadlines to their dissolving point, an ego that can shatter buffet platters at 30 feet, and a knack for making others love you and want you poisoned at the same time ... What warms this book, and gives it a long view of life, is that it was completed while its author was suffering from the early effects of Alzheimer’s ... He goes deep on a lot of things ... Life’s Work does get a bit fuzzy toward the end. The pearls begin to lack adequate stringing. This feels natural, part of the human drama. You finish feeling you’ve really met someone. Milch was his own best creation.

Maggie O'Farrell

Pan The New York Times ... this historical novel is verging on the steamy and operatic ... Hamnet wasn’t ridiculous in the way that The Marriage Portrait is ridiculous; at its best it was an affecting portrait of grief. But it too went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves, for creating scenes that longed to be bowers of enchantment ... It, too, had few sharp perceptions, little wit and little humble sense of life as it is lived down near the ground. Reading each I pined instead — for the reason one goes to a good restaurant — something simple and unpretending ... Murder and unwanted sex are primal drivers of narrative. In this novel the characters are so one-dimensional and overwrought that the force of neither driver lands. The novelist begins to resemble a conjurer forcing cards.

Jared Kushner

Pan New York Times It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents ... He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law ... Breaking History is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership ... This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes ... Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo ... The tone is college admissions essay ... Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum ... A therapist might call these cries for help ... The bulk of Breaking History — at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog — goes deeply into the weeds ... What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.

Lucy Sante

Mixed The New York Times I am not uninterested in the reservoir system, but I (probably) would not have picked this book up if someone else had written it. I’ve followed Sante’s work for decades, the way you follow a band, because her writing has an unmistakable and addictive tone ... while Nineteen Reservoirs is a beautiful object — the period photographs and postcards are expertly reproduced and glow with feeling, and the book concludes with an apposite photo essay by Tim Davis — that elusive tone only rarely emerges ... This is a static and somewhat repetitive book that lacks a narrative through line. Sante seldom makes the kinds of connections and associations she does in her best work. And yet: Her semi-failures have more going for them than most writer’s successes ... Sante has always had an underdog’s left-of-the-dial feeling for what’s been threatened or lost. The best material in Nineteen Reservoirs is about the people who had their land confiscated, in colonial fashion, and submerge.

Robert Lowell

Positive The New York Times A new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time ... Does the world need Memoirs? ... The argument I will make for Memoirs is this: It’s densely yet nimbly written, and you sense Lowell’s judgment and discrimination in every paragraph. As with nearly everything he wrote, there’s a sense of wheels within wheels ... Memoirs is evocative, and sly, in its assessment of Lowell’s Boston Brahmin family ... This book’s editors, Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, silently and deftly amend, in their footnotes, Lowell’s many small errors of fact, and point out where he seems to have invented characters. There’s a whole other book going on down there in the footnotes ... Reading Memoirs is like finding a roll of undeveloped film from 1954. Lowell rode these sentences into new ways of thinking and writing. There were riddles of existence that, clearly, he was only beginning to shake down.

Taymour Soomro

Mixed New York Times The first half of Other Names for Love is the best half ... Soomro writes clean, vivid sentences and this novel has a certain elegance, but it lacks a worldview and the kind of drilling insights that would take it to another level ... I did not stop, once, to pencil a curse word of admiration in the margins, which sometimes means nothing but sometimes means a lot. When the second half begins to drift, the absence of electric drive-by observation and intellection becomes more apparent.

Sayaka Murata tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori

Mixed The New York Times Murata’s prose is deadpan, as clear as cellophane, and has the tidiness of a bento box. She’s not the most subtle writer. You don’t read her for her extra-fine perceptual apparatus. You read her because when her stuff works, it’s chilly and transgressive at the same time ... A few of the stories are quite long; others are vignettes. A handful are banal...Even in her best stories, Murata has a weakness for thesis statements ... Murata’s prose, in this translation from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is generally so cool you could chill a bottle of wine in it. Body Magic is warmer, and more subtle. It made me wonder if she really needs the big-time conceits.

Miranda Seymour

Pan New York Times Book Review If you removed phrases like \'no clear account exists,\' \'we can’t be sure,\' \'a curious silence,\' \'it’s possible that,\' \'complete absence of documentation,\' \'appears to,\' \'seems likely\' and \'questions abound,\' Seymour’s biography would shrink by 10 percent. These locutions clutter Seymour’s book, especially since what we do know of Rhys’s life and career is, if not encyclopedic, a good deal ... Seymour is the author of many well-regarded biographies, including those of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Lord Byron’s wife and daughter. This one has, somehow, gotten away from her. It’s curiously lackluster ... On the one hand, it’s breezy — the sort of biography in which the author prints a snapshot of herself outside a school Rhys attended, and describes chatting up various locals on her researches ... On the other hand, it’s mean-spirited ... The prose and analysis are soft. Seymour leaves out so many of the best things Rhys wrote and said, and thus makes her seem less intelligent than she was. She lingers over Rhys’s intense interest in her own appearance, even quite late in life, for example, without noting that Rhys wrote that such an interest is \'the real curse of Eve\' ... Seymour has some material previous biographers didn’t. But the details in her book are, sentence by sentence and page by page, less piquant than the ones in Angier’s ... Rhys had a uniquely lonely intelligence, and a talent for facing hard truths. If all you know of her is Wide Sargasso Sea, this book will encourage you to branch out. That’s nearly — almost, maybe — worth the price of admission.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Pan New York Times Ottessa Moshfegh has a glittering intellect and an unquenchable dark turn of mind. Only the latter is on display in Lapvona, her fourth novel. It’s a pungent book but a flat one, narrow in its emotional range, a bleak, meandering and muddy-soled mix of fairy tale and folk horror ... Atrocities pile up. It’s easy to lose the thread ... It’s especially easy for concentration to wander because no one is quite who they seem to be, and because little that occurs has much in the way of resonance. I’m peeking at my notes to write this because it all blurred in my mind ... vigorously if bluntly written. The sentences seem to have been composed in lead type and locked into a letterpress. What’s gone missing is Moshfegh’s destroying wit ... the novel lacks an attitude, a stance toward this material ... No one tattoos the page with food horror quite like Moshfegh ... Moshfegh is one of the most interesting writers alive, but Lapvona is a gloomy, punishing and curiously flavorless banquet.

Keith Gessen

Positive New York Times A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene ... Is it OK to out your kid like this? ... Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was ... Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature ... He is just as good on parenting manuals ... Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations ... Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs ... Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers ... It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer...who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.

Alan Shipnuck

Rave The New York Times Shipnuck can\'t help tracing the arc of the Woods-Mickelson rivalry...Shipnuck is interested in Mickelson\'s reputed dark side and why it keeps threatening to pop out from behind his carefully constructed nice-guy facade...Shipnuck digs more deeply into Mickelson’s gambling than anyone has so far...His addiction has led him to grow tight with dubious characters...He bets on football so heavily, Mickelson told a friend, that his bets \'might move the line\'...His gambling losses totaled more than $40 million from 2010 to 2014, according to documents reviewed by one of Shipnuck’s sources...Is his willingness to sign autographs forever, for example, the mark of a generous spirit or a \'shameless brand-building exercise\'?...Shipnuck considers arguments both ways...Golf turns people into bores, in my experience, but Mickelson does not seem like one. He’s convivial, and his conversation is not always about golf.

Thom Gunn

Rave The New York Times Gunn had been raised in Kent, England, where his parents were journalists...He arrived in America fresh from Cambridge, and his first book of poems, Fighting Terms, had been published to lively notice...When he got a look at San Francisco, he knew he’d found his place...Not only was it beautiful, in league with the \'best European cities,\' he wrote to a friend, but it was \'incidentally the queerest city I’ve ever been in,\' Gunn remained there for the rest of his life, living in the Haight and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually six months on and six off...That letter is among the hundreds collected in The Letters of Thom Gunn,\' an appealing selection of his rowdy, funny, filthy, intensely literate letters...These details, in general, won’t surprise anyone who kept up with Gunn’s poetry, which was metrically sophisticated and dealt sometimes with earthy topics such as LSD, the Hell’s Angels, sex and its itchy discontents, and gay culture writ large...This book, like Gunn’s life, puts an unusual mix of pleasures on display...On the one hand, he had indestructible appetites for sex and drugs, together and separately...Typical sentences from this book are: \'I woke up the next day surrounded by naked bodies and uniquely hungover\' and \'Remind me to tell you how I lost the hair on my ass\'.

Harry Crews

Rave New York Times The most indelible scene in American literary memoir, for this reader at any rate, occurs about two-thirds of the way into Harry Crews’s A Childhood ... It is a nearly Dickensian anthology of physical and mental intensities ... A Childhood is the best introduction to his work. It explains so much of where Crews was coming from in his blood-tinted fiction ... This memoir has a foot in another world, a weird, old Depression-era America. Crews writes with knowledge and feeling on a wide series of topics ... Harry Crews died in 2012 at the age of 76. His novels, which are mostly out of print, aren’t for everyone, despite my abiding fondness for several of them. This memoir is for everyone. It’s agile, honest and built as if to last. Like its author, it’s a resilient American original.

Sam Knight

Positive The New York Times This is a rich, florid, funny history, with undertones of human grief. Knight plays it very straight. His prose is measured and measured again. It’s as if Strunk and White took the manuscript on vacation and made buffing it a competition ... Knight does seem to have his tongue in his cheek at moments, but that tongue is buried so deeply it would require an oral surgeon to locate and extract it ... The good news is that Knight is shrewd and perceptive, and his book is as good as his article. The bad news is that his book is not a great deal better than his article. The short version was enough for me ... Knight’s portraits of Barker and Fairley are lively ... Knight’s book is crisp, almost clinically so. It’s on the passionless side. The crooked timber of humanity is cut into two-by-fours. Photographs are employed to profound, poetic effect.

Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally

Mixed New York Times The Trouble With Happiness, a collection of stories, and The Faces, a novel...consolidate but don’t greatly extend her reputation; neither quite makes the claims on you that the memoirs do ... This is a lurid crackup novel, too heavy-handed for my tastes, but I suspect a lot of readers will respond to it ... This is a promising setup, thematically; you want to soak in the brine as if it were a Marianne Faithfull album. But a sense of overkill emerges ... The constant return to the idea of faces — we all have more than one, they can appall, those of our friends turn strange — is heavy, too, but it does lead to a starkly comic moment, in the asylum.

Elif Batuman

Rave New York Times Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were ... an even better, more soulful novel. Selin is more confident and, more important, so is Batuman ... This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations ... When Selin does begin to have sex, she is so perceptive that the scenes are a wonder ... When you write as well as Batuman does, there are worse fates. But you wonder if the next two novels will recount Selin’s junior and senior years, in a Harvard quartet, and what would happen if Batuman kicked away from shore.

Tove Ditlevsen, Tr. Michael Favala Goldman

Positive New York Times The Trouble With Happiness a collection of stories, and The Faces, a novel...don’t greatly extend her reputation; neither quite makes the claims on you that the memoirs do ... It’s easy to make these stories sound even bleaker than they are ... Yet as Martin Amis said, \'Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits.\' You sense, in these stories about miscarriages, cheating men, dinner parties gone wrong and frightened children, a writer pulling from a deep well, returning to familiar themes out of a deep compulsion, and that compulsion squeezes us too, in a kind of claustrophobic bliss-out, as if we’ve been inserted into one of Temple Grandin’s deep-pressure hug machines. The stories aren’t microfiction but, translated by Michael Favala Goldman, they’re really short—five or six pages each, somehow an ideal length.

Thomas Fisher

Positive New York Times This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong. Fisher’s account of his days is gripping. While reading, we are all, helplessly, medical voyeurs ... Fisher’s writing about his stream of patients is what gives this memoir its immediacy, its pulse ... His book derives its depth and tone from his arguments about the inequities of American health care. Fisher is moved, and infuriated, that so many African Americans die young because they lack access to decent insurance and treatment. His frustration, his outraged intelligence, is palpable on every page ... Fisher works out his aggravation by writing letters to some of his patients, explaining why he couldn’t spend more time with them, and why the health care system is so dismal for so many. These are long letters, and they appear in this book. I’m sorry to report that they don’t work; not really. The letters are a conceit, and they feel artificial, like exposition-filled movie dialogue ... Fisher remains a somewhat distant figure in The Emergency. He skips quickly through his own biography ... We don’t learn a lot about his private life now, either the small, earthy details or the things that seem to genuinely matter. What Fisher does provide is the best account I’ve read about working in a busy hospital during Covid ... Fisher locates beauty in a different part of the medical process.

Amy Bloom

Rave The New York Times Amy Bloom and Brian Ameche were a handsome couple. I know this not because there’s a photograph of them in Bloom’s new memoir ... I know this because I was so moved by Bloom’s bittersweet, truth-dealing book that I looked them up and read whatever I could find ... I’m not sure why I hadn’t until now read Bloom’s fiction. Maybe her soft, generic titles...were a deterrent. The title of this memoir is similar ... Not reading her: my loss. Bloom has one of those warm, wised-up, tolerantly misanthropic New York voices, in the manner of Laurie Colwin and Sloane Crosley and Allegra Goodman and Nora Ephron, and an ability to deepen her tone at will. I am not, as are these writers, Jewish. But when I read them I feel I’ve found my people ... Bloom tells this story with grace and tact. Scenes of their trip to Zurich are shuffled with scenes from their courtship and marriage ... There are a lot of tears in this memoir ... Part of what makes this book moving is Bloom’s toughness. She’s a mama bear, in the right ways. She doesn’t go overboard in explaining her moral reasoning. She doesn’t have to. Her title is her explanation.

Margaret Atwood

Mixed The New York Times Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to collect their PEN International speeches between hard covers ... The amount these speeches have added to the sum of human dullness is incalculable ... This applies even to those who can clearly write and think, like Margaret Atwood ... In Atwood’s new book...there are so many such speeches, including a PEN talk, that they quickly capsize the boat, threatening to drown even the good material. The heart-sinking opening sentences start early, and they never entirely stop ... I kept reading. Hope springs eternal across a crowded table of contents. And there is some smart material and pawky wit in Burning Questions, even if they huddle, trembling, like ferns behind a waterfall ... In some of the essays here, Atwood recalls the gestation and reception of her best-known novels ... Some of the most memorable things in Burning Questions are simply stray comments that noodle their way into your mind ... Atwood, at 82, hardly seems ossified. She’s radiant on this book’s cover, and the best pieces here cast a certain glow as well. As for the speeches, I suppose during those you can, as at any conference, sneak out to the sidewalk for an illicit vape.

David Wright Falade

Rave New York Times There’s nothing pulpy about David Wright Faladé’s Black Cloud Rising. It’s a Civil War novel based on the actual experiences of the African Brigade ... Faladé’s book is so accessible and rousing, though, that you hope it becomes available as a mass-market paperback, in packaging that more clearly announces: This book is a straight-up page-turner ... There are no braided points of view here, no too-pretty words, no splintered syntax. No leaden diagnoses of the human predicament belch on the smoky skyline. The nature of the American experiment is implicitly questioned but not burned to the ground ... This is a classic war story told simply and well, its meanings not forced but allowed to bubble up on their own ... This is in some senses Faladé’s first novel ...There’s blood and sinew in the story he tells ... It seems built out of pine, not mahogany, as if heeding the poet A.R. Ammons’s advice: \'Sometimes the best piece of / wood is not right for what you have in mind.\'

Sheila Heti

Mixed The New York Times Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, is about a young woman who turns into a leaf. \'Unrequited love’s a bore,\' Billie Holiday sang. So, it turns out, is photosynthesis ... Her transformation is disorienting, to us if not her. One moment the reader is consuming shot after shot of Heti’s strong, familiar brand of espresso. The next we’re sipping as if out of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup at MoMA ... Heti has long been a devastating writer about sexual magnetism, her prose as sensitive as the tip of a conductor’s baton ... Where is Heti going with this? It’s complicated. Pure Colour runs its readers along a borderline of substance and hallucination. You sense her doing several things at once ... She is niftily confounding expectations ... Does the novel work? Not entirely, not for this reader. Pure Colour is awfully earnest at times. It’s static as well; very little, beyond the big, Gregor Samsa-like reveal, happens ... And yet, she has a way of turning metaphysics to her advantage ... Heti is interested in charisma and beauty, the utter unfairness of them ... She can compact political and class antagonisms into small fists of meaning ... Pure Colour is not helplessly, organically, healingly funny, as were some of Heti’s earlier novels. But there are moments.

Jennifer Egan

Rave New York Times Sometimes...you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle—not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan’s new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start ... You don’t have to have read Goon Squad to pick up The Candy House, but it helps. Most of the characters are back ... All sorts of strings from the earlier book are picked up and braided, twanged or cauterized ... My description...makes this sound like a clash-of-civilizations novel, or a techno nail-biter...but it doesn’t read that way: It’s more nubbly. It comes alive in dozens of entwined stories, in connections and convergences ... The Candy House is a trim 334 pages, but it has a dwarf-star density. Inside, 15 or 20 other novels are trying to climb out. The chapters are short; the tone is aphoristic; the eye for cultural and social detail is Tom Wolfe-like ... Egan has a gift for combining the outrageous and the plausible without ejecting us from the narrative ... All this is wound together; nearly everyone is somehow connected. It’s all too much, except that it isn’t ... She knows where she’s going and the polyphonic effects she wants to achieve, and she achieves them ... I could argue, I suppose, that this novel’s corners are too sharp, that it lacks a certain heft and drift. The implications of the cube on sex habits, online and off, are oddly omitted. And the ending is tapioca soft ... Always check for your wallet when a writer goes all in, as Egan does here, on the power of storytelling and of fiction. The Candy House makes that case simply by existing.

Carl Bernstein

Mixed The New York Times ... a fond, earnest, sepia-toned book, the color of old clippings. It’s pretty good. I mean, it’s OK. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye. It’s just … long and pokey and a bit underthought. I might not have finished it if my paycheck didn’t depend on leaving a clean plate ... A lot happened in the world in the early 1960s ... He describes these historical events in detail, as if few had written about them before. He’s evocative about newsrooms themselves circa 1960 ... He’s good on the camaraderie he found ... Had it run to 175 pages, Chasing History might have been a small classic ... His heart glows remembering his early days in the business, but he can’t quite make ours glow alongside his. If at 370 pages this book overstays its welcome, well, the kid was all right.

Daphne Palasi Andreades

Positive The New York Times ... brash and talky ... achieves immediate liftoff ... It’s a treat, always, to read language that’s excited about itself. You wonder if Andreades will be able to keep it up over the course of a novel. If she doesn’t, not quite, she comes close enough that she has put herself immediately on the radar screen ... Andreades dryly, and deftly, sets up the conversations that ensue ... \'Brown girls, brown girls, brown girls,\' the author likes to repeat. She uses these repetitions for effect, relishing the words the way Chris Rock does in his comedy, pacing the stage ... Andreades’s writing has economy and freshness. Brown Girls reads as much like poetry as it does like a novel, which is another way of saying: Don’t arrive here expecting a good deal of plot ... The chapters are short, ramekin-size. The novel always seems to be stopping and starting over ... This quality can relieve Andreades of doing the hard work of exploring character, or ideas, in real depth ... fearless.

Zora Neale Hurston, Ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West

Mixed The New York Times Five or six of these essays are obvious masterpieces of the form, their sting utterly intact. There’s a lot of filler here, too, though—mundane essays that, if you removed Hurston’s name, could have been written by anyone ... If the editors aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel, they’re an inch or two away. This book’s long introduction is well written but not, somehow, useful. The authors devote many pages to telling you what you are about to read and cherry-picking the best quotes. It’s like watching a 15-minute trailer for the film you’re about to watch ... Relevant biographical information is absent ... I liked this book anyway. Reading Hurston, you always wonder what shape her dignity will take next. Her style and spark were her own.

John Darnielle

Rave The New York Times ... terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense ... The thing about Darnielle’s writing, in all its forms, is this: If you’re that dorky outcast kid drawing a pentagram on the back page of your three-ring binder in algebra class, not because you want to drink anyone’s blood but because you think it’s cool, he sees you. His novels are in close contact with the alternative cultural universes of fantasy and the occult and science fiction, yet they don’t resemble genre fiction. They’re earthy and fly low to the ground. They are plain-spoken and in no hurry ... Devil House...[is]never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.

James Andrew Miller

Mixed The New York Times There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in Tinderbox, James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond ... prepare for a landslide of corporate history. Students of power will find much to interest them. HBO had many stepparents over the years. Following these deals is complicated, like following the lyrics to \'There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly\' ... Miller gets good quotes ... Oral history is a strange form. It gives you a staccato series of micro-impressions, as if you were looking through a fly’s compound eyes ... Miller is a good interviewer, but a corny writer ... There are a lot of winning moments in Tinderbox. But wading through its nearly thousand pages I often felt spacey and exhausted, as if it were 4 a.m. on the third night of one of those endurance contests and I had to keep my hand on the pickup truck.

Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft

Positive The New York Times Book Review If you sense you are about to step into a sword-and-sandal epic with a mud room, you would not be altogether wrong. If you detect a saving, dill-scented note of satire, you would not be wrong either ... an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel. It’s sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. It treats everything it bumps into at both face value and ad absurdum. It’s Chaucerian in its brio ... This enormous novel makes space for a landslide of incident and commentary ... At a key moment, a character might wander off and weed the oregano. It’s that kind of book ... Tokarczuk can be very funny ... The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy: torture, betrayal, imprisonment, death ... feels modern in its sense of an old order ending. End times feel closer than they once did ... This novel’s density is saturnalian; its satire nimble; academics will tug at its themes, as if they were pinworms, for decades. The author’s enthusiasm never flags, even when a reader’s does. She bulldozes the sprawl forward ... Yet the characters remain at a distance. The Books of Jacob rarely touches the emotions. No page, for me, turned itself. A word from Finnegans Wake came to mind: thunderslog ... I don’t mean to dissuade. As with certain operas, I’m glad to have had the experience — and equally glad that it’s over.

Nadifa Mohamed

Mixed New York Times A potent, pointed novel that nonetheless remains distant — it never quite finds an emotional tone ... My favorite parts of The Fortune Men are when the author sends Mahmood to the movies ... Reverberant passages are rare in The Fortune Men. The book dissipates a good deal of its energy, especially in its first half, pivoting between the stories of the shopkeeper, her family, Mahmood’s estranged wife and their sons, and that of Mahmood himself. There is more summary than scene ... Little momentum builds. When it threatens to do so, the story feels hemmed in by the details of Mahmood’s actual life. The novel is semidetached ... This is a hit-and-miss novel, but Mohamed is a big talent, and she’s only getting started.

A.S. Byatt

Mixed The New York Times A.S. Byatt’s fiction...has been increasingly ornate, humorless, freighted with fantasy and myth, and encrusted with heavy literary reference. All my least favorite things in fiction ... Byatt’s fiction has become less convincing than her arguments. She’s less fierce than Carter, who once began a story, \'My father lost me to the Beast at cards.\' She’s less playful than the minimalist Barthelme, and less liquidly philosophical than Iris Murdoch. She seems, most of the time, to be writing with a quill under a prism-fringed chandelier ... Other stories fly a bit closer to earth, though rarely do you sense you’re reading about beings you might care about, or that anything at all is at stake. They’re top-heavy, forced in a hothouse. There are many stories within stories. If such stories were good, they wouldn’t be inside a different one. While reading, I frequently glanced at my wife across the room and made that brilliant new international hand signal that means \'help me.\' A human theme does emerge from this book. Byatt is a perceptive writer about aging, about what it’s like to feel like you’re disappearing, like Homer Simpson into that hedge, from the brighter world ... The reason to buy this book—well, to borrow it—is for the title story ... When the explosion comes, it is worth the wait. You no longer sense you’re reading treacle written in high diction, and that the only smoke is like that from the nostrils of a cartoon bull.

Patricia Highsmith, Ed. by Anna von Planta

Rave The New York Times Book Review The whole book is excellent. Highsmith is pointed and dry about herself and everything else. But the early chapters are special. They comprise one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts I’ve read—and it’s a crowded field!—about being young and alive in New York City ... In these diaries she can appear to have popped, fully formed, from a Charles Addams cartoon. Misanthropes will find a lot to please them ... condensed from some 8,000 pages of material. It is still, at nearly 1,000 pages, a whacking book. But it’s not logy. It’s been sharply edited by Anna von Planta, Highsmith’s longtime editor. The introductory material for each section is useful and concise. There’s no desire to hit \'skip intro.\'

Rax King

Rave The New York Times ... here comes Rax King, in her ebullient book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, to make the late aughts seem like the most vivid, concrete and ecstatic moment to burst into adolescence since time out of mind ... King’s book is a well-calibrated celebration of \'bad\' taste ... That King writes about these things while alluding to Sontag and Updike and Penelope and Odysseus without once seeming like she is otherwise slumming is part of her achievement ... She wears her literacy as if it were a nose stud ... Nor is it new to tuck memoir, wonton-style, inside cultural criticism, which King does. What does feel new — what’s always new, when you find it — is the glitter and squalor and joy and exactness in King’s writing. She’s opposed to distance and irony; you end up taking her seriously because she’s so opposed to the project of being taken seriously ... King writes about herself in the manner Martha Graham taught her dancers to move across the stage: She leads with her crotch. She possesses, in her telling, an incandescent libido, so mighty it could illumine a city’s electrical grid ... reads like sequential shots of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky ... Ode to Warm Vanilla Sugar is in league, as coming-of-age essays go, with Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts ... So winsome is the writing in Tacky that, most of the time, there’s no other word for it but classy.

Kati Marton

Positive The New York Times Marton’s new biography, The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, is a bit like Merkel herself: calm, dispassionate, not afraid to bore us. Many readers will find it a balm. It’s instructive to spend time in Merkel’s competent and humane company ... Merkel didn’t talk to Marton for this book. When the author does get a quote out of someone close to Merkel, it’s often a banality...But give Marton credit. She has doggedly retraced Merkel’s trail, and the story she brings is a good one ... On occasion The Chancellor veers toward hagiography, but it steps quickly away again. Marton is a critical observer, especially of Merkel’s tendency not to articulate her deeper feelings, her frequent failure to win over hearts as well as minds ... This book is a bedtime story of a queasy sort, or so it can seem. It’s as if Marton, via her subject, were tucking the old liberal order in and wishing it a good night, for tomorrow it may die.

Wil Haygood

Rave The New York Times ... elegant and well-made ... Some prolific nonfiction writers slowly grow bleary; you sense them, in their later books, going through the motions, rounding off corners. Haygood, on the other hand, has become a master craftsman, one whose joinery is seamless ... This is sweeping history, but in Haygood’s hands it feels crisp, urgent and pared down. He doesn’t try to be encyclopedic. He takes a story he needs, tells it well, and ties it to the next one. He carries you along on dispassionate analysis and often novelistic detail ... As you read, you may find yourself making lists of films to watch or rewatch ... Stale language begins to creep in toward the end. It’s past time for an ambitious young copy editor to invent a search widget called ClicheCatcher™ to routinely run on manuscripts before they go to press ... Yet this is important, spirited popular history. Like a good movie, it pops from the start. (Haygood was wise to omit an introduction.) Like a good movie, too, it comes full circle.

Kelefa Sanneh

Positive The New York Times Major Labels isn’t a sharp-prowed vessel that’s going to help break poptimism’s icy grip. It’s ecumenical and all-embracing. The good news is that Sanneh...has a subtle and flexible style, and great powers of distillation. He’s a reliable guide to music’s foothills, as well as its mountains. The bad news is that this book about genre is—pun intended, I suppose—sometimes generic. It’s closer to a textbook, a Ken Burns-style history lesson, than a series of well-aimed arguments ... Major Labels is full of good biographical details ... The best thing about Sanneh may be that he subtly makes you question your beliefs ... \'I am drawn to music that starts fights,\' Sanneh writes. If I wish this book started a few more of them, well, it has other things on its mind.

Carole Angier

Positive The New York Times Angier’s book is ungainly at times, and oddly structured. It escapes, for sure, what the biographer Michael Holroyd called \'the prison of chronology.\' Readers not already familiar with Sebald’s work will find her synopses of his books difficult to parse. But her biography acquires a stubborn dignity ... Angier has stared down a writer whose life, in many ways, remains a similar container-box of holes. If future biographies will surely have more to say, Angier has persisted, and written an intelligent and intuitive book about a writer who, like certain mountains, has his own weather, and whose career remains a contested site.

Fred D'Aguiar

Positive The New York Times D’Aguiar’s memoir is the wildest of [recent books about illness]. Part of his defiance in the face of cancer is to throw everything he has onto the page. The result is weird and articulate and angry; there’s some overwriting, and sometimes the thread is nearly lost. But his rage to live shivers in every sentence ... I liked the sections in which D’Aguiar enters into a dialogue with his cancer. These reminded me of Benjamin Franklin’s dialogue with his gout, during which all he could sometimes utter was \'Oh! eh! oh!\' ... I’m happy to report that Year of Plagues ends on a cautiously upbeat note. Cancer’s had to pipe down.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken

Positive The New York Times This is a strange, gothic, Bible-obsessed novel, laced with buzzard-black themes and intimations of horror ... Admirers of the six-book My Struggle series — I’m among them, with reservations about the final volume — will want to know: Does The Morning Star cast the same sort of spell those novels did? The answer, for a long time, is yes ... About the details of daily existence, he manages to be, without ladling on lyricism, twice as absorbent as most of the other leading brands ... The Morning Star becomes, in other words, a somewhat programmatic novel of ideas. Knausgaard chews on notions of faith, free will, the transmigration of souls, the nature of angels, on meaning and nothingness in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Rilke’s poetry ... Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive, yet there is something cramped about his work when he approaches ideas straight on, instead of obliquely ... Here the earnest wrestling is with how we think about mortality. At certain moments you sense he is in close contact with all the oldest and deepest wisdom; at other moments, the stream runs shallow.

Jonathan Franzen

Rave The New York Times ... a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. Crossroads is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations ... Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events — a car wreck, rape, suicide attempts, adultery, drug deals, arson — that arrive only slowly, as if revealed in sunlight creeping steadily across a lawn ... Franzen threads these stories, and their tributaries, so adeptly and so calmly that at moments he can seem to be on high-altitude, nearly Updikean autopilot. The character who cracks this novel fully open — she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction — is Marion, Russ’s wife ... The Franzen-shaped hole in our reading lives is like a bog that floods at roughly eight-year intervals. This time that bog is shot through with intimations of light ... Flannery O’Connor spoke of the \'moment of grace\' that appears in many of her stories, \'a moment where it is offered, and usually rejected.\' Franzen’s novel is flush with such moments. It’s about tests most of us fear we are not going to pass.

Atticus Lish

Rave The New York Times Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War for Gloria, is, by and large, a monster—solemn, punishing, kinetic, in easy contact with dark areas of the psyche, and yet heartbreaking in its portrait of a mother and son facing her mortal illness. It more than pays off on the promise of his first novel, Preparation for the Next Life, which won the 2015 PEN/Faulkner award ... You never sense [Lish is] merely writing \'quality fiction\'; he seems to draw instead from a deep well of experience, especially when it comes to the tastes and textures of life on the economic margins ... The details are intimate and harrowing and, to some degree, drive the core of the narrative ... Lish’s novel is powerful, intelligent, brooding and most of all convincing; it earns its emotions. Two things in it don’t convince ... No matter. The War for Gloria works because the details are so casually drilled home.

Joy Williams

Mixed The New York Times As Williams’s books go, this isn’t a very good one. Her wit misfires more than usual; the ecological themes are overly familiar; there are no real characters to hang onto, and very little plot, not that anyone comes to Williams for scenario ... Expectations are funny things, though. If you blacked out Williams’s name on the cover and told me that Harrow was written by a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I would probably have thought to myself, \'A wild one has escaped the infirmary! I greet you, wild one, at the start of an interesting career. Please stop making me laugh while unspooling my intestines\'...Such are the mental contradictions when reading a lesser Williams novel ... Williams’s characters strike poses and dispense thought bubbles, verbal pellets; they can seem to have stepped out of a Jules Feiffer strip. Everyone skitters sideways, as if they were crabs. Her humans are given to epiphanic exclamations that often have nothing to do with anything that’s happening. They’re trying to remain sane in a demented world. They’re total weirdos, in the best sense ... You skim Harrow, as if it were a book of poems, for the author’s observations, threaded as they are with acuity and chagrin and strange harbingers and vestiges of old mythologies ... Williams isn’t that kind of nature writer, one of the tenderheaded, cry-of-the-loon variety. Even if this novel is half-realized, like a wire frame awaiting clay for its head, its skepticism and sanity are consistently on display.

Richard Powers

Pan The New York Times ... so meek, saccharine and overweening in its piety about nature that even a teaspoon of it numbs the mind ... equal parts earnest opinion-page essay (humans + nature = yikes) and middling Netflix science fiction product (boy reconnects with dead mother through high tech) ... The medical science described in “Bewilderment” is really interesting, in the manner of a New Yorker article. As fiction, the novel is D.O.A. — shallowness that requests to be taken seriously ... it’s got a nubbly sentimentality ... To be fair to Powers, he retains an ability to alchemize the strangeness of everyday global life...But these moments are rare here ... There are some books you want to give to your best friend; this is one to give to your distant aunt, for her reading group. It’s a James Taylor song when you require a buzz-saw guitar. There’s no impudence, no wit, no fire and little fluttering understanding, despite the ostentatious science, of how human minds really work ... It’s a book about ecological salvation that somehow makes you want to flick an otter on the back of the head, for no good reason at all.

Colm Tóibín

Positive The New York Times ... subtle and substantial ... Toibin’s symphonic and moving novel humanizes [Thomas] further ... Toibin seeks to grasp the entirety of Mann’s life and times, the way a biographer might, and he does so quite neatly. Maximalist in scope but intimate in feeling, The Magician never feels dutiful. Like its subject, it’s somber, yet it’s also prickly and strange, sometimes all at once ... Toibin is a writer of pinging dialogue, a novelistic Tom Stoppard, and he gives Katia many of the best lines ... Toibin’s fiction is animated by the ever-alert attention he pays to sexual subcurrents ... a big novel that waxes and wanes.

Rita Dove

Rave The New York Times Book Review Rita Dove’s new book of poems is among her best. The title makes it leap from the bookcase ... Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs the everyday — insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of pills — into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious. Her sleepless eye for cant, necessary in all good poetry, is a bonus ... These are fighting poems ... You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Not hers.

Jan Grue tr. B. L. Crook

Rave The New York Times Grue is a Norwegian writer and academic who owns a shrewd, stern, pared-down prose style ... He writes exceedingly well about his desire not to be too polite, not to be a pushover, while realizing that, as he puts it, \'you cannot live in an uninterrupted battle with the entire world.\' He is candid about his peppery feelings, his \'hostile impulses, discomfort, ill-will\' ... Grue is helplessly epigrammatic ... a quietly brilliant book that warms slowly in the hands. A bonus is the author’s writing about clothing. Grue learns to pay attention to style and cut. He becomes a bit of a dandy ... artful.

James Tate Hill

Positive New York Times [Has] a lot to say about desire and pain and depression and shame and unlikely sources of joy, among other topics ... Blind Man’s Bluff is amiable, too. It’s been a long time since I met such a thoroughly normal guy in a memoir. Hill doesn’t try to impress us with his tastes and persona ... His book doesn’t have the grit and the rage and determined literariness [of other memoirs] ... But I’d buy him a beer anytime.

Anthony Veasna So

Positive The New York Times Witty and sharply expressed short stories ... Four or five of the stories in Afterparties are good enough that the reader senses that he had a vast amount of soul and spirit in his account, and that he’d only just begun to draw from it ... The author is at his best when he has a lot of plates spinning. A few of the quieter stories struggle to leave an impression.

Carol Leonnig

Mixed The New York Times ... earnest and diligent, to a fault ... alas, reads like 300 daily newspaper articles taped together so that they resemble an inky Kerouacian scroll ... Perhaps it’s not the authors’ fault that I Alone Can Fix It is grueling. It may be that a reader, having survived Covid-19, \'stop the steal\' and the bear-spray wielders, and feeling a certain amount of relief...is uneager to rummage so soon through a dense, just-the-facts scrapbook of a dismal year ... A primary and not insignificant achievement in I Alone Can Fix It, however, is its bravura introduction of a new American hero, a man who has heretofore not received a great deal of attention: Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A better title for this book might have been Mr. Milley Goes to Washington.

Michael Wolff

Positive The New York Times Wolff tells a broad, jumpy, event-laden story about Trump’s shambolic final year ... a smart, vivid and intrepid book. [Wolff] has great instincts. I read it in two or three sittings ... It’s the book that this era and this subject probably deserve ... Wolff has an eye for status details.

Carolyn Ferrell

Mixed The New York Times ... a difficult novel to read. The subject matter is about as grim as grim gets ... is difficult to read, too, because of its structure. Ferrell mixes bits of narrative, collage-style, with snippets of news stories, with letters and lists and spells and incantations and social service assessments and the answers to tests and questionnaires. There are atmospheric photographs. The effect is to keep the book’s action slightly remote, at a distance ... No real narrative force is permitted to develop in Ferrell’s novel, either. It’s an endurance test. I admired it while longing for it to end ... Ferrell’s title, Dear Miss Metropolitan, summons to mind the dark comedy of Nathanael West’s 1933 advice-column novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s a misleading title for this book ... The author is a vivid maker of sentences with a flair for casual surrealisms ... There are few scenes of applied, extended torment in Dear Miss Metropolitan. But the dry facts, unbearable in every detail, are more than enough. Over the course of the novel, they make something in your soul break down ... It becomes clear, and not for the first time, that Ferrell is navigating American trauma writ large, as well as her characters’ own. Some nightmares, and subsidiary nightmares, aren’t easily outrun.

Katie Kitamura

Rave The New York Times ... coolly written and casts a spell. The light it emits is ghostly, like that from under the lid of a Xerox machine ... The narrator’s voice is largely bloodless. One of Kitamura’s gifts, though, is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread. Your animal instincts as a reader — the tingling of the skin, the eagerness to pick the book back up — may be engaged before the rest of you is ... Kitamura pays attention to the dark side of urban landscapes, the things we prefer not to learn about ... All novels are, in a sense, about language, but Intimacies presses down on how meaning is made, and how it is compromised ... the real heat here, as in Kitamura’s previous novel, A Separation (2017), lies in the author’s abiding interest in the subtleties of human power dynamics ... Few novelists write so astringently about how we misread people, and are forced to refresh, as if on a web browser, our assumptions about them ... I like Intimacies — it’s certainly one of the best novels I’ve read in 2021 — without it quite being the sort of thing I like. The rapt attention it pays to the problems of glamorous, international, well-appointed people, not to go all Tea Party on the readers of this review, poked whatever class antagonisms I cling to ... You don’t sense the grit and grain of life. No one has ill-timed acne, or really can’t catch a cab. There are not many stray, stabbing insights. A film version would feature a lot of long, somber, pre-dawn drone shots of the stylish urban landscape and a thrumming score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ... Kitamura has delivered a taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.

Quentin Tarantino

Rave The New York Times Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage ... Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game. He’s not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights. He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten. The novel is loose-jointed. If it were written better, it’d be written worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks. In my memory, it’s the smell of warm coconut oil and dust mites and puddling Mercurochrome ... Tarantino goes so deep into Manson’s once-promising music career, you may feel you’re reading a back issue of Rolling Stone or Mojo magazine ... Tarantino makes telling a page-turning story seem easy, which is the hardest trick of all.

Salman Rushdie

Mixed The New York Times I read Rushdie’s arguments with much interest and little agreement, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used to say. He is fencing with a poorly stuffed straw man ... Much of the rest in Languages of Truth is limper and less interesting. The book contains several sleepwalking commencement speeches, semi-obligatory memorial lectures and the introductions to books and speeches delivered on behalf of PEN America, of which he was president from 2004 to 2006 ... He may be right. But the irritable Rushdie felt like the real one, or at least the wide-awake one. If his arguments about the state of fiction in Languages of Truth don’t convince, at least they’re genuine signs of life.

Jim Shepard

Mixed The New York Times ... I picked up Phase Six on a whim and devoured the first 100 pages before I knew what was happening ... In its second half, alas, this one rolls over and expires ... Like a lot of people, I have a sweet tooth for apocalyptic narratives. Shepard efficiently gets his off the ground. Things get dark quickly. He nails the scientific details, but also the cultural ones ... passes the Bechdel test on nearly every page ... Shepard is a crisp and intelligent and reliable writer ... Shepard writes perceptively, in Phase Six, about a lot of things. He’s passionate in his defense of the environment, though it’s hard to find a decent novelist who isn’t. He pays attention to the ways certain cable news channels make every situation worse. He makes scientific realities tactile ... After its creepy and bravura opening, Phase Six stalls. It’s as if, having achieved escape velocity, Shepard turned off his engines. What begins as a brainy potboiler, the kind of book you’d have felt lucky to find in one of those spinning drugstore paperback racks, becomes ponderous ... The world outside is burning and we’re almost entirely stuck inside ... There’s some slack writing, too, which is unusual for Shepard ... aspires to real density, but it can’t quite get there: The characters remain essentially static. The book falls into a no-person’s land between pop thriller and literary novel. It doesn’t satisfy on either level.

Ann McCutchan

Positive The New York Times ... plain-spoken ... McCutchan is a sensitive observer of Rawlings’s work, and of her deeply unconventional life in general ... It’s a pleasure to meet this cursing, hard-drinking, brilliant, self-destructive, car-wrecking, fun-loving, chain-smoking, alligator-hunting, moonshine-making, food-obsessed woman again on the page ... Come to this biography for Rawlings’s outsize personality, her quest to lead a life that felt authentic to her...Stay for the portrait of a woman whose writing meant everything to her.

Rachel Cusk

Rave The New York Times You know when you’re reading a page of Rachel Cusk’s fiction. Her narrators tug insistently if coolly at the central knots of being. They analyze every emotion as if it were freshly invented. Nothing is extraneous ... The narrator is familiar: a sharply observant writer in middle age ... More notably, this book has a swirling hothouse quality that’s new ... It’s as if Cusk has been reading Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels. She digs into the gothic core of family and romantic entanglements. I filled the margins with check marks of admiration, but also with exclamation points. This novel pushes its needles into the red ... One doesn’t come to a Cusk novel for plot but for her extra-fine psychological apparatus. Yet there is a fair amount of plot in Second Place ... If I could have rubbed a lamp and lightened this book’s lurid intensities, I might have. It is not a novel that gladdens the soul. But gladdening the soul has never been Cusk’s project.

Rachel Kushner

Rave The New York Times Kushner reminds us that she writes as well as any writer alive about the pleasure of a good motor doing what it was designed to do ... The essays in The Hard Crowd aren’t all about motorcycles and antique muscle cars, another of Kushner’s pet topics...But The Hard Crowd swings back around to engines and to motion. The author had found wings; she meant to use them. We watch her move her soul around ... This book has a real gallery of souls.

Jenny Diski

Positive The New York Times Amid the book reviews in the LRB by critics determined to sound sober and certain, as if they were museum docents, her reviews and essays admitted doubt. They were marvelously shrewd but approachable and witty. Diski’s articles made the sound of someone chewing her fingernails very intelligently. She made stuffy waiting rooms a little brighter ... Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? includes essays, couched as book reviews, on such creeps, malcontents and strivers as Jeffrey Dahmer, Howard Hughes, Dennis Hopper, Keith Richards, Piers Morgan and Richard Branson ... Diski has some interesting if limited sympathy for Dahmer who, in his own mind, was creating rather than destroying ... This book lacks, alas, an index. And some of Diski’s best stuff, written for other publications, is not here. For example, she used to write supermarket criticism for The Sunday Times of London, in a column called \'Off Your Trolley\' ... Some of the essays in Diski’s book are better than the others. The earlier ones, in fact, are a bit finer than the later — more intimate and free-floating. It’s as if she was beginning, after two decades of writing for the LRB, to sense the well running dry ... \'So much thought about everything appears in the form of literary criticism,\' Iris Murdoch wrote in a 1974 letter. In an ideal world, this would be so more often. Diski was a model.

Edward St. Aubyn

Positive The New York Times St. Aubyn’s new book, Double Blind, is an entertainment on scientific themes ... This is a hard book to summarize. For a short novel, it has many characters and moving parts ... Double Blind is always interesting because St. Aubyn is exacting. He takes all of this book’s topics seriously; he distills them and gives them all a good shake ... St. Aubyn catches the malaise, and the dread, that his mostly altruistic characters feel about the state of the planet.

Menachem Kaiser

Rave The New York Times Menachem Kaiser’s Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure tells a twisting and reverberant and consistently enthralling story. It’s a weird story that gets weirder ... Kaiser is a reflective man on the page, with a lively mind. He dwells on the moral seesaw he finds himself on ... Plunder has many stories to tell ... many moods and registers. It acquires moral gravity. It pays tender and respectful attention to forgotten lives. It is also alert to melancholic forms of comedy. Tonally I was reminded at times of Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent first novel, Everything Is Illuminated ... Traveling on a private road, closer to the ground, and at a slower pace, [Kaiser\'s] walk turns up details that are fresh, unexpected and significant. His perceptions are sharp. We partake of his curiosity.

Timothy Brennan

Pan The New York Times The subtitle of Timothy Brennan’s new book, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, is somewhat misleading. A Life implies an honest attempt at portraiture — a stab at wrestling a blood presence onto the page. In other words, a proper biography. In his preface, Brennan refers instead to his book as an \'intellectual biography,\' which is a subtly different animal. In this case, the result is a dry, dispiriting volume, one that frequently reads like a doctoral dissertation. It’s an uninspired parsing of academic texts and agendas. What the large print giveth, the small print hath taketh away ... a sense of missed opportunity lingers over Places of Mind ... in the final two-thirds of the book, the life is skimped; it’s an afterthought, pushed into corners ... Brennan seems to be speaking to others in his fields of expertise, not to an eager and curious general reader.

Sherry Turkle

Positive The New York Times A beautiful book. It has gravity and grace; it’s as inexorable as a fable; it drills down into the things that make a life; it works to make sense of existence on both its coded and transparent levels; it feels like an instant classic of the genre ... Her memoir is intellectually ambitious. She evokes the hothouse atmosphere at Radcliffe and Harvard in the late 1960s, when she was an undergraduate. She sketches fine, small profiles of the professors who influenced her ... The reason the reader cares about these intellectual adventures is that Turkle has already established a warm, intimate voice. We hear in her always the sensitive, curious, slightly baffled girl she was ... Turkle’s food writing, invested with emotion, is as fine ... The Empathy Diaries, I am devastated to report, slides to an uncertain and unpersuasive ending. Turkle attempts to bring the reader up to date with her life, but in a manner that seems evasive. She does not offer what one might call artistic resolution ... After so many felicities, an opacity. Come for this reverberant play anyway.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Positive The New York Times The first 100 pages of The Committed are, to my mind, better than anything in the first novel. The narrator’s voice snaps you up. It’s direct, vain, cranky and slashing — a voice of outraged intelligence. It’s among the more memorable in recent American literature ... subtly draws upon the mythic power France once held for Black Americans ... [Nguyen\'s] sentences, as they heat, expand. He lets them run riot. Some cover multiple pages, building to towering peaks. When these arias work, they’re ecstatic. When they don’t, one recalls Capote on Kerouac: \'That’s not writing, that’s typing\' ... The overwriting in this novel only rarely bothered me. More often I was reminded of George Balanchine’s comment that if his dancers didn’t occasionally fall onstage, they weren’t really going for it ... The second half of this book is shaggy, shaggy, shaggy. If it’s not a total breakdown, it’s something close ... This is a bookish novel. It’s the kind in which a bouncer at a brothel reads Voltaire ... Tragedy and comedy blend awkwardly in this novel’s second half. Nguyen can be very funny ... Nguyen consigns his characters to a series of frazzled, far-fetched scenarios. Mayhem feeds mayhem. There are several extended torture scenes in the back half of this book that don’t work at all ... Nguyen doesn’t find a tone for these scenes. They’re awful in their way — there are rubber hoses and electrodes clamped onto nipples — but they’re hard to take seriously. There’s a daft James Bond quality to them. The torturers fritter their time away, long enough for the tortured to be rescued. Doors are kicked open with a bang; guns blaze. You sense the author trying to keep the plot frantically spinning, rather than elegantly extending his themes ... Nguyen’s cynical humor just saves him ... This novel doesn’t hold together, but it’s more serious and more entertaining than nine-tenths of the novels that do. Its narrator wants redress for the wrongs of history, but he also wants to live in the imperative tense ... As you can tell, I’m of two minds about The Committed. I’ll put my feelings this way, borrowing something the English writer Jonathan Coe said about Fedora, Billy Wilder’s penultimate film: \'Flawed and bonkers, but I like it.\'

Mark Harris

Positive The New York Times One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, Mike Nichols: A Life, is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs ... Nichols was a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure we understand him much better at the end of Mike Nichols: A Life. He was a man in perpetual motion, and Harris chases him with patience, clarity and care.

Hermione Lee

Mixed The New York Times Book Review In the astute and authoritative new biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package ... Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15 percent of its body weight.

William Feaver

Positive The New York Times The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, \'smooth\' and \'hairy,\' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers. Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of The Lives of Lucian Freud — the second volume, Fame, 1968-2011, is out now — exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo. Feaver, a longtime art critic for The Observer in London, doesn’t provide a fixed portrait of Freud, the great realist painter, so much as he leads us into a studio filled with crusty brushes, scrapers, half-completed canvases, easels, dirty floorboards, mahlsticks and distilled turpentine, and lets us poke through the detritus as if to assemble a likeness for ourselves ... Can one pick up Volume Two of this biography if one hasn’t read Volume One? Feaver seems to suggest the answer is no. He doesn’t always bother to reintroduce people or topics ... Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There’s a sense one could skip three or four pages almost anywhere in these books and not miss anything crucial.

Chang-Rae Lee

Mixed The New York Times Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, My Year Abroad, is, like everything he writes, considered and elegant, formal and philosophical. He’s firmly in command. He remains in command while this novel runs straight off the road and into a deep ravine. To borrow a euphemism from the world of aeronautics, this long and draggy book is a \'controlled flight into terrain\' ... Reading My Year Abroad, one starts to feel, as Pete Townshend wrote in a recent Who song, \'over-full, always sated, puffed up, elated\' ... Lee isn’t a humorless writer, and he surely sees some mischief here too. But he plays this all with a straight face, and the scars Tiller comes away with are real.There are good things in My Year Abroad. Pong is an appealing and original creation. The fact that Tiller, Val and Victor must mostly remain housebound for their protection gives this novel Covid-19-era resonance. Lee has earned the right to write a fluky novel without shaking our respect. Sometimes, with fiction, it’s sic biscuitus disintegratum — that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Sarah Moss

Rave The New York Times As titles go, it’s mildly pretentious...Yet Moss, except in flashes, is anything but a pretentious writer. She writes beautifully about English middle-class life, about souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped ... She catches the details of ordinary existence in a manner that’s reminiscent of the director Mike Leigh: the peeling roof tiles, the cheap plastic teakettles, the beans on toast. She never condescends, and her fluid prose is suggestive of larger and darker human themes ... Reading her, one recalls John Barth’s comment that the best literature is \'both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access\' ... a bit less tightly wound than Ghost Wall, and it has an expedient ending. But there’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer ... As always in Moss’s work, there is a strong sense of the natural world. There are riddles of existence she’s shaking down. As a character puts it in Ghost Wall, \'ancient knowledge runs somehow in our blood\' ... As always in Moss’s work, too, there is an ominous quality, slow uncanny beats from an extra subwoofer or two, mighty but muffled ... One senses Moss stumbling toward an ending rather than running confidently downhill toward one. This is comment more than complaint. Endings don’t matter to me quite as much as they do to many ... Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is a great fog novel. Summerwater is pretty close to a great rain novel.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken

Mixed The New York Times In the Land of the Cyclops finds him in, at best, a holding pattern. These are minor essays, earnest and sawdust-filled ... Knausgaard’s plodding essays read more like lectures than like criticism. They’re more oil than vinegar ... One thing to like about this book — its primary translator from the Norwegian is Martin Aitken — is how Knausgaard reorients the world of culture and allows us to view it through his own Nordic lens ... He’s right to notice that we’re living in an era when fiction, because it’s a refuge for unpoliced thought and feeling of every stripe, matters more than ever. Elsewhere in this collection, you get the sense of a writer laboriously working out things that have been better worked out by others.

Guillermo Stitch

Rave The New York Times If you read Finnegans Wake for the off-color puns; if you take to Flann O’Brien’s satirical novels as happily as a pup going for a morning walk; if, like Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, you suspect you saw something nasty in the woodshed; if, like J.P. Donleavy, you’d like to decompose when you die in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs of Dublin; if you sometimes wish you were an extra in John Gay’s raucous The Beggar’s Opera, then Guillermo Stitch’s new novel, Lake of Urine, is for you ... Admittedly, that’s a lot of ifs. Can’t I also have, one might ask, characters I can identify with, a tendon of plot and the consoling sense that I’m a moral and high-minded person? Not here, no. Lake of Urine offers instead strange harbingers, offbeat mental exfoliations, subterranean impulses, verbal ambuscades and warty, warty manifestations of joy, wit and lust ... Stitch has more fun than a writer should be allowed to have ... Nothing about Lake of Urine seems forced ... Stitch flicks his blade around all the important things in life, isolating absurdities, nicking arteries. He deflates pretension at every turn. He throws images like tarot cards. He’s a caustic humorist with serious intent. His novel invites you to view the world as fundamentally absurd and usually awful, but also to recognize that laughter is a mighty, and cleansing, recompense ... As if made for our moment, Lake of Urine imparts a sense of old ways collapsing, and of men and women adjusting to brute new realities.

John Thompson and Jesse Washington

Positive The New York Times ... an unusually good sports memoir ... a consequential book with a plainspoken tone. Even after his success, Thompson preferred McDonald’s to restaurants with white tablecloths, and his voice makes an authentic sound ... This book has its lacunae. His wife and children are rarely mentioned. He wished he’d spent more time with them. He gives little evidence of his life outside of basketball, but perhaps he didn’t have much of one ... You sense there are stories that await a biographer.

Alice Quinn

Pan New York Times The editor Alice Quinn’s Covid-era anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, falters on every front. This lukewarm book, largely uncompromised by alert feelings, political insight, wit, striking intellect or lightning of any variety, is — to borrow a slab of Orwell’s Newspeak — doubleplus ungood ... Quinn has good feelers, except when they fail her, as they do here ... A few of these poems evoke the realities of blue-collar life, but mostly they’ve been written as if by comfortable indoor cats ... A few strong poems and some bright moments aside, Together in a Sudden Strangeness leaves little mark on the mind. It makes American poetry seem as if it is dazed and sated, in critical care and intubated.

Eley Williams

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... spirited ... Dictionaries are plump and (mostly) written in earnest. This novel more resembles a bonsai tree — compact, wizened and funny ... Plot is not why a reader should come to The Liar’s Dictionary. One approaches it instead for highly charged neurotic situations and for Williams’s adept word-geekery. Her esotericism is always on cheerful display ... The author has a knack for summoning the peculiarities of her word people ... You have to like a novel in which the put-downs are mellifluous and on point ... If The Liar’s Dictionary sounds like it’s for you, it probably is. It’s for those who’d trade an entire NCAA football division for Mary Norris, Benjamin Dreyer, Lynne Truss, Jesse Sheidlower, Bryan Garner (no relation) and a dazzling first-round copy editor to be named later ... I enjoyed The Liar’s Dictionary without quite being able to let down my guard ... There’s a thin line, in books like this, between being playfully literate and being self-delighted, in trying too hard to charm. It’s the difference between a real bookstore and one that smells like potpourri, and between wit and whimsicality. Williams can strand herself on the wrong side of this line.

Hilary Holladay

Positive The New York Times ... allows us to meet this prickly poet fresh and entire. It’s the first proper biography of her, and there’s a lot to unpack. This is a good story well-told ... If Holladay’s solid biography has a weak spot, it’s that she makes it difficult for anyone to criticize Rich’s work, for any reason whatsoever, and not be thought complicit in the grinding machinery of misogyny ... Holladay is a sensitive reader of Rich’s poetry. She also explicates Rich’s windswept moods.

Peter Guralnick

Mixed The New York Times It’s not so commanding. There’s something warmed-over about it. Reading it is like watching Merle Haggard perform in an uptight club with a quiet policy and a two-drink minimum ... None of these profiles are bad; none are particularly striking. They’re heavy on quotation and filler ... But there’s a fuzziness to Guralnick’s old stuff, at least when he isn’t writing to the beat of a good anecdote. Part of the fuzziness the reader feels in Looking to Get Lost is because these pieces aren’t dated, and we’re not told where they originally appeared. We’re not looking to get lost; we are lost ... It’s a cliché to remark that a book sent you running back to its subjects’ work with fresh eyes. But Guralnick’s book contains good endnotes.

Philip Gefter

Positive The New York Times ... wise and ebullient ... Gefter takes the reader inside so many of Avedon’s photo shoots, and so deftly explicates his work, that you’re thirsty to sate your eyes with Avedon’s actual images ... One of the achievements of Gefter’s biography is to argue persuasively for Avedon’s place, as a maker of portraits, as one of the 20th century’s most consequential artists ... Gefter selects the right photo sessions to linger over ... Gefter’s prose is unshowy but supple.

Don Delillo

Mixed The New York Times \"DeLillo’s new one is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry ... The good news about The Silence is that it’s engrossing and that, at 83, DeLillo’s syntax is as prickly as ever. I’m as attracted as anyone else to stories of doomed airplane flights and intimations of the end of the world, and DeLillo mostly held me rapt. I was never sorry to be holding this novel. The bad news, in addition to a certain amount of black-box, black turtleneck pretentiousness that is a hallmark of late-career DeLillo, is that The Silence reads like the first two chapters of a disaster novel. At 117 pages, it’s over before it gets started. It’s as if a filmmaker put two couples inside a remote old farmhouse for the weekend, cut the power, cued the dogs of hell and then rolled the credits ... a minor, oddly frictionless DeLillo novel. In terms of his career, it is not waterfall but spray. Posterity will be kind to him, but it will take relatively little note of this production.\

Phil Klay

Mixed The New York Times ... many slowly grinding parts. It gets the job done, just about, but it’s a ponderous journey ... It’s got a lot of primary characters. It’s got a story that skips around in time, so there’s a moral Doppler effect to factor in. The reader needs to leave a trail of stones so as not to get lost ... One needs a sharp pencil, a deep intake of breath and a willingness to follow the author closely. On occasion I lacked at least two of the three ... The author has done his homework and sticks pushpins into a large map. Yet this novel works, when it does, when it flies lower to the ground. Its flashes of genius and beauty are entirely in its details, not in foreign policy punditry ... Klay is brilliant on things like what it’s like to walk through a city after a recent bombing. He is very fine on what he calls the soundtrack of war ... He understands both the technology of war and the wet stuff of brutality and torture. He’s dryly funny about the new realities of American journalism and foreign reporting ... Klay’s writing about tending to the wounded is electric in its exactness ... These excellencies are small moments tucked into a baggy novel that struggles to find its focus. It’s not the author’s fault that the culture is saturated with prestige dramas about the drug wars, and that Don Winslow recently wrapped up his masterly Cartel trilogy. But there’s a sense, while reading Missionaries, of moving over instead of transcending familiar ground.

Shirley Hazzard

Rave The New York Times Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic. One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them. You drop into one as if you were a wet cell phone and it were a jar of uncooked rice ... a single important and elegant volume ... These are about condescending, pitilessly detached men and the trapped women who love them — and they’re simply brutal ... Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: \'We are human beings, not rational ones.\'

David Mikics

Positive New York Times David Mikics’s Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is a cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. This is not a full-dress biography — there have been several of Kubrick — but a brisk study of his films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite ... Mikics is an adept student of Kubrick’s uncanny art ... This book’s subtitle notwithstanding, Kubrick was in many ways the least American of American directors ... This book captures his control-freak side. It also captures why people wanted to work with him. He had a feel for every aspect of what made a film work.

Marilynne Robinson

Mixed The New York Times This is the era of Jim Crow and strictly enforced miscegenation laws, a milieu Robinson evokes with small, deft strokes ... When Jack opens his mouth, he tends to say the same six or seven things, as if Robinson were pulling a string in his back ... This is probably the place to say that, like a lot of readers I know, I’m divided about Robinson’s novels. On the one hand, there’s Gilead, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and which patiently accrues grace and power. On the other hand, to open her other novels, including this one, is largely to enter a remote, airless, life-denying, vaguely pretentious and mostly humorless universe, where it is always Sunday morning and never Saturday night, where the same bespoke arguments about religious feeling are rehashed, where a lonely reader enters, sniffs the penitential air and asks: Who died? ... Jack is a charmer who is seldom allowed to charm. We’re told he plays barrelhouse piano in bars, that he cuts loose on payday, that he’s a gifted and inveterate criminal. His motto might be carpe noctem. Yet we’re not allowed to see whatever jubilation he finds on the night side of life. He’s a moth, ostensibly drawn to flame, yet rigid because there’s a pin through his thorax. We witness only the hangover, moral and otherwise, the downcast eyes on the morning after. In this novel, he’s the dullest bad boy in the history of bad boys. He’s made to sit perpetually in the corner, facing the wall ... You rarely sense base emotion of any variety in Jack. Jack and Della, unlike Stanley and Stella, are not allowed, for example, to revel in anything as simple as lust. They shyly titillate only each other’s souls ... Della, in her deep need to shake off the expectations of family and society, is a fascinating character, and should resonate far more than she does. Neither she nor Jack seems to have independent life. You sense them placing their heads directly into the halters the author has made for them.

Ayad Akhtar

Rave The New York Times ... a beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life ... This novel gets off to a slow start ... One wonders when Akhtar’s book will settle, and when he will find a direction in which to aim his stories. One wonders for about 85 perceptive but drifting pages. He’s been tuning up ... Many of the most powerful moments in Homeland Elegies deal with the narrator’s life in the years after 9/11. There are powerfully written scenes of confrontation (you can see the film in this novel) between Akhtar and cops, strangers and others who are suspicious of him ... electric footnotes ... There is good writing about Salman Rushdie and Edward Said and syphilis and hoof stew and Scranton, Pa., and screenwriting, among many other things ... a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and at its best it has candor and seriousness to burn.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave The New York Times It takes something more than intelligence to be able to write intelligently ... Whatever it is, Sigrid Nunez has it. When I open one of her novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be ... It’s as good as The Friend, if not better ... This novel has sorrow in it. It’s also quite funny. We bumble our way toward death as we bumble toward everything ... [a] wise novel.

Ali Smith

Positive The New York Times Ali Smith’s new novel, Summer, is the concluding volume in her immersive, prickly and politically ardent seasonal quartet ... Each has been on the beat of the world’s news, from Brexit to Trump to wildfires in Australia to immigrant detainees to, now, the arrival of Covid-19. (You imagine her at the printing plant, dictating final touches as the presses churn.) Each has been like a push notice that clicks open in your mind ... When we get momentarily baffled in a Smith novel, we don’t, like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, sit and scratch our hindquarters. We’re with the author, banging down bosky mental paths. She trusts that we’ll eventually notice the trail blazes on the rocks. She’s writing about the state of her own soul at the moment, and meaning can be up for grabs ... This novel has a lot to say about political prisoners and immigrant detainees of all stripes, from World War I up to the present day. Efforts are made to help some of them ... Along the way there is a good deal of talk about evanescence — of summertime and everything else ... This novel made me laugh, quite a lot, as the generations wage war ... Smith’s seasonal novels can be pretty on-the-nose, politically. Sometimes they veer into the saccharine. The water, here and there, turns brackish. But as with a strong river, their motion is fundamentally self-purifying ... Summer is a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment. \'Whatever age you are,\' one character comments, \'you still die too young.\'

Isabel Wilkerson

Rave The New York Times It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away ... Caste lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing ... Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans ... Wilkerson does not shy from the brutality that has gone hand in hand with this kind of dehumanization. As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand ... Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word \'racism,\' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.

Natasha Trethewey

Rave The New York Times Nothing she has written drills down into her past, and her family’s, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out ... This is a book with a slow, steady build. This is restraint in service to release ... This memoir has eddies of joy and celebration. Trethewey writes memorably about the music Gwendolyn loved ... The second half, unexpectedly, dumps a bag of harrowing receipts on the table. Thanks to a police officer who had been the first on the scene, Trethewey has access to...her mother\'s police statements...transcripts of telephone calls ... Trethewey dispenses this material to powerful effect ... Memorial Drive closes like a door sucked shut by the wind ... Even though you intuit what is coming, the moment you learn of Gwendolyn’s death is...stunning.

Kelli Jo Ford

Rave The New York Times ... more than promising ... Kelli Jo Ford summons the details of minimum-wage life in the last quarter of the 20th century. She does this without cluttering her spare sentences, which is why her details resonate ... This is a novel in stories, a dread form in the wrong hands. The point of view shifts, vertiginously, from one chapter to the next, as if you are watching a heist from multiple security cameras. But Crooked Hallelujah has a supple cohesiveness ... As a writer, Ford is quietist. Her book reads like a series of acoustic songs recorded on a single microphone in a bare room with a carpet. There are times when you might wish for more boldness, but she never puts a wrong foot. This is a writer who carefully husbands her resources. Small scenes begin to glitter ... has an elegiac rather than a comic tone. Yet when I combed back through my notes, I realized that so many moments had made me smile ... Ford’s novel finds its center of gravity at the intimate human level.

Mary Jordan

Mixed The New York Times ...The Art of Her Deal, a well-reported book, can’t help but seem lopsided. Trump-world stalwarts such as Corey Lewandowski...Chris Christie...and Sean Spicer...are quoted fulsomely. The less obsequious comments mostly come from unnamed sources ... Jordan has drilled down, though, and brings new information about this unconventional first lady to the surface ... Jordan pays attention to the many interviews Melania gave as a model and afterward, and catches her in many exaggerations, including the fact that she speaks many languages. She appears to speak only two ... Jordan never quite finds a voice with which to tell this story. She doesn’t have a strong point of view, and shies away from acute analysis. The Art of Her Deal reads like a very long newspaper article rather than a tightly wound book. The author bends so far backward to be fair to her subject that, at times, you fear she may need chiropractic help ... Donald Trump appears to dwell in the White House, for the most part, like a sultan among his pillows. Melania is self-exiled with her parents and son. On many days, Jordan writes, her press office doesn’t answer questions about where she is ... Melania played a kind of satirical James Bond girl in a famous photo shoot for British GQ. I thought of her situation recently while watching the Bond film Live and Let Die. That’s the one in which Roger Moore, stranded in the middle of a pond filled with crocodiles, manages to get to the safety of shore by using their heads as steppingstones.

Chris Atkins

Positive The New York Times There has been a good deal of excellent writing, in the last few years, about jail and African-American men ... Atkins’s book....is a different, less harrowing sort of volume. But it’s a good one. He’s a sensitive observer, sober but alert to wincing varieties of humor. He’s not one of those people who, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, \'had the experience but missed the meaning.\' ... Atkins’s best writing is about what imprisonment does to one’s body and mind: the adrenaline surge of arrival in prison, the taste of shock in one’s mouth. He writes about the exhaustion prisoners feel, a vastly more extreme version of what many have felt during quarantine ... He spends nine months at Wandsworth before he is transferred to a minimum-security prison to serve the remainder of this time. His diary ends with his transfer. He writes that prison made him a better person; he’s less of a judgmental soul. A Bit of a Stretch may not be a major book, but it’s soulful indeed.

Fang Fang, Trans. By Michael Berry

Positive The New York Times Fang Fang captures the shock and panic at the start of the quarantine ... Because she is plugged into the cultural and academic worlds in Wuhan, there is a roll call of the deaths of many well-known artists, journalists and professors. There is an interesting sense, in this diary, of an intellectual proletariat ... This is an important and dignified book that nonetheless, in this adept translation by Michael Barry, has its share of dead space and repetition ... would have been twice as good at half the length. It’s a bit easier to praise, as Tom Wolfe said of the William Shawn-era New Yorker, than it is to read. Still, the urgency of this account is impossible to deny ... This book is most scorching in Fang Fang’s calls to hold to account the leaders who downgraded and minimized the virus, wasting nearly three weeks and allowing it to seep into the world at large. She rallies around this topic like Henry V pacing the floorboards before the Battle of Agincourt. She may live meekly during the lockdown, but she writes bold sentences.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Mixed The New York Times ... intelligent and respectful and well made but bland; it is warm bread instead of toast ... The Clinton-Rodham love affair is a highlight of this book ... Bill Clinton is close to demonic ... One of the impressive and moving things in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s own memoir is the sheer number of good friends she made, and kept, over the years. This novel boils those many friends down to a very few ... has its intimacies, even if it’s not an especially interior novel...Yet she remains essentially distant. If she’s not as creaky as an animatronic president at Walt Disney World, she is somewhere between that and a truly inhabited human being ... This is skillful ventriloquism, yet Sittenfeld never occupies her subject at an animal level. Rodham never has a thought, in this novel, that stabs you or comes from anywhere close to left field. As if it were the Great Salt Lake, you won’t sink in this book — but it won’t quench your thirst, either ... The best thing about reading Rodham, while living through our government’s response to the coronavirus, is that it allows us to do something some of us were doing already, which is to recall her competence and empathy and to miss her enormously.

Bill Buford

Positive The New York Times This is a more sober book than Heat. It’s as if Johnny Cash followed up \'Get Rhythm,\' as a jukebox single, with \'Hurt.\' ... As with good cookery, no shortcuts are taken in Dirt. When Buford picks up a subject — be it bread or language or culinary history or Italian versus French food or the nature of Lyon — that subject is simmered until every tendon has softened ... This is a big book that, like an army, moves entire divisions independent of one another. Watching Buford choose a topic for scrutiny is like watching an enormous bodybuilder single out one muscle, on the mountain range of his or her arms, for a laser-focused burn ... this book has a blind spot as regards money. Buford and Green abandon their jobs and apparently their incomes and rent an apartment in Lyon that has six marble fireplaces. They order dear bottles of wine in restaurants and consume extortionate menus and take high-priced classes and send their children, when they finally return to New York, to an elite private school ... I don’t demand that a writer tell me where his or her seemingly endless supply of scratch comes from. But the lack of even vague disclosure, in a book that takes an interest in social class in Lyon, leaves an odd crater. Buford’s story may have some readers skating along the line that separates envy from something else ... At a time when writers really, really want us to like them, and it’s all a bit gross, Buford doesn’t try very hard. He has a smart, literate, sly voice on the page. But he doesn’t go overboard, for example, when it comes to calling attention to himself as a good father. He’s away from home a great deal, leaving a lot of the messy work to his wife ... I admire this book enormously; it’s a profound and intuitive work of immersive journalism. If I didn’t turn every page with equal enthusiasm, well, it’s a long trip. There will be gray days and sunny ones. Walter Bagehot said some writers are incisors, while others are grinders. Buford is a grinder of a high order.

Lawrence Wright

Positive The New York Times The sweeping, authoritative and genuinely intelligent thriller—the sort of novel in which the author employs a bulldozer and a scalpel at the same time—is a rare specimen. Lawrence Wright’s second novel, The End of October, is one of these. The fact that it’s about the world in shock and ruin because of a virus similar to Covid-19 makes it read as if it’s been shot out of a cannon ... As a fiction writer, Wright will not make you forget that Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood still stride the planet. His dialogue can be a bit wooden. There is some overbearing psychological development. A major character dies without the impact the moment might have had...What he offers in compensation is a great deal of learning about viruses and their attendant political and social horrors; learning that he injects into a maniacal page-turner. He offers the joy of competence — his own as a writer, and the scientific and moral competence of many of the characters he’s invented. At a moment when competence and verity are in short supply at the top, and when our best scientists cannot share their nomenclature and expertise, this is no small consolation, even while reading about humanity coming to a boil ... While we long for that frabjous day when we can put Covid-19 behind us and once again grip the communal pen at the coffee shop counter, Wright’s novel is here as a real if solemn entertainment, a stay against boredom and a kind of offered prayer for the best in us to rise to the surface.

Kate Lister

Mixed The New York Times ...Kate Lister’s first book...is not about libido in times of plague and anxiety. But it’s impossible not to read it now through that lens ... Lister, an Englishwoman, is a strong writer, and her book comes with a story attached ... This might be a good time to get a bicycle. Among the best chapters is one subtitled \'Sex and Cycling\', Lister explores the history of bicycles as agents in the emancipation of women ... Lister writes about aphrodisiacs such as oystes. I did not know, until reading her, that oysters have eyes. I would like to unlearn this fact ... Lister is aware that her book, dark passages aside, is a romp rather than an especially serious or comprehensive work of history or criticism. She has the double entendres to prove it ... This is a book of varying merit. At moments, when Lister is piling one fact atop another, A Curious History of Sex has a Wikipedia-page vibe. But she manages to pull out of these midair stalls. She’s mostly quite good company on the page ... Wherever we are heading, whatever your proclivities, Lister has this comment: \'I promise, it’s all been done before.\'

Hannah Sullivan

Rave The New York Times It’s great cocktail-bar (and dive-bar) verse ... pellucid and startlingly intelligent poetry ... Sullivan catches the \'slam-hold of horns\' in taxicabs and how, when you are young in New York, you can pile into a cab with too many others ... You follow this writer where she wishes to take you. She is a poet of steel shavings, of semidetached feeling, of unexpected links and impieties and unpropitious implications. She’s writing criticism of daily life—criticism of the state of her own soul.

Woody Allen

Pan The New York Times Book Review Volunteering to review [Apropos of Nothing], in our moral climate, is akin to volunteering for the 2021 Olympic javelin-catching team. I told my wife and daughter my plan, and they stared at me as if I’d announced my intention to find the nearest functioning salad bar and lick the sneeze guard ... I believe Allen’s sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime partner Mia Farrow, which began when Previn was 21, was obviously the perverse act of a man whose brain salts are dangerously out of balance ... The accusation that in 1992 he molested his adopted daughter, the 7-year-old Dylan Farrow, is a charge of another magnitude. I believe that the less you’ve read about this case, the easier it is to render judgment on it ... I believe that Hachette, the publishing house that acquired and then canceled Apropos of Nothing, behaved cravenly ... So kill me now or come along, there’s a book to talk about ... Anyone who’s read Allen’s previous books...knows he has an authentic and easygoing voice on the page. That’s true in Apropos of Nothing, too, at least for a while. Later on this book begins to make the clicking sound cars do when the battery has expired ... Like many of our fathers and grandfathers, Allen is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world. His friends should have warned him that Apropos of Nothing is incredibly, unbelievably tone deaf on the subject of women ... Nearly every time a woman is mentioned, there’s a gratuitous pronouncement on her looks ... The heavy breathing gets more intense as the book moves on ... \'When you meet her you have to fight your way through the pheromones,\' he writes about Scarlett Johansson, 19 when he first worked with her. \'Not only was she gifted and beautiful, but sexually she was radioactive\' ... The final third of this book falls apart dreadfully. It’s a rolling of credits, a handing out of goody bags ... He can live with being reviled by many, he says, because he doesn’t read the articles. He lives in a bubble. He’s making a new movie.

Ben Katchor

Rave The New York Times This is an encyclopedic book, history as told through old newspapers and telephone books and scraps of detail found in letters and memoirs ... This dense cultural and culinary history is reason enough to come to The Dairy Restaurant. But Katchor...has a sharp mind and a sly sense of humor. His words and his charcoal-palette drawings have a combinatory intelligence ... Many of the best moments in this book are stray gleanings ...This is a forlorn book, somehow. You wish it came with a good mixed bread basket, for mopping up the lonely broth.

Madison Smartt Bell

Positive The New York Times ... revealing ... a sensitive and thorough biography. Bell knew Stone well toward the end of his life; the two traveled together in Haiti. The author explicates Stone’s fiction and expands its context. If this quite conventional biography never entirely takes off, it is rarely uninteresting ... Bell writes with special alertness about Stone’s marriage ... This is one of those rare biographies in which you don’t feel like skimming the first 35 pages.

Catherine Lacey

Mixed The New York Times ... strange, estranging and heavy-handed ... This is a novel that takes itself very seriously. The reader who has kept pace with Lacey’s fiction will be willing, mostly, to take it seriously, too ... What works in this novel is its Kafkaesque sense, through Pew, of free-floating anxiety and mortification of a sort that is impossible to define and thus impossible to soothe. Pew will not be characterized, interpreted, diagnosed or annotated. She seems to drift, like the planchette on a Ouija board ... Pew’s muteness draws out other people’s stories, in the manner of the fiction of Rachel Cusk, among others. Some of these are confessional and quite dark, yet few resonate ... Lacey has a mastery of the lives and lingo of the Have a Nice Day crowd, the kind of people whose defensive optimism keeps them from learning about anyone. She stacks the deck so heavily against these hair-sprayed grotesques that they’re brittle, however; they crack like dry spaghetti ... This novel walks a high wire between pretentiousness and a kind of cool, disembodied unease. For me, it fell too often into the goo pit ... Pew feels as if Pew is lying perpetually in a canoe, able only to see the sky above. The reader may feel stuck looking in the other direction, as if his or her face has been inserted into the equivalent of one of those holes at the ends of massage tables, where all one can see is floor tile and dust mites ... Lacey is such a talented writer that she casts a certain spell, even when that spell is distant and difficult to tune in.

Juli Delgado Lopera

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... the prose is as ebullient and assertive as Rosie Perez’s shadowboxing in the opening credits of Do the Right Thing ... Lopera pushes this novel’s idiomatic language into English and then Spanish, to bold and farcical effect ... The way to write a novel, Jim Harrison once said in The Paris Review, is to \'just start at Page 1 and write like a son of a bitch.\' That’s what Lopera has seemingly done in Fiebre Tropical. You can open this novel anywhere and find sunbeams, the signs of a writer who is grinding their own colors ... There are moments in Fiebre Tropicalwhen one begins to wish for more structure, for a stronger sense of narrative inevitability. A nimble voice can only take you so far. Then, around this novel’s midpoint, something valuable happens. We pivot backward in time to observe Francisca’s mother and grandmother when each was 15, and more than a little bit wild ... There is a feeling of coming full circle.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The New York Times Occasionally it verges on the poky ... Like a so-so vacation that ripens in your mind and begins to look quite rosy in retrospect, I liked Death in Her Hands more after it was over and I’d let it sit a few days. It has an afterlife in your mind. From a distance, you can savor its trap doors. If I sometimes wished I were sneak-reading one of the author’s other books under the table, well, I am a fool for that high Moshfegh style. Vesta has a vast interior life, but life has reduced her. She’s like an ornamental shrub that’s been ruthlessly espaliered. She put me in mind of the critic Seymour Krim’s comment that so very many people never find \'the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.\'

Eric Eyre

Rave The New York TImes Eyre finds a tone for his story. He writes with candor and gravity; a tensile rod of human decency braces every paragraph. He attached himself to this story the way a human fly attaches to a skyscraper, and he refused to let go ... meat and potatoes journalism in a light, sensible broth. There are lawsuits and court fights and public records requests; there is also skulduggery and a mysterious manila envelope dropped into a mailbox. There is unexpungeable grief. It’s the work of an author who understands that objectivity is not the same as bland neutrality. I expect it will be taught to aspiring reporters for many years to come ... demonstrates why local journalism matters, more than ever.

Larry Kramer

Positive The New York Times Volume two strews a lot of carnage ...The score-settling is sometimes personal — although, with Kramer, everything is personal ... Lemish, like Kramer, is a diva, always ready to pull the bung from his emotions. He devours his enemies so ravenously that, when he speaks, their tails are still hanging from his mouth ... A river of blood courses through Kramer’s epic. That blood is bought and sold and swapped and spilled. If both volumes of The American People were the only books left behind by our species, an alien people who discovered them would, at the very least, really know that we had been here ... This novel, like its predecessor, is overstuffed, packed with incident and narrators and digressions within digressions. Unlike an iceberg, it hides nothing under the surface. It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a beautiful and humane one. It’s the journal of a plague century. I can’t say I liked it. Yet, on a certain level, I loved it.

Gish Jen

Mixed The New York Times ...[a] densely imagined if static new novel ... Much of the futuristic language Jen deploys, her portmanteaus, reflects the banality of both corporate uplift ... and state-sponsored evil ... Into this totalitarian landscape, like a flower slipped into the barrel of a rifle, Jen inserts an almost old-fashioned baseball novel ... Jen...is a wonderfully gifted writer. But The Resisters is not among her best novels; it never sinks its hooks into the reader ... In part, this is because we have dystopian novel overload, a condition Jill Lepore diagnosed in The New Yorker a few years ago. In part, too, it’s because Jen exerts so much effort constructing her world, this book’s hardware, that the human software is underdeveloped. There’s not a lot of human juice here, those micro-pleasures of perception that fill much of her earlier fiction; there’s merely a rolling scenario ... Once in a while, this novel opens a small box of dread. But there’s a tameness here, too. You know there’s going to be a big game at the end. You sense that, within certain limits, everything is going to be okay. To borrow imagery from a less literary sport, you feel that this novel’s bowling lane has bumper rails.

Philip Rucker

Positive The New York Times [Rucker and Leonnig] are meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date ... reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It’s as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass ... The result of Rucker and Leonnig’s hard work is a book that runs low to the ground; it only rarely pauses for sweeping, drone-level vistas and injections of historical perspective. This is not Garry Wills or Joan Didion. They do break news, some large and some small ... Rucker and Leonnig are adept at scene-setting, at subtly thickening the historical record.

Jenny Offill

Positive The New York Times Weather is written not so much in consecutive paragraphs of narration but in often square blocks of text, each set off by white space, as if they were stanzas. They’re the work of a curator who likes a spare hang. Each paragraph is a little lonely, like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting. These parcels of feeling and intellect drop out one at a time, like packs from a cigarette machine. All the others descend down a slot, awaiting their turn. The effect of this style is to put a pause after every paragraph, to hold it up for a little extra light and a little extra examination, to allow it to linger in the mind. There’s a bit of the brilliant Lydia Davis in Offill ... Offill’s writing is often brisk and comic, and her book’s format underlines her gifts ... There’s a drawback to this format, too. Not every paragraph in a standard novel needs to shine ... when each paragraph in a short novel is cocooned in consecrating white space, as they are in Weather, the weaker ones can read like off notes rather than merely the veins or arteries that carry a story along ... Offill has genuine gifts as a comic novelist. Weather is her most soulful book, as well.

Garth Greenwell

Rave The New York Times ... incandescent ... Anyone who read Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (2016), knows that his writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage ... There’s a moral quality to these extended sessions. In bed is where Greenwell’s men work out and reveal the essences of their personalities ... Carnal moments are accelerants; they’re where Greenwell’s existential and political themes are underlined, then set ablaze ... a better, richer, more confident novel. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. It’s a novel in search of ravishment ... Greenwell is a sensitive writer about the student-teacher relationship ... Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. Every detail in every scene glows with meaning. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata ... This novel’s second half is not quite the equal of its first. Some scenes end rather than resolve. Greenwell is a brooder. You begin to wonder how his humorlessness will wear over time ... Yet there are no failures of equilibrium. This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.

Colum McCann

Pan The New York Times McCann takes their story and drops it to the ground, where it shatters. To read Apeirogon is to watch him pick up the shards ... The Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek, writing on Twitter, recently called \'storytelling\' a \'jazz-hands word.\' Apeirogon is a jazz-hands novel ... You sense you would like Rami and Bassam if you got to know them. But we are not allowed to settle into the texture and nuance of their experience. We’re evicted from the narrative on almost every page so that McCann can tweezer in arty and only vaguely relevant facts about birds, or about John Cage’s music, or about the Dead Sea Scrolls or the derivation of the word \'dextrose\' ... is so solemn, so certain of its own goodness and moral value, that it tips almost instantly over into camp, into corn. It’s as if the author were gunning for the Paulo Coelho Chair in Maudlin Schlock ... not a meal but a table littered with ingredients ... When you insist on a lot of white space between paragraphs and sometimes between single sentences, and if your work is humid, the effect can unintentionally verge on the amusing. Each sentence has an apricot-colored scarf tied around its neck. And it’s as if the reader has been given 10 seconds and a bong hit between each one; time to squint and nod and say, \'So true\' ... [McCann\'s] analysis of the predicaments that face the Middle East is not raw or original or sophisticated. His message is optimistic and banal. Apeirogon is like a political memoir that bangs on about the importance of bipartisanship as if the senator had, just this morning, arrived at the idea.

Aravind Adiga

Rave The New York Times ... bracing ... I like to read Adiga’s novels almost as much as the poet James Dickey liked to drink. He has more to say than most novelists, and about 50 more ways to say it ... Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul ... Adiga is valuable because he attends to how people think, rather than how they should think. No one in his novels is simple to understand. Adiga may not agree with everything that gets said or thought, but there is no gauze on his mental windshield. Nice people are often skewered, as if on kabobs. Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse ... has a simmering plot ... Adiga’s plot clicks the novel forward along its tracks, but it’s packed with small implausibilities. You come to this novel for other reasons, notably for its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives ... You can scoop Adiga’s smaller observations up like shrimp in a net.

Ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Rave The New York Times An essential new book, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, presents this writer in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. Nearly all of these letters are previously unpublished. What brings them alive is that while they brood on the largest of issues — identity, alienation, the political responsibilities of the artist — they’re earthy and squirming with all the vital things of everyday experience ... You move from the cascade of Ellison’s thinking about art and ideas, for example, to one of the funniest and warmest letters I’ve ever read ... This collection has so many incidental pleasures that I nearly always felt lucky to be reading it while the rest of the world had to make do with Twitter ... His writing about music is nearly always sublime ... There’s too much of John F. Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor and co-editor of these letters, in this collection. His introductions to each decade of letters are overly long, not especially perceptive and spill too many details ... Collections of letters, like biographies, build narrative momentum — how will Ellison get out of this jam? — momentum that Callahan dashes by too often emerging in the narrative to tell you what is going to happen and to pre-empt the best lines ... contains so much fine human stuff, however, that the indelible line from Invisible Man reverberates over it: \'Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?\'

D.H. Lawrence, Ed. by Geoff Dyer

Positive The New York Times Book Review Most of this material was new to me, and I enjoyed this book enormously ... Reading Lawrence’s writing about sex, in general, leaves you suspecting that he walked around with perpetual rugburn ... ends with Rebecca West’s remembrance of Lawrence, published shortly after his death in 1930. Lawrence would have admired her refusal to lapse into panegyric ... Lawrence’s deadline excursions nearly always hit their mark.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ed. by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy

Pan The New York Times ... is mostly for completists ... Nabokov disliked the Q. and A. \'I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child,\' he wrote. Yet two-thirds of Think, Write, Speak is made up of interviews, more than 80 of them, most conducted after the publication of Lolita. One suspects that Nabokov, spying this talky book from the Great Beyond, must feel as if someone has dug up his bones, hanged him, and buried him again ... Nabokov is Nabokov. He dispenses gleaming shards...But the same topics keep coming around, as if on a sushi belt.

Bob Kaufman, Ed. by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell

Rave The New York Times ... the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. It reminds us that Kaufman had his weaknesses; his poems could tip over into splintered whimsy. Yet this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor ... What sticks with you about Kaufman’s work is its celestial wit.

Adam Platt

Positive The New York Times The best thing about Platt’s new memoir is the way he dispenses with pretense in general. He does not pretend, even though he knows a great deal, to be a super-foodie. He’s maniacally self-deprecating. He serves good stories because he doesn’t over-batter them ... Platt surfs these waves without being crushed or much bothered by them ... One way to judge a memoir is by how well the author writes about people other than him or herself. There’s a lovely and extended homage here to the Falstaffian food writer and historian Josh Ozersky, a friend of Platt’s who died in 2015 ... The reason to come to The Book of Eating is Platt’s eloquence and wit about what being a professional glutton does to his body and to his family ... Sometimes this book is too casual for its own good. Platt includes sections of essays he’s published previously, not all of which fit. Once in a while, the writing goes on autopilot. Nothing is really at stake. But his charm lashes this succession of small plates together.

Holly George-Warren

Positive The New York Times A new biography, Janis, by the music writer Holly George-Warren, performs a service by stripping away a lot of the noise around Joplin — cackling and bawdy, she was America’s first female rock star and Haight-Ashbury’s self-destructive pinup girl — and telling her story simply and well, with some of the tone and flavor of a good novel. This is fundamentally an Eisenhower-era misfit story, and there are a lot of those. But Joplin’s story has a special freight of pain in it.

Atticus Lish

Rave The New York Times Book Review Atticus Lish’s first novel, Preparation for the Next Life, is unlike any American fiction I’ve read recently in its intricate comprehension of, and deep feeling for, life at the margins. This is an intense book with a low, flyspecked center of gravity. It’s about blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food, bad options. At its knotty core, amazingly, is perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade. It’s one that builds slowly in intensity, like a shaft of sunlight into an anthracite mine ... Mr. Lish’s sentences...are confident, loose jointed, strewn with essential detail ... There’s been a surfeit of wounded warriors in recent American fiction...these men can, in lesser hands, be stock characters. Not here. The encrusted detail in Mr. Lish’s prose flicks the switch on in every sentence ... This is a love story with a lot of ache in it ... This book is thick with the kind of sub-countertop-level detail that can’t be faked ... Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories ... The final chapters of this indelible book pulled my heart up under my ears.

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Positive The New York Times ... pushes Betts’s story forward, in verse that is nimble in its diction, tone and focus. The poems are about returning to everyday American life, but in an estranged and often painful way, as if blood were rushing into a long-pinned limb ... In prison, Betts wrote in his memoir, letters were known as \'kites,\' because they flew up and out. The poems in Felon are kites of a different sort — bruised, sensitive, wounded missives, sent into hard wind, from a man in transition.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Positive The New York Times Book Review It’s a big and sustaining pile of — as I’ve heard it put about certain people’s fried chicken — crunchy goodness ... The essays in Pulphead bounce around, like hail ... What’s impressive about Pulphead is the way these disparate essays cohere into a memoirlike whole. The putty that binds them together is Mr. Sullivan’s steady and unhurried voice ... Like well-made songs, his essays don’t just have strong verses and choruses but bridges, too, unexpected bits that make subtle harmonic connections ... All of this is a way of saying that these essays have split ends and burnt edges. This fact makes you vaguely dread Mr. Sullivan’s inevitable hiring by The New Yorker as a staff writer. You don’t want to see any of the edges buffed away ... There are moments in this book when Mr. Sullivan is a bit pulp-headed, glibly mythopoetical, straining for effect ... Those moments are rare. Most of the essays in Pulphead are haunted, in a far more persuasive way, by what Mr. Sullivan refers to with only slight self-mockery as \'the tragic spell of the South.\'

Bernardine Evaristo

Positive The New York Times ... a big, busy novel with a large root system ... Lorrie Moore has written that Ann Beattie’s fiction is a valentine to friendships. The same is true of Evaristo’s. This novel is a densely populated village where everyone leans on one another in order to scrape by ... presents a landscape of abiding multicultural sensitivity ... Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions. When you are feeling your way into new ways of living, she understands, there must be room for error ... written in a hybrid form that falls somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo’s lines are long, like Walt Whitman’s or Allen Ginsberg’s, and there are no periods at the ends of them ... There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy. Evaristo’s wit helps, too ... This looseness can detract as well. There is sometimes the sense that Evaristo loves all of her sentences a little bit but few of them quite enough. This essentially plotless novel grows longer, but it does not always appear to grow richer ... There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather settle into the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. You begin to feel you are always between terminals at a very large airport, your clothes and toiletries in a little wheelie suitcase behind you. It’s possible to admire this deeply humane novel while permitting your enthusiasm to remain under control.

Michel Houellebecq, Trans. by Shaun Whiteside

Mixed The New York Times The new Michel Houellebecq novel, Serotonin, is an exhausted and exhausting book. It makes you wonder if he has played out his string as a fiction writer ... Like nearly every Houellebecq novel, Serotonin should be stamped on its spine with a tiny skull and crossbones, like you used to see on bottles of poison, to keep away the devout, the unsuspecting and the pure of heart. His fiction picks up topics like prostitution, sexism, pedophilia, pornography, racism, torture and sex tourism as if they were cans of diet soda. He turns them over to observe them coolly, neutrally and often comically from all sides. He triggers intense responses ... Submission, in terms of its plot, felt like a vise slowly tightening. Serotonin is comparatively quite slack. Like bleach-burned sheets, it seems thin and worn. Someone has been in this motel room all night, strewing scurrilities ... Houellebecq arrives in your life \'waving genitals and manuscripts,\' to borrow a phrase from Howl. Don’t feed his characters. They will keep coming around. Houellebecq’s great trick is managing to smuggle so much life into his novels, even into minor ones like Serotonin, while his characters’ hearts can seem, like Damien Hirst’s shark in its formaldehyde, to marinate in brine.

Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Bela Shayevich

Rave The New York Times Book Review You can open this document anywhere; it’s a kind of enormous radio. It offers a flood of voices: doctors and writers, deli workers and former Kremlin apparatchiks, soldiers and waitresses. Ms. Alexievich gives these people space. There are few interpolations from the author. When she does insert a comment, it’s in brackets and often unbearably moving, like \'She no longer wipes her tears\' or \'She’s practically screaming\' or \'And both of us cry.\' A freight of catharsis is on display ... This book is thick with longing for old times, terrible though they might have been ... In this lucid translation by Bela Shayevich, she gets these details onto the page. But the stories...can also be baggy and repetitive ... This book can leave you lost in time, as well. The interviews were collected over many years, but dates are rarely supplied. This book is dense on a macro level, but one sometimes misses the sentence-by-sentence density of the best fiction. These are quibbles. Secondhand Time is an avalanche of engrossing talk. The most ancient grievances are churned up...So are the freshest longings.

Vivian Gornick

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...funny and elegiac and truth-dealing ... It’s a book in part about that feeling of futility that can sneak up on anyone late on a certain afternoon. But it’s also about a dozen other things: New York City, friendship, sex, intellection, class, the feminist movement of the 1970s, living alone. It’s a slim book with big echoes ... Ms. Gornick’s inability to make peace with the world — her high-strung air of discontent — is the condiment that spices so much of her work. She is a cheerful destroyer of certainties ... What puts The Odd Woman and the City across, however, is how deeply Ms. Gornick gets into the fat of feeling. She is as good a writer about friendship as we have. She is especially fine on the unraveling of old friendships, which can be more painful than breaks between lovers because less expected ... She has spent a good deal of her life, she writes, daydreaming about \'the tomorrow in which I would write a book of enduring value, meet the companion of my life, become the woman of character I had yet to become.\' This lack of certitude is what puts a propeller on this memoir.

Ian McEwan

Pan The New York Times It’s been difficult to miss Ian McEwan. The Cockroach, his satirical new Brexit novella, is his second book this year and his third in three years. The Cockroach is so toothless and wan that it may drive his readers away in long apocalyptic caravans. The young McEwan, the author of blacker-than-black little novels, the man who acquired the nickname \'Ian Macabre,\' would rather have gnawed off his own fingers than written it. At dark political and social moments, we need better, rougher magic than this ... McEwan is hardly a dummy; he derives more than a few witty-ish moments from his premise. The best arrive early ... Once McEwan has established his premise, however, The Cockroach stalls. It devolves into self-satisfied, fish-in-barrel commentary about topics like Twitter and the tabloid press. The literary references...are plummy and tortured ... The idea of writing The Cockroach probably seemed, in the shower one morning, like a good one. Later, after coffee, it might have occurred to McEwan that suggesting your opponents are cockroaches might be to drop down to their carpet level.

Molly Antopol

Positive The New York Times It sometimes put me in mind of Allegra Goodman’s work; both writers are adept at auditing the emotional lives of frazzled Jewish intellectuals. At other times, the Old World lefty politics in Ms. Antopol’s stories summoned the memory of Grace Paley, for whom every joke came wrapped around a bony fist of meaning ... Political awareness is a birthright for Mr. Antopol’s characters. So is latent paranoia ... It’s one of the achievements of Ms. Antopol’s stories, though, that her men and women seem to be questioning everything, all the time ... The details in these stories are consistently fresh and offbeat without being showy ... By the final third of The UnAmericans, I began to feel that I was returning to places I’d been ... If this impressive book sometimes makes the sound of a writer still figuring it all out, Ms. Antopol’s soulfulness and wit make even holding actions memorable and promising.

Cheryl Strayed

Rave The New York Times Book Review Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir...pretty much obliterated me. I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. I like to read in coffee shops, and I began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of looks that said, \'Oh, honey.\' It was a humiliation. To mention all this does Ms. Strayed a bit of a disservice, because there’s nothing cloying about Wild It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound ... The clarity of Ms. Strayed’s prose, and thus of her person, makes her story, in its quiet way, nearly as riveting an adventure narrative as Jon Krakauer’s...Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. ... Parts of this frank and witty book belong in Best American Sex Writing 2013. ... The lack of ease in [Strayed\'s] life made her fierce and funny; she hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Positive The New York Times His account of his life up to the age of 13 or so (soccer, candy craving, playing with matches, grades, swimming, skiing, girl craving) is accomplished and often intense, but you miss the adult complexity and the toggling back and forth in time of the first two books ... For all this Oedipal drama, Book Three of My Struggle isn’t grueling. There are expert, almost Mark Twain-like observations about being a boy, and for every scene in which he cowers from his father, there’s one in which he does something like stick his erect little penis into a discarded Heineken bottle, only to have it stung by an angry beetle ... If this volume lacks some of the heat and intellectual force of the first two books, it feels like an essential building block. This writer is constructing a towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic projects of our era feel more worth attending to.

Elif Batuman

Rave The New York Times Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her. One professor’s mustache and mobile eyebrows give him \'the air of a 19th-century philanderer.\' A boyfriend steps off an airplane looking \'as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy\' ... Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer, though — beyond her calm, lapidary prose — is the winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty. She’s the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she’s feeling ... There are moments in The Possessed where Ms. Batuman loses the threads of the stories she’s trying to tell, moments where plot summary or historical précis drag on too long. But these data-dump moments are rare ... It’s a deep pleasure to read over her shoulder.

Catherine Lacey

Rave The New York Times Book Review Catherine Lacey’s searching, emotionally resonant first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, is about a young woman who pulls the pin on her own life ... Elyria is disengaged and depleted in a manner that put me in mind of the characters in the novels of Tao Lin, that Zen summoner of millennial ennui. Yet there’s nothing depleted about Ms. Lacey’s prose, which manages to be dreamy and fierce at the same time ... Nobody Is Ever Missing is composed mostly of long, languid sentences that push into the night like headlights. They’re the sign of a writer settling in for a long backcourt game, one who is going to wear you down rather than go in for the kill. Sometimes these sentences lose their way, stall out or end up doubling back on themselves. Just as often, they are improbably beautiful, or simply cool and knowing ... Ms. Lacey’s slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There’s significant talent at work here ... Nobody Is Ever Missing gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. It’s an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, \'trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.\'

Mary-Kay Wilmers

Rave The New York Times ...sure-footed ... Wilmers is a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Didion-Elizabeth Hardwick-Janet Malcolm school of dispassionate restraint and psychological acuity. She can do more damage with a raised eyebrow than most critics can do with a mace. Her wit steals in like a cat through an unlatched window.

Stephen King

Mixed The New York Times ...a big shank of a book that reminded me instantly of many of the reasons I loved (love?) [King]. His characters are the kind of people who hear the trains in the night. The music is always good. He swings low to the ground. He gets closer to the realities and attitudes of working-class life in America than any living writer I can think of ... I read The Institute quickly and painlessly and I tried to enjoy myself. That I didn’t is partly a matter of temperament. I generally want to smack a (fictional) kid with special powers. I don’t care about quests or magic or Vulcan mind-melding. Yet I can suspend my predispositions. The right writer can convince me to stick around. King kept me marginally on the hook ... buries itself under a self-generating avalanche of clichés ... The right words are all we have in this world, and King too rarely pauses to search for them. He can access a good deal of genuine chrome-wheeled magic as a writer, but he reaches too often for the canned and frozen stuff, for the dried spices, for word-clusters that fell off the back of a Sysco truck ... feels antiquated and a bit gamey in other ways. The novel is set in the present day, but potatoes are \'spuds,\' coffee is \'joe\'...You may start to feel you’re in a ’50s-era cartoon strip ... This novel is less a motorcycle than a double-decker bus, but it does handle gracefully. The plot never stalls. There’s a fervent anti-Trump streak. And King still really knows what to do when he gets his characters out on the road.

VIV Albertine

Rave The New York Times Ms. Albertine’s book is wiry and cogent and fearless. It contains story after story about men who told her she couldn’t do things that she did anyway ... Her book has an honest, lo-fi grace. If it were better written, it would be worse ... She’s quite honest in this memoir about whom she slept with, and the attendant miseries. On her first page, she says, \'Here we go then, (genital) warts an’ all\' ... Ms. Albertine’s life up to the breakup of the Slits occupies only half of Clothes Clothes Clothes. There’s a lot of pain in the second section, which she calls Side 2: loneliness, doubt, a bad marriage, cancer, depression.

Sally Mann

Rave The New York Times Hold Still is a cerebral and discursive book about the South and about family and about making art that has some of the probity of Flannery O’Connor’s nonfiction collection Mystery and Manners yet is spiked with the wildness and plain talk of Mary Karr’s best work ... She whips these stories to life, with a novelist’s relish and skill, shaking every bit of dust from them ... The best quality of Hold Still — a book that strikes me as an instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last 50 years — is its ambient sense of an original, come-as-you-are life that has been well lived and well observed ... Like the photographs she most admires, it is rooted in particulars yet has \'some rudiment of the eternal in it.\'

Nell Zink

Rave The New York Times Doxology isn’t fundamentally a music novel. It has many other things on its mind, including a subversive history of American politics from Operation Desert Shield through the start of the Trump presidency, and it’s superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss ... Zink writes about music as if she were a cluster of the best American rock critics...crushed together under a single byline. This novel is replete with erudite signifiers that drop all over the place, like a toddler eating a pint of blueberries ... Doxology puts [Zink] on a new level as a novelist ... This book is more ambitious and expansive and sensitive than her earlier work. She lays her heart on the line in a way she hasn’t before ... Doxology loses a bit of its sweep, if none of its intelligence, in its final half. Yet it has taken a running leap, regardless, at greatness. Zink writes as if the political madness of the last four decades had been laid on for her benefit as a novelist ... Like a mosquito, Zink vectors in on the neck of our contemporary paranoia. She has got a feral appetite for news of our species, good and ill. As dark as Doxology can be, it’s no wonder that its title means a hymn of praise.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave The New York Times So much happens in this relatively short book, there are so many shrewd details, that it could have simply been a straightforward memoir of Ms. Ward’s life ... This at times somber book is also shot through with life, with a sense of rural community and what it felt like to be adolescent and footloose on hot Mississippi nights, all the beer cans and weed and loud music and easy sex and rolled-down car windows ... Ms. Ward occasionally presses her thumb down too hard on this material, forcing meanings that were plain already, but these lapses are rare ... Men We Reaped reaffirms Ms. Ward’s substantial talent. It’s an elegiac book that’s rangy at the same time.

Christopher Hitchens

Rave The New York TImes Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one’s friends — Mr. Hitchens’s close ones include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton — I’ve ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens’s personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.

Zahra Hankir

Rave The New York Times ... a stirring, provocative and well-made new anthology ... a book that banishes all manner of silences ... rewrites the hoary rules of the foreign correspondent playbook, deactivating the old clichés. Each of these women has a story to tell. Each has seen plenty ... has many aspects to it, but at bottom it imparts a pervasive sense of fear and loss.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Positive The New York Times The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn’t a typical first novel, if by \'typical first novel\' we mean a minor-chord and semi-autobiographical nibbling expedition around the margins of a life. The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler ... Coates writes as if he’s thrown his readers into a carriage and is hurtling them through the woods. The ride is bracing, even if one sometimes misses the grainy and intense intellection of his nonfiction writing. In his earlier books each paragraph felt like a bouillon cube that could be used to brew six other essays. Here the effect is more diffuse, and something intangible goes missing ... One of [Coates\'s] achievements in this novel is to closely underscore the human particularity of a range of enslaved men and women ... The most urgent sections of this ambitious novel are, for this reader, its more grounded ones ... Coates’s novel sometimes feels as if it were written quickly, and it has the virtues and defects of that apparent spontaneity. Where his nonfiction runs narrow and quite deep, The Water Dancer mostly runs wide and fairly shallow. It’s more interested in movement than in the intensities of sustained perception.

Toby Faber

Positive The New York Times Book Review \"In a new book titled Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, Toby Faber, the grandson of the company’s founder, relates this house’s story as it celebrates its 90th anniversary. He does so ingeniously, compiling it from original documents — letters, memos, catalog copy, diary entries. It’s a jigsaw puzzle that slowly comes together ... This is, in many regards, a business book. You may learn more than you wanted to know about things like laminates and cartridge paper requirements ... Geoffrey Faber was a rock, and clearly a great-souled man. He’s a bit of a rock in print as well — his letters and diary entries evidence nobility but rarely shine. The details here do consistently shine, however ... The snippets of Larkin’s letters are excellent...

Rachel Cusk

Rave The New York Times Book Review ...a sharp new miscellany ... Cusk’s first collection of essays. It also contains some book reviews and introductions, but her heart does not seem in them. She mediates between her mind and the external world with a precision and agility that mostly goes missing when she mediates between texts ... [the essays] are first-rate, marked by candor and seriousness, and they’re familiar ... Her writing about parenting is discerning and granular ... Cusk’s essays are subtle; they do not announce their intentions through a megaphone. She feels her way into her topics and she will not be hurried. You read her for her riddling questions, not whatever answers might pop out at the end. She is often ambivalent, but never neutral in the self-protective modern manner. She is a poet of split feelings. Her inquisitive intelligence is the rebar that, inside the concrete, holds the edifice upright.

Peter Orner

Positive The New York Times One way to get a handle on Orner is to observe that he writes short. His stories tend to be three or four pages, gone in the blink of an eye, though some are longer. In his novels, he keeps the chapters clipped tight, too. Rarely are these chapters more than a few hundred words. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Reading him I recalled Clive James’s crack that some literary magazines fetishize brief stories, \'as if written specifically for people who are bright but tired.\' The stories in Maggie Brown & Others, too, are mostly just a few pages long. They’re piers rather than bridges ... An upside to this brevity: Your mind is given a lot of pit stops, so you can recharge and load up on snacks for the next stretch of asphalt. A downside: Orner’s stories flick by awfully quickly. You can feel you’re flipping through boxes of vintage postcards. Your eyes can glaze ... Orner can do anything, so he tries to do everything. There’s never a sense that he is flailing. His sentences run clear and true. He’s not the sort of writer who, in a gun battle, would be saved by the bullet that strikes his thesaurus.

Kevin Barry

Positive The New York Times ... buoyant ... like Beckett’s Godot, is about the wait. It’s about hunkering down and admitting the presence of old ghosts. The reason Night Boat to Tangier works is that Maurice and Charlie are vivid company on the page, a couple of battered and slightly sinister vaudevillians on a late-career mental walkabout. They might have fallen out of an early Tom Waits ballad, a chest fever splashing over minor seventh chords ... This novel is hard to quote. Nearly every other sentence contains pungent Anglo-Saxon nouns and gerunds. If you stripped them all out, this novel would lose eight percent of its body weight ... There’s an overemotional side to Night Boat to Tangier, and Barry sometimes lays it on fairly thick ... But Barry is such a deft and generous writer that he gets the honey-to-acid blend almost exactly right. He also spackles his novel with poetic utterances that tend to land neatly ... We’ve met guys like Maurice and Charlie before, of course...But Barry manages to make this territory his own, and to make it fresh.

Sarah M. Broom

Rave The New York Times Book Review ... forceful, rolling and many-chambered ... [Broom\'s] memoir isn’t just a Katrina story — it has a lot more on its mind. But the storm and the way it scattered her large family across America give this book both its grease and its gravitas ... This book is dense with characters and stories. It’s a big, simmering pot that comes to a boil at the right times ... This book is a mood. It starts slow, with layers of family history. The opening sections impart a sense of someone swinging the prop of an airplane, hoping the engine will fire. The author doesn’t make her first appearance, as a 5-year-old, until we are more than 100 pages in. But trust her. This book more than takes flight ... Broom does a masterly job of situating each of her family members as Katrina looms on the horizon ... There is some mildly portentous writing in The Yellow House, but for the most part Broom’s prose is alert and inquisitive. If the author remains at a certain distance at the end of this book, if she is somewhat unknowable, well, she’s had many other stories to tell, and to tell well ... This is a major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade. There are a lot of complicated emotions coursing through its veins. It throws the image of an exceptional American city into dark relief.

Wendell Berry

Mixed The New York Times Together the books weigh in at a forest-pulping 1,674 pages. It’s a lot of Wendell Berry. It’s vastly too much Wendell Berry, a determined reader soon discovers ... The numbing length of these two new collections do Berry no favors. From the start, he bangs the same themes so relentlessly...that one’s eyes begin to cross. It’s not that Berry isn’t correct to be desperately concerned about these issues, and about the loss of old ways and fine workmanship in general. You can be right there alongside him, at least on the big points, while still being driven to madness by repetition ... Berry’s single-note essays make you recall Carlyle’s comment about Macaulay, that listening to him was okay for a while but \'one wouldn’t live under Niagara.\'

Téa Obreht

Pan The New York Times \"...sentimental and meandering ... there’s little well-directed commentary about life, nature, art, ideas or anything much at all in Inland ... Let me pause to say: Obreht has real gifts as a storyteller...[but] Inland floats up and away, like a magic carpet bound for anywhere and nowhere ... All the drama feels fake, as if someone is backstage shaking a thunder sheet ... Like Annie Proulx, Obreht is fond of offbeat nouns and verbs, especially when describing the natural world ... More common are observations and dialogue that are as softly didactic as refrigerator magnet slogans ... I realize I am being terribly hard on Obreht’s novel, but I felt lashed to its mast very early on and That Sinking Feeling never entirely went away. The many readers who will enjoy Inland and put it on best-seller lists can send an old curse in my direction. \

Robert Menasse, Trans. by Jamie Bulloch

Rave The New York Times If you tasked an excellent writer with turning a tall stack of recent issues of The Economist into a novel, you might get The Capital. Somehow I mean this as high praise ... Perhaps what we have in The Capital is a great murder mystery ... It’s an unusual murder story, though, because the suspense lies not in discovering the identity of the assassin (we follow him as he goes on the lam) but the identity of the dead man. You come to suspect that the murder is a kind of MacGuffin, that maybe it doesn’t matter at all. I enjoyed The Capital so much that I could keep going like this. It’s possible this is a great Holocaust-minded novel for a new millennium ... The translation, by Jamie Bulloch, is adroit. Yet The Capital made me want to learn to read in German, where it is surely even better. This is a baggy book, with room for everything Menasse wants to put into it. It has its share of longueurs. But there is also pointed writing not just about politics but about subways and orgasms and woolly underwear and air conditioning and retirement homes ... this novel evidences a sharp awareness of the forces remaking European life, with Brexit as only one example.

Jeanette Winterson

Positive The New York Times This is not a typical novel ... The sole epigraph in Frankissstein is from the Eagles. No one quotes the Eagles ... So far so weird ... In this novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, [Winterson] walks her wits on a very long leash ... Frankissstein is not a particularly good novel, if we limit our definition of a good novel to one that, at minimum, has characters and/or a plot in which one feels invested. Winterson seems to know she’s boxed herself into a facile and jokey situation, and she’s decided to shoot herself out of the corner. This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy ... Frankissstein also has, if you squint just slightly, an intelligent soul. Winterson has always been interested in gender fluidity and there is room, in our glimpses of Ry, for real feeling between the satire and bickering ... Winterson is playing a game that’s entirely her own. The fourth wall is broken frequently, as if this were an episode of Fleabag. ... the book is anchored in soliloquies that wear their intent and erudition lightly.

Megan Marshall

Positive The New York Times ... pushes Ms. Marshall into the front rank of American biographers ... She is comfortable with subtle intellection as well as the sweep of history. She captures the intricacies of Fuller’s editorship and her stints as a front-page columnist and foreign correspondent ... Ms. Marshall is terrific on Fuller’s composition of the feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which made her a celebrity ... as seductive as it is impressive. It has the grain and emotional amplitude of a serious novel, especially in its first half. It delivers a lovely and bumpy coming-of-age story, one of the best such stories 19th-century America has to offer ... slackens in its final third, when Fuller is living in Italy. Too much is made of her lack of sexual experience; the author lingers too long over suggestive phrases from Fuller’s writing ... Ms. Marshall’s prose, usually so crisp, edges toward the overripe ... These are rare slips in an alert and elegant narrative. Ms. Marshall’s rigorous book stands on the shoulders of earlier scholarship and many previous biographies of Fuller. It doesn’t contain a vast amount of new material. But in Ms. Marshall, Fuller has found what feels like her ideal biographer.

T. J. Stiles

Rave The New York Times Stiles demonstrates a brute eloquence of his own. This is a mighty — and mighty confident — work, one that moves with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt’s noisy life and time ... full of sharp, unexpected turns ... The most flat-out enjoyable sections are those that deal with New York’s great steamship wars of the first half of the 19th century ... Mr. Stiles is clear-eyed about his subject’s nearly amoral rapacity ... Mr. Stiles gets Vanderbilt the man onto paper. He is eloquent on Vanderbilt’s love of horses and horse racing, his tangled relationships with his 13 children and his dabbling in the occult ... There are moments in any biography of this size when your eyes are going to glaze over; I certainly did not wish The First Tycoon were longer. But I read eagerly and avidly. This is state-of-the-art biography, crisper and more piquant than a 600-page book has any right to be.

Robert Macfarlane

Positive The New York Times There’s a bit of John Muir and John McPhee, patient writers and naturalists both, in Macfarlane’s work. Is he a young fogey? Sometimes. He can ladle on that BBC/PBS gently-eat-your-peas earth-show narration ... Yet there’s a bit of Geoff Dyer, of the critical wildcat, in him. There’s the prickling sense, reading Macfarlane like Dyer, that a library door or a manhole cover or a bosky path might lead you not just to the end of a chapter but to a drugs party or a rave ... Macfarlane’s writing can be humid ... More often it is superb. He is so good at what he does, and has won so many awards for his books, that there has begun to be pushback in England, just to keep his career in perspective ... this is an excellent book — fearless and subtle, empathic and strange. It is the product of real attention and tongue-and-groove workmanship.

Gabriel García Márquez

Rave The New York Times A resonant new collection of García Márquez’s journalism, \'The Scandal of the Century,\' demonstrates how seriously he took reportage ... These are articles that, in their confidence and grace, put the reader in mind of \'The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor\' ... So many of the best pieces in \'The Scandal of the Century,\' however, are essays, unpretentious and witty meditations on topics like barbers and air travel and literary translation and movies ... The articles and columns in \'The Scandal of the Century\' demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start ... He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding; he didn’t know how to phone anything in. He was a world-class observer ... The humble García Márquez put it this way: \'I am basically a journalist. All my life I have been a journalist. My books are the books of a journalist, even if it’s not so noticeable.\' He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.

Ocean Vuong

Mixed The New York Times Vuong is a mightily gifted observer ... Some lines have the almost hallucinatory exactness of his best poems ... Vuong’s writing about nail salons, and the way mothers raised their children in them, is moving and rarely less than excellent. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, at the same time, filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities. There are enough of these that this novel’s keel can lodge in the mud ... \'Deep Purple Feeling\' could be an alternative title for certain swaths of this novel ... The strongest parts of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where this novel picks up genuine force and has some of the mournful resonance of the Bruce Springsteen song \'The River,\' arrive in its second half. This is where the narrator details his doomed love affair with Trevor, a boy he meets while both work in the tobacco fields ... Vuong’s novel is a mixed success, a book of highs and lows. At its best, it’s unleashed in every regard.

Karen Russell

Mixed The New York Times Each [story] is like a haunted Charles Addams house that pops up in a sleek, modern subdivision ... Russell creates fully realized worlds. Her writing is particular and alive. Her imagination spills over the sink and hits the backsplash ... Orange World also demonstrates Russell’s limitations. Read in bulk, outside of magazines, some of her stories shrink in stature ... One reason for this is that we are only rarely invested in her characters. Her people find themselves in intense situations, but it seldom feels like anything is at stake. They live, they die; no matter, turn the page and bring on the next outré scenario, the next rabbit from the hat ... While her stories examine the human condition writ large, they sometimes lack in the sort of crucial details about the human condition writ small — those blazing, passing insights and uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our species ... undamentally tame ... The glow Russell’s stories cast is not a cheap one, like the flickering of battery operated candles on a restaurant table. I’m simply not certain their power is, except rarely, strong enough to be wicked.

Ali Smith

Positive The New York Times Book Review ... the most political book thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles ... Smith is not going to ride out this tumultuous political moment artistically, as if she were a car parked under an overpass during a storm. She’s delivered a bracing if uneven novel, one that, like jazz, feels improvised ... tendentious at times, but it taps deeply into our contemporary unease. It’s always alive ... Smith embeds her politics in interlocking plotlines that flow like waking dreams, in melodies and countermelodies. Her gifts are such that she nearly pulls this awkward bird aloft ... Her novels are like Mike Leigh’s films or The Mekons’ albums. Some are better than others, but all are the product of a unique and hard-won vision; a vision that’s homely in the best sense of that word. You never doubt you’re in the presence of a serious artist, even when things are going pear-shaped ... mith’s vision isn’t fundamentally pessimistic...There’s too much squirming life in her fiction, slashes of cleansing light for those who seek it.

Robert S. Mueller

Pan The New York Times It perhaps necessarily lacks both the novelistic sweep of the 9/11 Commission Report and the intimate — \'prurient\' would be a more exact word — scene-setting of the Starr report on President Bill Clinton ... The Mueller report is a dense slab of verbiage. It is not written in bureaucratese, but it is not far from it either ... This is not a narrative that warms in the hands. There is no sweeping language. It appears to have been designed to make minimum political impact ... A plausible title for the paperback editions that will soon be in bookstores might be, We Didn’t Not Find Anything ... The Mueller report is a thorny, patriotic addition to this curious American shelf ... With its blacked-out redacted passages, the report more closely resembles a reverse crossword puzzle. We will collectively be solving for its inky elisions for some time, perhaps the rest of our lives ... reading it is like consuming a short story collection that’s already been excerpted in every magazine you subscribe to ... Volume Two of the Mueller report, like the second volume of Bob Dylan’s greatest hits, is the more stereophonic and satisfying ... It is hardly pleasurable to read, on textual as well as emotional grounds.

Ian McEwan

Positive The New York Times \"... pretty good ... Because it’s a McEwan novel, however, and because it falls somewhere toward the middle of his oeuvre in terms of quality, it’s tempting to say about it: Meh. He has set expectations high, this man ... a sharply intelligent novel of ideas. McEwan’s writing about the creation of a robot’s personality allows him to speculate on the nature of personality, and thus humanity, in general ... There are some pokey moments in this novel, some dead nodes. But McEwan has an interesting mind and he is nearly always good company on the page ... McEwan is good on coziness between humans and machines.\

David E Hoffman

Positive The New York Times Book Review \"... authoritative and chilling ... a readable, many-tentacled account of the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union ... What’s particularly valuable about Mr. Hoffman’s book, however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest — and quite frankly the most terrifying — account to date of the enormous and covert Soviet biological weapons program, developed in defiance of international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile ... Mr. Hoffman has an eye for bleak, jagged details ... Mr. Hoffman is so careful not to bore his readers that he sometimes underestimates them, verging closer to Tom Clancy than to John Lewis Gaddis. More synthesis and cerebration would have made this good book better.\

Ed. by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

Mixed The New York Times For every essay in Appalachian Reckoning that’s provocative, another is unreadable. The academic language in some of these pieces...makes it seem as if their authors were walking around on stilts ... not everything here is a polemic. The volume includes poems, photographs, memoirs and a comic piece or two. I’m not entirely sure why it’s in this book, but Jeremy B. Jones’s love song to Ernest T. Bass, the fictional character on \'The Andy Griffith Show\' who was addicted to throwing rocks, is a pleasure. A few of these writers try to one-up [J.D.] Vance on the atrocity meter ... The book to read, if you’re interested in the history of the exploitation of Appalachia, is Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (2017).

Stephen Greenblatt

Positive The New York Times The Swerve...brings us Mr. Greenblatt in his more cordial mode. He wears his enormous erudition lightly, so lightly that most readers will forgive him for talking, at times, a bit down to them. This book is well-brewed coffee with plenty of milk and sugar stirred in ... Approaching Lucretius through Bracciolini was an ingenious idea. It allows Mr. Greenblatt to take some worthwhile detours ... The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughout The Swerve are tangy and exact ... This book’s pumping heart is Mr. Greenblatt’s complicated reckoning with Lucretius’ masterpiece ... It’s possible to admire Mr. Greenblatt’s book while wishing it contained more of the boldness and weirdness he admires in Lucretius. Mr. Greenblatt’s prose, charted on a Geiger counter, would register mostly a state-of-the-art air-conditioner’s steady hum. I found myself longing for a few more unsettling spikes of intellect and feeling. You won’t be bored by The Swerve; neither will you be on the edge of your seat.

Susan Choi

Rave The New York Times \"Choi’s new novel, her fifth, is titled Trust Exercise, and it burns more brightly than anything she’s yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest ... Choi gets the details right: the mix tapes, the perms, the smokers’ courtyards, the \'Cats\' sweatshirts, the clove cigarettes, the ballet flats worn with jeans, the screenings of \'Rocky Horror,\' the clinking bottles of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers ... Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. She catches the way certain nights, when you are in high school, seem to last for a month — long enough to sustain entire arcs of one’s life ... The plot fast-forwards about 15 years. Minor characters become major, damaged ones. I do not want to give too much of this transformation away, because I found the temporary estrangement that resulted to be delicious and, in its way, rather delicate.\

Albert Woodfox

Rave The New York Times ...[an] uncommonly powerful memoir ... His memoir is strewn with words from others he read while in prison — Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Frederick Douglass ... Solitary is a profound book about friendship ... This story, which Woodfox has written with Leslie George, is told simply but not tersely. If it sometimes induces claustrophobia, well, it’s meant to. Very often the painful details, and the author’s own humanity in the face of them, start to make your chest feel too small ... If the ending of this book does not leave you with tears pooling down in your clavicles, you are a stronger person than I am. More lasting is Woodfox’s conviction that the American justice system is in dire need of reform.

Namwali Serpell

Rave The New York Times \"... audacious ... an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia ... The plot pivots gracefully — this is a supremely confident literary performance — from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis ... The reader who picks up The Old Drift is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale ... Serpell carefully husbands her resources. She unspools her intricate and overlapping stories calmly. Small narrative hunches pay off big later, like cherries coming up on a slot machine. Yet she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in The Old Drift, like dervishes, are set whirling. When that whirling stops, you can hear the mosquitoes again. They’re still out there. They sound like tiny drones. They sound like dread.\

Bryan Washington

Positive The New York Times \"Washington’s subtle, dynamic and flexible stories play out across [Houston\'s] sprawling and multiethnic neighborhoods. His characters move through streets named so often — Richmond and Waugh, Rusk and Fairview — that they come to have talismanic power, like the street names in Springsteen songs ... Washington cracks open a vibrant, polyglot side of Houston about which few outsiders are aware. On one level, this landscape is bleak ... But there is a fair amount of joy in Washington’s stories, too ... A few of these stories are barely more than vignettes. One or two don’t quite coalesce. This is on a certain level a modest book, one that isn’t going to drive other young short story writers into the shadows. But the promise Washington displays is real and large.\

Andrew G McCabe

Positive The New York Times Book Review Better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be ... a concise yet substantive account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack. It’s an unambiguous indictment of Trump’s moral behavior ... a rapid-fire G-man memoir ... patriotic and oddly stirring. It has moments of opacity, where you feel he is holding back at crucial moments, but it is filled with disturbingly piquant details ... if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.

Leslie Jamison

Rave The New York Times In The Empathy Exams...[Jamison] calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours ... her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else’s pain. I’m not sure I’m capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise ... Ms. Jamison is painfully well read and well informed. She is capable of quoting James Wood, Axl Rose and the philosopher Mark Jefferson in the space of four or five sentences without sounding deranged. At the same time, one or two of her lesser essays find her swinging too frequently from quotation to quotation, as if from vine to vine. Her sentences have an ideal speed-to-power ratio ... I’ll read whatever she writes, as long as I’m around.

Chris Christie

Pan The New York Times Let Me Finish is a superficial and ungainly book that tries to cover so many bases at once — it’s a series of attacks and justifications, it’s a master class in sucking up and kicking down, it’s a potted memoir, it’s a stab at political rehabilitation — that reading it is like watching an octopus try to play the bagpipes ... An alternative title for this unintentionally poignant book might have been, You Used to Really Like Me, Remember? ... Christie saves his real fire in this book — which was written by a ghostwriter named Ellis Henican — for Bannon, the one-time chief executive of Trump’s campaign ... If you skim through Let Me Finish riffling the book like a deck of cards, nearly all you will see is Christie saying, in so many words, I told you so ... Christie’s sense of being right at every moment is wearying. Like a fan that blows for too long, his grille fills with dust ... As a literary performance, this book is nylon, not wool or silk ... Trump himself comes off rather well in this book ... Is Let Me Finish a plea to be let back in, at a high level, to Trump’s administration? ... Do voters want him back? This self-serving book doesn’t make the most appealing case.

Tommy Tomlinson

Rave The New York Times Book Review The problem with Tommy Tomlinson’s inspirational new book is that reading it will make you hungry ... His clean and witty and punchy sentences, his smarts and his middle-class sensibility made me yearn for the kind of down-to-earth columnist I often read in the 1980s and 1990s but barely seems to exist any longer ... Tomlinson may not be for everyone. Like Rick Bragg, he can sometimes seem like a Southern boy with just a bit too much syrup in him. If tears and frequent use of the word \'mama\' set your teeth on edge, he may start to resemble, in your mind, a pre-moistened towelette ... As for me, I loved this book. I found myself sneak-reading it from the moment it came in the door. As with a sack of White Castle burgers, I hated to reach the end.

Elsa Morante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein

Positive The New York Times \"Morante’s vision is so baroque, and her prose so operatic, that after reading her I needed some alone time, with cucumber slices over my eyelids ... Morante delivers epic emotions ... Morante’s themes are not subtle. Arturo’s Island, even in Goldstein’s adroit translation, is a sledgehammer performance. But her writing, once you acclimate to its gargoyle extravagance, has the power of malediction.\

David Szalay

Positive The New York Times Turbulence is a sleek machine with a cool tone. Each chapter picks up from the last, but presents a new protagonist, as if a moral baton were being passed. The chapters come full circle. In the end, the book resembles a snake that’s begun to consume its own tail ... Szalay...is a gifted writer ... Turbulence...[is] a consistently interesting novel, but its 12 chapters...race past so quickly (each is around 10 pages) that you’re back on the ground, your ears fizzing, before you’ve had a chance to finish your little bag of pretzels ... There are enough plot fragments in Turbulence to suggest many novels. Szalay could set up shop on eBay. I wish he’d carried some of them a bit further. These melancholy flights have a lot to say about human impermanence.

Doug Bock Clark

Rave The New York Times \"... immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable ... Like a first-rate novel, too, The Last Whalers has an abiding but unforced theme. It’s about the flood of modernity, in the form of outboard motors and cellphones and televised soap operas, as seen from the perspective of a curious but wary society that fears losing itself in the deluge. There’s a lot going on in this feat of journalism, but at heart it’s about a whaling community. Clark does not stint on beautiful, terrible, blood-streaked accounts of hunting sperm whales ... Clark’s writing is supple but unshowy ... Accumulated tensions are only slowly released. Scenes are delivered, not summaries. This book earns its emotions ... You finish The Last Whalers with hope for [the tribe described], and hope that Clark writes many more books.\

Christopher Castellani

Rave The New York Times \"... blazing ... Writing fiction is to no small degree a confidence game, and Leading Men casts a spell right from the start ... What you’ve yet to learn is how reliably tender and evocative Castellani’s onrushing prose can be. His first achievement in Leading Men is to create a world, one inhabited largely by young, charming gay men, that seems to be comprised almost entirely of late nights and last cigarettes and picnics on good blankets and linen suits with the trousers rolled to the knees. This writer’s scenes glitter, and they have a strong sexual pulse ... [Castellani’s] second achievement is to pry this milieu open and pour a series of intricate themes into it ... This book is a kind of poem in praise of pleasure, and those pleasures are sometimes stern. Its author knows a great deal about life; better, he knows how to express what he knows ... Leading Men has a few dead nodes in it and the subplot, involving the reclusive actress and a production of Williams’s final play, generates fewer sparks than does the account of Williams and Merlo’s dazzled propinquity. But this is an alert, serious, sweeping novel. To hold it in your hands is like holding, to crib a line from Castellani, a front-row opera ticket.\

Lili Anolik

Mixed The New York Times When did \'logic\' and \'facts\' and \'firsthand accounts\' get such a bad rap? (Did I miss a memo?) Anolik makes a show of tossing her car’s steering wheel out the window at the first turn. The resulting book is good and bad in almost equal measure. It’s good because Anolik has an instinctive grasp of why Babitz mattered as a writer and because, despite her apparent protestations to the contrary, she’s done her homework. Hollywood’s Eve fills in many of the gaps in our knowledge of Babitz’s life and work. It’s bad because it’s so breezily written, as if willing itself to become a work of what used to be called the New Journalism ... Reading it, you feel you’re taking part in three conversations, two on call-waiting ... Anolik sometimes verges on condescending to Babitz ... But she’s a sensitive reader of her work and owns a sly wit ... Anolik’s book succeeds in its primary mission: It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz.

Elizabeth McCracken

Mixed The New York Times \"Bowlaway is a large and caterwauling sort of opera buffa, packed with outsize characters—some with recherché talents—and wild, often dreamlike events. If this novel were a bar, it would be the kind of joint where the Christmas lights are left on all year long ... More than one woman in this novel has lost a child. The writing on this topic makes for close to unbearable reading ... This is the sort of novel in which nearly every character has an offbeat name (Leviticus Sprague, Cracker Graham, LuEtta Mood) and can seem more like a collection of quirks than a human being ... McCracken in Bowlaway comes close to writing caricatures instead of characters. That this ambitious novel nearly works is a testament to her considerable gifts as a novelist, her instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling ... The plot has many resonances but never fully sets its hooks in us ... This novel’s cast grows epic, but McCracken is always most impressive when she works small, when she is describing movie kisses or corsets or simply loneliness and longing.\

Sally Rooney

Positive The New York Times \"Sally Rooney’s sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She’s like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon ... In the new novel, there [are fewer throwaway lines] but perhaps something better. There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punch line ... Rooney is almost comically talented at keeping the lovers in her novels frustrated and apart. When you are deep into Normal People, you may start to feel that she has gone to this particular well one too many times ... [Rooney is] an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started.\

David Kipen

Mixed The New York Times Book Review An ebullient and often moving way to organize history ... consuming [Dear Los Angeles is a bit like watching an orange-scented, palm tree-lined, gin-soaked version of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, The Clock ... Kipen doesn’t have the historical richness to work with that Carpenter did in New York Diaries. Among this collection’s more obvious blind spots is pop music. This book’s joys are pomegranate joys, feeling for seeds among the pith.

Peter Sagal

Positive The New York Times \"[The Incomplete Book of Running is] funny, well written (mostly), filled with humility and perpetually on the scan for moments of stray grace ... Sagal’s book is not the one to read if you crave advice about the best cushion-heeled socks to buy, the correct earbuds (he advises against listening to music while running) or the finest anti-chafing creams. If you want that sort of information, you can turn to a magazine like Runner’s World, where Sagal has a column. He’s funny and perceptive about running magazines, by the way.\

Karen Thompson Walker

Pan The New York Times \"Walker has a gift for spooling out [the novel\'s] details, as if we are kittens and she is trailing string ... Walker needs to keep the plots of her novels spinning, like plates on sticks. When the action slows, you realize what a limited and sentimental novelist she too often is ... None of these characters says or does an interesting thing. Anarchic instincts and impure thoughts are kept to the barest minimum. Minds race in neutral. Reading this book’s bland dialogue is like watching players on center court use dead tennis balls ... Walker knows what to do when she’s sinking her initial hooks into her readers. But she’s such a mild writer here that a true sense of menace is never allowed to bloom.\

Natasha Trethewey

Positive The New York Times \"There are other soft spots in Monument, moments when Trethewey’s metrical dexterity slackens or her political points are too on the nose. These moments are swamped, however, by the author’s insistent intellect and her gift for turning over rich soil. The human details in Trethewey’s work — those crabs, that music, those cracked palms — are like the small feathers that give contour to a bird’s wing. Monument is a major book, and in her best poems this poet soars.\

Lucia Berlin

Mixed The New York Times Berlin (1936-2004) was a writer of tender, chaotic and careworn short stories ... she’s a writer you want in your back pocket ... This memoir, which lacks the richness of Berlin’s fiction, had been left uncompleted ... it’s a stand-in until the inevitable biography of Berlin is written.

Rose George

Positive The New York Times I will read anything George writes ... Nine Pints is her fourth book...and her most personal ... As if George were pinching and expanding an image on a screen, Nine Pints expands to open up a world ... This book was clearly a trial for the author to write; she was frequently ill with dire symptoms caused by hormonal fluctuations during its composition. These facts add a bass note of mortality to the discussion ... at one or two moments, George’s prose is not as utterly sharp as we’ve come to expect from her ... her English phlegm never falters.

Hilary Spurling

Positive The New York Times ... sensitive and sharply written ... Without fawning, [Spurling] warms Powell up. She places his work in social and intellectual perspective, and briskly lays bare a life rich with friendship and incident ... Spurling, writing with style and spark, pulls Powell down from his chilly pinnacle. It’s a pleasure to meet him all over again.

Anna Burns

Pan The New York Times \"Burns expands this material into a willfully demanding and opaque stream-of-consciousness novel, one that circles and circles its subject matter, like a dog about to sit, while rarely seizing upon any sort of clarity or emotional resonance. I found Milkman to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked ... the repetitions, the piling up of extraneous detail, the dashes within dashes, the sense she instills in her readers of craving verbs the way an animal craves salt [is representative of Burns\' style in Milkman] ... The best thing in Milkman is Burns’s occasionally sensitive portrait of this young woman’s flickering consciousness ... Sometimes her pile-on sentences achieve a prickly, shambolic sort of grace ... Milkman requires so much effort for so modest a result.\

John Wray

Rave New York Times Books Serious, sober and frequently mesmerizing ... spare yet supple prose ... contains some very adept writing about theology and religious feeling ... manages to nearly always hold a skeptical reader rapt...a significant literary performance. This novel’s contents are under enormous pressure ... There are no blood clots of showily displayed research to block this novel’s arteries.

Lionel Trilling and Adam Kirsch

Positive The New York Times \"Lionel Trilling, the regal American literary and social critic, was an ardent letter writer — he composed as many as 600 a year — but a slow-moving one. Corresponding with him was like playing squash with an opponent who pockets your serve, walks off the court and returns four months later to fire it back...and nearly all the letters in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch, begin with apologies and small arias of explanation for delay. The younger, slicker Ovitz would never have done such a thing. He explains in his back-patting new memoir that he specialized in keeping clients happy by identifying and then fulfilling their wildest dreams. As he says here: \'It’s only blarney if you can’t make it happen. If you can, then it’s the truth — and the truth is the supreme sales tool.\' \

Chelsey Minnis

Rave The New York Times Book Review \"[Minnis\'s] verse arrives well chilled. It is served with misanthropic aplomb ... Minnis is endlessly quotable, so one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly ... In Baby, I Don’t Care, one of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time, Minnis is not merely conducting a droll séance with the help of Turner Classic Movies ... [Minnis\'s] poems marinate in the sort of feelings you don’t like to admit you have. There’s a tang of Nietzsche in her antisocial desires, her amorality. Minnis is a bored, fierce, literate attendee at what the poet Frederick Seidel has referred to as \'life’s cotillion\' ... Let’s say you haven’t bought a book of poetry in some time. Baby, I Don’t Care and the reissues from Fence Books could make you come back. You could start here.\

Lucia Berlin

Rave The New York Times \"[In Evening in Paradise, there] is little if any diminishment in quality or intensity [of Berlin\'s work] ... One thing that makes Berlin so valuable is her gift for evoking the sweetness and earnestness of young women who fall in love ... Berlin is so stealthily funny ... Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize; she definitely deserved, to borrow the name of a Waylon Jennings song, a Wurlitzer Prize, for all the coins she drops into our mental jukeboxes. She has an instinctive access to the ways music can both provoke and fortify ... During her lifetime she was not published by that major house, or any other. She is now.\

Jonathan Lethem

Pan The New York Times There’s a good book lurking in this material ... The Feral Detective is not it. This one begins losing parts out on the interstate almost immediately. The plot is shaggy and complicated; so much so that even the author loses interest in it ... This novel’s tone is closer to that of Elmore Leonard. It’s got a bit of boogie in its bones. Yet it utterly lacks the density and sure-footedness of Motherless Brooklyn. A central problem is that Phoebe is a ditz ... Lethem never gives her anything impudent, urgent or surprising to say or think or feel ... Lethem is such a generous and ingenious writer that it’s painful to watch him flounder. Is it time to worry that literary novels will be among the next casualties of Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Bob Woodward

Mixed The New York Times \"Nothing in Bob Woodward’s sober and grainy new book is especially surprising. This is a White House that has leaked from Day 1. We knew things were bad. Woodward is here, like a state trooper knocking on the door at 3 a.m., to update the sorry details ... Fear is a typical Woodward book in that named sources for scenes, thoughts and quotations appear only sometimes. Woodward has never been a graceful writer, but the prose here is unusually wooden. It’s as if he wants to make a statement that, at this historical juncture, simple factual pine-board competence should suffice ... If this book has a single point to drive home, it is that the president of the United States is a congenital liar. I wish Fear had other points to make. I wanted more context, more passion, a bit of irony and certainly more simple history. Surely Woodward, of all people, has worthwhile comparisons to make between Trump and Richard Nixon. But this is not Woodward’s way. Fear picks up little narrative momentum. It’s a slow tropical storm of a book, not a hurricane. You turn the pages because Woodward, as he accumulates the queasy-making details, delivers on the promise of his title.\

John Kerry

Mixed The New York Times Remember boredom, sweet boredom? John Kerry’s new memoir, like its author, is reserved and idealistic and reassuringly dull, for long stretches, in its statesmanlike carriage ... Every Day Is Extra is a booster shot of old school, small-l liberal values. It is bland the way upper-class food used to be bland. It reminds you why Kerry would probably have made a very good president. It also reminds you why he lost.

Bill Cunningham

Positive The New York Times Like a pair of pearl earrings from Tiffany’s, Bill Cunningham’s posthumous memoir arrives as if in a small blue box. It’s an unexpected gift ... Fashion Climbing is reminiscent of Archie comic books and moony teenagers sharing a malted milkshake in 1957 ... At times Fashion Climbing can seem like the most guileless thing ever written and its author slightly touched in the head, in a kind and upbeat \'Forrest Gump\' sort of way ... Fashion Climbing is poorly served by Hilton Als’s introduction, which is emotive... while not telling you any of the things you want to know.

Claire Tomalin

Positive The New York Times A Life of My Own, is on one level a phlegmatic tour of a fruitful life ... On another level, the book is one shock after another ... A Life of My Own has a formal quality. Occasionally there is the unhappy sense that Tomalin is viewing her own life from too great a distance, as if she were a biographer working through a stranger’s life from file cards. She is a fluid writer but not the sort to go in search of le mot juste. Original ideas and memorable turns of phrase are rare ... Yet there is genuine appeal in watching this indomitable woman continue to chase the next draft of herself. After a while, the pages turn themselves. Tomalin has a biographer’s gift for carefully husbanding her resources, of consistently playing out just enough string. When she needs to, she pulls that string tight.

Nate Chinen

Mixed The New York Times Chinen’s book opens big enough, with a volley of plunger-muted trumpets ... One can learn a good deal about a critic by noting his or her favorite words of approbation and disapprobation ... Things not to be, in Playing Changes, are \'formal,\' \'insular,\' \'boosterish,\' \'historicist,\' \'buttoned-up\' or \'dutifully self-conscious\' ... Most of these latter terms are pointed in the direction of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis ... Marsalis’s brand of uptown jazz has long been at war with the downtown version, at least in the music press. Chinen revisits these battles. To a nonparticipant, from a distance, they seem faintly ridiculous ... The best way to read Playing Changes is with YouTube and Spotify fired up on your laptop. Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears, and you’ll want to make a playlist ... it’s hard not to get lost in the descriptive terminology in Playing Changes. You often feel you are floating free of context ... This book is at its best when grounded; when it mixes fact with more florid expression.

Barbara Kingsolver

Mixed The New York Times It’s got a ripe theme for Kingsolver, an unabashedly political writer, to pluck — that is, how poverty looms today for so many middle-class families ... This book also offers, at times, the easygoing pleasures of Kingsolver’s voice. When she’s on, reading her sentences is like walking on crunchy leaves; her writing can be acute and funny ... Yet Unsheltered is dead on arrival. The historical sections are delivered in starchily ornate prose ... In the present-day sections, every other conversation threatens to become an op-ed piece or a humanistic monologue out of lesser John Steinbeck or Arthur Miller ... Kingsolver’s politics, in this case, sit on the chest of her fiction and asphyxiate it ... This novel reads as if its author has been sent here, like Spock aboard the Starship Social Progress, to affirm our principles. Kingsolver wants to feed us improving ideas, as if we were moral nestlings ... She has a good feel for human stuff, for the messes we make and how we clean them up.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken

Pan New York Times \"...a gift to his detractors, those who have found the books to be solipsistic and overwrought. At nearly 1,200 earnest pages, Book Six is a life-drainer, so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it. I had to flog myself through it. I carried it under my arm like a football, giving the Heisman Trophy push-off to friends, family, basic hygiene, Netflix and the pets. When I finished, I felt there were fang marks in my neck; I wanted a blood transfusion. There are few books I will more avidly not read again ... Especially trying is Book Six’s 400-plus page excursus into Hitler and the etiology of the Third Reich. It is a grindingly sophomoric exercise that sits undigested under this novel’s skin, like an armchair inside a snake ... This book is the largest in the absorbing My Struggle series, but curiously it’s the runt of the litter.\

Gary Shteyngart

Mixed The New York Times \"This book, like a radio station whose frequency you can’t quite catch, keeps losing you. It keeps tipping over and then righting itself again, like a bottom-weighted inflatable unicorn. Lake Success keeps righting itself for many reasons. First among them is that Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation (he’s 46), is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy ... The wit and the immigrant’s sense of heartbreak—he was born in Russia—just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesn’t disappoint ... This busy, squirming, roomy novel has a tidy ending, one that too neatly dispenses prizes and gives Barry a stab at redemption ... Is Barry hollow or is he holy? Shteyngart’s prose holds you in a way that Barry himself never does.\

Olivia Laing

Mixed The New York Times Crudo is Laing’s slim first novel, and it’s less persuasive than her earlier work. Fiction, it seems, is a genre she’s still feeling her way into. This is a hard book to get a handle on ... In Acker fashion, Laing smuggles bits of text from other sources into Crudo, sometimes identifying these snippets as such but often not. (All citations are provided in an index.) ... Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel ... Laing evokes the shattered, dreamlike quality of much of Acker’s work. Yet at moments the prose can be pretentious, verging on parody ... There’s a did-this, did-that quality to Crudo, a sense that everything matters yet nothing does, that can make one feel a bit ill, as if you’ve caught an intellectual and emotional flu, the way that being online too long can do. I suspect this was partly Laing’s intention.

Donald Hall

Positive The New York Times They’re up there with the best things he did ... These books have flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash’s stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin ... Which isn’t to say they are not also full of guff. About a third of A Carnival of Losses is threadbare and meandering, memories of dead relatives and journeys abroad and anthologies past. But the other two-thirds are good enough to make clear that Hall did not live past his sell-by date as a writer ... Hall does not, in A Carnival of Losses, wield much of a cleaver. He does not clamor for the last word in old disputes.

Deborah Levy

Rave The New York Times ...so many minor moments of quotidian grace and wit...filter through The Cost of Living...that it is always a pleasure to consume ... [Levy] isn’t collecting her thoughts here so much as she is purposefully discollecting them. Calm and order, she suggests, are vastly overrated.

Keith Gessen

Positive The New York Times Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country feels small and tentative in its opening pages ... Gessen is a writer of spare sentences; he’s more of a Chekhov than a Nabokov. There’s little thunder, no off-piste mental excursions, no sense of a writer stropping his razor. His sort of plain writing is difficult to pull off. There is a fine line between elegant simplicity and mere meagerness. As this novel pushes forward, however, Gessen’s patience, his ability to husband his resources, begins to pay off. He introduces character after character—goalies and oilmen and comely academics, the heartbroken, the disinherited and the excluded—each of whom blooms in the mind. Which is another way of saying that this earnest and wistful but serious book gets good, and then it gets very good. Gessen finds an emotional tone for his material. He writes incisively about many things here but especially about, as the old saw has it, how it is easier to fight for your principles than live up to them ... This artful and autumnal novel, published in high summer, is a gift for those who wish to receive it.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The New York Times Because this is a novel by the superabundantly talented Moshfegh—she’s an American writer of Croatian and Iranian descent—we know in advance that it will be cool, strange, aloof and disciplined. The sentences will be snipped as if the writer has an extra row of teeth ... Moshfegh is an inspired literary witch doctor ... This is a strong book but one that doesn’t advance our sense of Moshfegh as a writer. Her sensibility, you feel, is like a jewel that has yet to find its most advantageous setting. One never quite feels anything is at stake ... Moshfegh writes with so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read. She has a sleepless eye and dispenses observations as if from a toxic eyedropper ... Though this novel is set nearly 20 years ago, it feels current. The thought of sleeping through this particular moment in the world’s history has appeal.

Joe Mungo Reed

Positive The New York Times It’s one of the indices of Reed’s talent that you hotly flip this book’s pages even when there’s not a lot going on, when it’s just another hilly day on the tour ... Without pressing too hard, this novel proposes the peloton as a metaphor for marriage ... This novel derives its power from its limited focus and direct language. There are no adipose, word-glutted sentences. Reed is mostly content to give us strong silk thread, absent pearls ... Like a racer, Reed carefully husbands his resources in this ruthless little sports novel ... Reed cuts out distractions as if they were cancer.

Sayaka Murata, Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Positive The New York Times In Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, a small, elegant and deadpan novel ... [a]n issue Murata leaves hanging, tantalizingly, is how deranged Keiko might or might not be. Clearly she longs for an authoritarian hand on her shoulder; she wants to know, at all times, what to do. (\'Hai!\') But in delineating her, Murata flirts with genuine darkness ... Convenience Store Woman is short, and it casts a fluorescent spell. Like a convenience store, it is chilly; it makes you wish you had brought a sweater. At the same time, it’s the kind of performance that leaves you considering the difference between exploring interesting topics and actually being interesting ... I have mixed feelings about Convenience Store Woman, but there is no doubt that it is a thrifty and offbeat exploration of what we must each leave behind to participate in the world.

Seymour M. Hersh

Mixed The New York Times Book Review \"The qualities that make Seymour Hersh a first-rate reporter—his hustle, his wonkiness, his nighthawk drive to unearth a radioactive fact and then top that fact—make him a second-rate memoirist. Like a greyhound or a kamikaze pilot or an insurance man peddling a policy, he’s not built for reflection ... If Hersh rarely seems quite human, neither does Reporter. He piles on the policy and deadline details while leaving people and their beating hearts mostly behind ... To be fair, Hersh does get his share of stories told. Battles with his journalistic ally and nemesis Abe Rosenthal, a legendary editor of The Times, are delightfully recounted ... So many of journalism’s old war dogs have left or are leaving us, and there’s a sense that we won’t get many more memoirs like this one. If this book’s pilot light isn’t fully lit, it still puts a big career across.\

Tommy Orange

Rave The New York Times \"There There has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation in a way that’s reminiscent of the best of Alexie’s early work. In terms of sheer brio and promise, its appearance marks the passing of a generational baton ... The story Orange tells moves cinematically in its second half, sweeping up all that came before. To film it properly would require a Robert Altman, a director with an unorthodox sense of spectacle. It might also require a director willing to tinker with Orange’s expedient Grand Guignol ending, one less willing to simply burn the set down ... It’s the close-up work that puts this novel across, however, the quotidian details of blasted lives. That Orange manages to link these details to a historical sense of outrage at how America has treated its native people, in a manner that approaches scarifying essay without dropping over the fence into lecture or sociology, adds to this novel’s smoke ... Orange is especially interested in what cultural inheritance means, in how to carry your roots like a conscience, in what one needs to leave behind and what one needs to take ... There There has its soft spots. At times it veers toward the sentimental; it can lean too heavily on its themes. There are perhaps too many resonant generalities about the importance of storytelling. But the real stuff is here, a sense of life as it is lived, an awareness of the worm inside each bottle of mezcal.\

Julia Van Haaften

Mixed The New York Times The last quarter of this book is primarily made up of the honors Abbott received, and is a slog that even Jackie Onassis flying up to see her on a private plane cannot redeem. Van Haaften can’t help but type up every detail...so much so that you lose a bit of your goodwill toward the earlier portions of the book. This is a less than perfect biography in other ways. The author is better on the trees than the forest, and as a writer she is sometimes flat-footed. The narrative has a tendency to skip around in time. But Van Haaften has done her research, the real work, and the pages turn themselves.

Rachel Cusk

Rave The New York Times \"She has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears ... As trilogies of recent vintage go, these books strike me as a stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon. One can recognize Cusk’s achievement, and admire the crisp workings of her mind, while still deploring the slight increase, as this trilogy has gone on, in oracular and overblown statements ... Cusk provides sly commentary on the notion that she’s writing anything that resembles a diary. She puts the words, of course, in anyone’s mouth but Faye’s, reminding us once again that it’s not what people say but what one hears that matters.\

Michael Ondaatje

Mixed The New York Times \"Warlight reads, at its not-infrequent best, like a late-career John le Carré novel. It hooks you in ways that make its quiet storm of bombast almost possible to bear ... Warlight moves at a clip that, in Ondaatje terms, can be said to be breakneck. He writes well about all sorts of things, from British private schools to river navigation to how large restaurants operate. He’s a devotee of curious detail. This story is, however, told at a distance ... There’s an unpleasant sense that Ondaatje is regaling us rather than simply putting across a story. In his overweening interest in secrets and tall tales, in his relish for how stories are told, he’s taken the Salman Rushdie exit off the Paul Auster turnpike ... his burnished, lukewarm sentences don’t snap to life like the people he enjoys. Reading him on these scruffy men and women is like listening to someone try to play \'Long Tall Sally\' on solo cello. It’s not awful, but it’s weird.\

Kevin Young

Positive The New York Times \"Young is a maximalist, a putter-inner, an evoker of roiling appetites. As a poet of music and food, his only rival is Charles Simic. His love poems are beautiful and sexy and ecstatic ... Young’s new book, Brown, is vital and sophisticated without surpassing anything he’s done before. It’s a solid midcareer statement ... Young has long been investigating the lives, art and lingering meanings of black cultural figures. He seems to know everything and everyone.\

Sheila Heti

Rave The New York Times \"...[an] earthy and philosophical and essential new novel ... [Motherhood] floats somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. It reads like an inspired monologue, delivered over a kitchen table, or the one Spalding Gray sat behind in Swimming to Cambodia. Not a lot happens, yet everything does ... This book is endlessly quotable, and a perfect review would be nothing but quotations. She makes a banquet of her objections to parenthood. If you are an underliner, as I am, your pen may go dry.\

Rachel Kushner

Positive The New York Times \"Kushner’s portrait of life inside the women’s prison is grainy and persuasive. It’s all here: the lice treatments, the smuggling of contraband in rectums and vaginas, the knifings, the cliques, the boredom, the heinous food ... Kushner smuggles her share of humor into these scenes. Like Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, a book this novel references, she is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace ... If these prison scenes have a flaw, it’s that Kushner has clearly done so much research that it weighs her down a bit. It’s as if she feels compelled to report everything she’s learned. The Mars Room is a major novel, a sustained performance, one that broods on several exigent ideas ... The Mars Room moves cautiously and slowly. It prowls rather than races. It is like a muscle car oozing down the side roads of your mind. There are times when you might wish it had more velocity, more torque, yet there are reasons it corners cautiously.\

Tracy K Smith

Rave The New York Times \"Smith’s new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America’s original racial sins — open wounds that have had insectlike eggs repeatedly laid in them — and apprehension about history’s direction ... Wade in the Water is pinned together by a suite of found poems that employ near-verbatim the letters and statements of African-American Civil War veterans and their families. These historical poems have a homely, unvarnished sort of grace ... If this new book lacks some of the range and depth and allusiveness of that earlier book, well, she has battened down certain hatches.\

Jeff Benedict & Armen Keteyian

Rave The New York Times \"...a confident and substantial book that’s nearly as sleek as a Christopher Nolan movie. It makes a sweet sound, like a well-struck golf ball. I found it exhilarating, depressing, tawdry and moving in almost equal measure ... This book is littered with the bodies of those Woods cut out of his life without a thank you or goodbye — girlfriends, coaches, agents, caddies. If you stripped most of the golf out of this book, you might sometimes think you are reading the biography of a sociopath, a nonmurderous Tom Ripley or Patrick Bateman or Svidrigailov from Crime and Punishment ... This intense book gives us Woods’s almost mythical rise and fall. It has torque and velocity, even when all of Woods’s shots, on the course and off it, begin heading for the weeds.\

Lorrie Moore

Positive The New York Times There’s some scrapbook-like bloat. The world would have continued, for example, without the review, written for Moore’s college literary magazine, of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn ... More significantly, although Moore is hardly a pushover, there’s less crack in her whip than some readers (well, me) might like ... In her reviews of fiction (by Margaret Atwood, Joan Silber, Bobbie Ann Mason, Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin and Richard Ford, among many others), she has great feelers ... Had she wanted, Moore could have had an important career as a theater or television critic ... When writing teachers pass this book to their students, the title See What Can Be Done will be read as a simple command.

Leslie Jamison

Mixed The New York Time \"This material has been hashed over many times in previous books, and in the first half of The Recovering Jamison brings little that’s new to this discussion. You frequently feel you’re reading filler; mental sawdust. The first half is off-putting in other ways. Jamison is close to humorless as a writer, and she rubs and rubs our noses in her bad-girl bona fides ... The great surprise of The Recovering is that the second half is close to magnificent, and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold ... Inside the 500-plus pages of The Recovery is a shorter, finer book and maybe even a screenplay awaiting someone. In this case I am not entirely unhappy to have taken the long way home.\

Mario Vargas Llosa, Trans. by Edith Grossman

Mixed The New York Times No deep soil is overturned in The Neighborhood, but two things keep one turning the pages. For one, it’s a confident book and confidence is contagious. It’s filled with cliffhangers...and over-the-top incident. For another, it is warm to the touch, particularly as regards sex ... In The Neighborhood, the sex is hot and the beer is cold ...They eat at a seafood place called Seven Deadly Fins. In a novel as contrived and uneven as this one, the human touches go a long way.

Ian Buruma

Positive The New York Times Buruma casts an emollient eye over the multiple and overlapping ways that he felt like an outsider in Japan. He often received special treatment as a gaijin, but just as often it was made clear to him that he would never get as close to this culture as he wanted ... Buruma is a keen observer and the owner of a well-provisioned mind. There are smart little junkets in this book into everything from Japanese movies...to the country’s tattooing culture ... His prose is unflaggingly good ... For a book that is largely about extreme experience, in terms of art and life, he is perhaps overly discreet about his own emotions and behavior. Whenever you sense he is about to open a door, he instead drops you at the curb.

Robert Coover

Mixed The New York Times The best of [Coover's] stories are now collected in Going for a Beer ... When Coover’s stories don’t work, which is about half the time even here, they’re dreadful ... But when they work, oh my ... The sensation is that of being in an astounding if disturbing movie, in which you are the only human with a ticket ... A handful of Coover stories is probably enough for me. A slimmer volume than this one might be a portable classic.

Alan Hollinghurst

Mixed The New York Times Hollinghurst writes long, absorbing, much-peopled novels that display a masterly grasp of psychological processes and a prickling awareness of minute betrayals and inarticulate desires. His sensibilities are so fine you sense he can detect a pea beneath 20 mattresses when it comes to failures of tact, poise and discernment ... Of course the sex writing is good. Sometimes it’s brutal, other times fond and funny ... The truth about The Sparsholt Affair is that it is not among this writer’s more successful novels. It is intricately patterned on the sentence level yet moves tentatively, at the rate of afternoon sunlight creeping across a floor ... You feel you are watching impeccable B-roll or a John le Carré novel without bad guys or an important work of theater as seen from 300 yards away. Your mind rates this book rather highly; your heart gives it only two stars. You come to regard it with respect but not ecstasy.

Uzodinma Iweala

Pan The New York Times Speak No Evil is a muted, minor-chord novel. The trip to Nigeria and a startling moment of racial violence late in the book aside, it is a fairly mild and conventional gay coming-of-age novel ... It’s a book about race and gender and identity but not an especially telling book about those things ... There are moments in this novel that hint at Iweala’s freer, more essayistic voice. He is probing on how, back home in Nigeria, Niru’s father is a different man — larger and louder, he seems to take up more space ... Not enough scenes are this alive. Like so many second novels, this one feels like a book Iweala had to get out of the way in order to arrive at what he really wants to write next.

Sigrid Nunez

Rave The New York Times \"...[a] dry, allusive and charming new novel ... The writing profession, in The Friend, is viewed as a series of little murders of the soul. Writers are weird, jealous, greedy, backbiting, warped from the undersea compression of competition in Manhattan ... The Friend is thick with quotations and anecdotes from the lives and work of many writers, in a way that can recall the bird’s-nest-made-of-citations novels of David Markson. Nunez deals these out deftly; they do not jam her flow. The snap of her sentences sometimes put me in mind of Rachel Cusk.\

Zadie Smith

Positive The New York Times \"...like a brisk day on the cross-country trails. She writes a good deal about art and gardens and travel, and about non-controversial — at least for her New York Review of Books readers — topics like libraries (good) and global warming (bad). In the best of these pieces, however, Smith presses down hard as a cultural critic, and the rewards are outsize ... For six months, Smith was a book critic for Harper’s Magazine, and the results are printed here. These reviews are a mixed bag, mostly because the titles seem random and often infra dig. She’s penetrative, however, on the Mitfords and Edward St. Aubyn and Paula Fox and the essayist Geoff Dyer.\

Martin Amis

Positive The New York Times \"Amis’s new book, like the collections that preceded it, is the product of a ferocious yet sensitive mind. Even when he is considering writers he’s assessed many times before (Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, John Updike, Christopher Hitchens), his aim is so unerring that he resembles a figure out of Greek myth, firing arrows through ax-heads lined up in a row.\

Ahmed Saadawi, Trans. by Jonathan Wright

Rave The New York Times \"What follows, in this assured and hallucinatory story, is funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture. Funny because Saadawi wrings a good deal of black humor out of the way the monster’s pieces fall off at inopportune moments ... Saadawi’s tone can be sly, but his intentions are deadly serious. He’s written a complex allegory for the tribal cruelties in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. His book is especially moving about women who have lost their sons and husbands, and who wonder if they are alive and will ever return ... Saadawi blends the unearthly, the horrific and the mundane to terrific effect ... You get the sense, throughout Frankenstein in Baghdad, that Saadawi’s creature, alive with malevolent intelligence, is feeding off its own destructive energy. The reader feeds off it as well. What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.\

Denis Johnson

Rave The New York Times \"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden picks up, to a large extent, where Jesus’ Son left off. Only a few characters recur, but these are essentially the same unlucky bipeds, sometimes glimpsed a few decades later. Their friends are dying and their own bodies have begun to betray them ... The stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are not as cohesive or as plangent as those in Jesus’ Son. This is a lesser book, but only in the sense that the best later Sinatra records were lesser than In the Wee Small Hours, or that Neil Young could not in later decades recapture the mood of After the Gold Rush or Tonight’s the Night. These stories drift, but Johnson finesses his way through them, his prose vernacular and elevated at the same time. One can say about this book what one narrator says about the poems of a writer he loves: \'They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing.\'”

Jamie Quatro

Pan The New York Times \"Fire Sermon is, in other words, one of Quatro’s short stories extended to novel length. Yet somehow this saga lacks a novel’s amplitude. The narrator, Maggie, is a writer. Even she seems aware that this thin if fervid book brings little that’s fresh to the theme of illicit sexual desire ... Maggie conflates sexual and religious desire, sometimes to memorable effect. More often, these meditations set off the pretentiousness alarm that rests, like a smoke detector, at the top of one’s mind. You may finally have to cover the thing with plastic wrap and a rubber band ... There’s real humanity in this novel, and there are insights about love and longing. Quatro is a gifted writer. But Fire Sermon ultimately reminds the reader of Emma Bovary’s observation that there is \'in adultery all the banality of marriage.\'”

Ali Smith

Rave The New York Times \"Winter is an insubordinate folk tale, with echoes of the fiction of Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter, that plays out against a world gone wrong ... If I’d rank Winter a notch below Autumn in terms of its cohesion and pure witchy cerebral power, there are few writers on the world stage who are producing fiction this offbeat and alluring...Finally, each of these books has an elastic structure, one that allows Smith the freedom to write as if improvising a bedtime story. The combination of dreaminess and acuity is what gives these books their tang ... Smith does not wear her politics as lightly in Winter as she did in Autumn. There is perhaps one speech too many about how we are all in this world together. This novel takes more patience than did Autumn; it’s slower to rake its themes into a coherent pile. My advice: Read it anyway.\

A.R. Ammons & Robert M. West

Positive The New York Times Here now is The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons in two slab-like volumes. It’s a rocking double-wide mobile home of electric American verse. The cube-like density of these books is imposing until you open the screen door … On the most bedrock level, Ammons was a nature poet. Daily he was out amid the moss and grackles and the zucchini vines and the roadkill. He didn’t issue ‘cry of the loon’ writing, however, to borrow an old New Yorker magazine put-down of overwrought nature prose … Ammons carries you along because as he vamps, like a musician, there’s a sense of drama, of his mind expanding and contracting. He will hit his groove and deliver a string of intensities. Then he will pull back because the beauty is too much; he’ll wait for the next moment to strike.

Sam Shepard

Positive The New York Times This novel’s themes are echt Shepard: fathers and sons; shifting identities and competing versions of reality; a sense that there are watchers and there are watchees in this world of dusty gravitas. The setting is the American West. The prose is taciturn. The pronouns have vague antecedents. The book is cryptic and pretentious. It is also sly and revealing ... But this novel is not simply a burnt offering, a Baedeker of dread and decay. There is a kind of parched humor as well ... Spy of the First Person did not begin to fully hold my attention until its midpoint. Several things start to happen. The novel begins to overspill its tight borders. There is an increasing, slashing awareness of not merely one human but a world in distress ... There are echoes of Beckett in this novel’s abstemious style and existential echoes. Our little bands will come apart.

Steven Stoll

Positive The New York Times ...a powerful and outrage-making if somewhat academic analysis of the forces that have made West Virginia one of the sorriest places — statistically, at any rate — to live in America ... Ramp Hollow is not Hillbilly Elegy redux. Stoll does not relate his own story, and his book is not especially warm to the touch. But as economic history it is gravid and well made ... Stoll clings to a different vision of what the United States could be. His book becomes a withering indictment of rapacious capitalism.

Louise Erdrich

Mixed The New York Times Book Review Louise Erdrich’s quietly apocalyptic new novel, Future Home of the Living God, isn’t about a plague, exactly. But something sinister is happening to our blue planet ...a feverish and somewhat feeble novel. Erdrich’s heart isn’t really in her dystopian visions, and this novel’s scenes of chases and escapes are hokey and feel derived from films ... To read this novel is to wade through a great many solemnities...funny thing about this not-very-good novel is that there are so many good small things in it ...her sentences can flash with wit and feeling, sunbursts of her imagination ... Signs and portents, auguries and premonitions. Erdrich’s novel is packed with them, push notices from an onrushing nightmare.

Cristina De Stefano, Trans. by Marina Harss

Mixed The New York Times It’s the first authorized biography we have of Fallaci, with access to new personal records, and welcome for that reason. It is not particularly well-written or thoughtful but it gets her story onto the page and, thanks to its subject, is never dull.

Joe Hagan

Rave The New York Times \"Hagan has delivered a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography. It’s a big book, one that no one will wish longer, but its chapters move past like a crunching collection of singles and not a thumb-sucking double album. It’s a joy to read and feels built to last. Hagan is among those relatively rare biographers who keeps macro and micro in yin-yang balance ... Sticky Fingers is about promises and promises betrayed, and about how Wenner’s life — his increasing obsession with fame and a plutocratic lifestyle — reflected both ... Come for the essayist in Hagan, stay for the eye-popping details and artful gossip ... After Wenner himself, Annie Leibovitz is the most fully realized character in this biography. She comes across as an endearing wild child, sleeping with some of her subjects, abandoning rental cars in haste at airports and becoming, Hagan writes, a \'full-blown drug addict whose body was, more than once, unceremoniously dumped in front of a hospital by her dealer\' ... In scorning Hagan’s work, Wenner’s editorial antennae have failed him. He had the nerve to select a writer and not a hagiographer, and the decision, at the end of his long career, looks good on him.\

Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney

Rave The New York Times As this new anthology of her work demonstrates, she had fresh eyes, quick wits, good feelers and was murderously well-read ... To move one’s way through Hardwick’s essays is to bump into brightness on nearly every page ... This collection is a miscellany, but potent themes emerge. Hardwick took a special interest in the literature of New York City. She was incisive on Wharton and Henry James in New York, and also on the see-saw lives of the novelists and critics of her own generation ... I undervalued her. This book put me straight. Hardwick was a landmark American critic, with a George Orwell-like gift for candor. Like Orwell, her cardinal humors were essentially tolerant. Her dudgeon rose only when something vital was at stake. Her essays have novelistic density; they are a thoroughgoing pleasure.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Positive The New York Times There is bad and good news about Fresh Complaint. The bad news is that there’s nothing especially intense or inventive here, no sign that short fiction is the fertile row Eugenides should have been hoeing all along. The good news is how solid these stories are anyway. Two or three are excellent; none are total misses. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious ... Many of Eugenides’s short stories are about mental self-mutilation. He writes with elegiac wit about middle-class, mostly educated men and women whose lives have begun to grind them down ... This book delivers many small corkscrews of feeling. For all of its interest in failure and misbehavior, it is threaded with a strong moral sensibility. Eugenides’s miserable bipeds want to behave well but there are so many obstacles in their way ... Eugenides has written life-altering books of that sort, and Fresh Complaint isn’t one of them. But its charm and insight are real, and formidable.

Jennifer Egan

Positive The New York Times ...a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. It’s an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk ... How to search for a body underwater, how to facilitate your rescue if lost and drifting at sea, how to run a nightclub, how to bribe a cop, how to care for an invalid — you learn things while reading this novel. Egan’s fiction buzzes with factual crosscurrents, casually deployed ... Egan is a generous writer. She doesn’t write dialogue, for example, so much as she writes repartee. Many writers’ books go slack when their characters open their mouths, as if dullness equals verisimilitude. Egan’s minty dialogue snaps you to attention ... If I have a complaint about Manhattan Beach, it’s that while Egan is in full command of her gifts, there’s only rarely a sense that she’s pushing herself, or us. This novel is never estranging. It never threatens to overspill its levees, or to rip us far from shore and leave us there for a while. Egan works a formidable kind of magic, however. This is a big novel that moves with agility. It’s blissfully free of rust and sepia tint. It introduces us to a memorable young woman who is, as Cathy longed to be again in Wuthering Heights, 'half savage and hardy, and free.'”

Rachel Cusk

Rave The New York Times \"While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit. This is largely because the small conversations and monologues in Outline are, at their best, as condensed and vivid as theater … The narrator is mostly a listener, an asker of questions, an intellectual filter. Posing meaningful questions to others, or even unmeaningful ones, she correctly observes, is a skill that ‘many people never learn’ … Ms. Cusk marshals a lot of gifts in this novel, and they are unconventional ones. With no straightforward narrative to hang onto, no moving in and out of rooms, she’s left with the sound of her own mind, and it’s a mind that is subtle, precise, melancholy. This is a novel with no wasted motion.\

Loudon Wainwright III

Rave The New York Times Instead of inventing a mythos, Wainwright simply wrote some excellent songs — rich, complicated, sometimes dorky, marked by unexpected wordplay and often surprisingly dark. His new memoir is all of these things, too. It’s a funny, rueful thing to consume. Wainwright has hurt most of the people he’s loved, and he’s loved some remarkable people. He’s written fond and sometimes acid songs about them; they’ve returned serve ... Wainwright does not go easy on himself in this book. In typically memorable prose, he describes how he got into 'the nasty and destructive habit of picking up women after shows, bringing a sort of love hostage back to the hotel room, a raunchy token of esteem.' He’s jealous of the success of others in his family. He likes reading his own good reviews and other people’s bad ones. He describes ogling women while doing laps at his local pool. He’s a stinking, traitorous cretin. And yet, as he woos his memories back, there’s a great deal of fondness in this book, too. Like the best songs of the Wainwright-McGarrigle-Roche clan (Rufus has a child with Leonard Cohen’s daughter, Lorca, so this dynasty may still be in its infancy), this straightforward book makes your heart wobble on its axis. And it sends you back to the songs.

Mixed The New York Times Mr. Vásquez’s novel is a kind of languid existential noir, one that may put you in mind of Paul Auster. Hot things are evoked in cool prose. Everything is, in Miles Davis’s terms, kind of blue … Mr. Vásquez is an estimable writer. His prose, in this translation by Anne McLean, is literate and dignified. Fetching images float past. We read that ‘a friend’s house smelled of headache.’ And that Elaine has never slept with anyone who ‘didn’t have orgasms in English’ … The plot can seem overdetermined. I turned the pages with interest — Mr. Vásquez is a gifted writer — but without special eagerness. He sometimes seems more interested in poetic generalities than in squirming people.

Daniel Mendelsohn

Rave The New York Times These sentences — well made, revealing and funny — are typical of Mendelsohn’s book. What catches you off guard about this memoir is how moving it is. It has many complicated things to say not only about Homer’s epic poem but about fathers and sons. If you have not read the Odyssey, or have not read it since you were 30 pounds lighter and regularly wore sandals, this is a rich introduction or reintroduction. Mendelsohn makes Homer’s epic shine in your mind ... Homer composed the Odyssey in dactylic hexameter, the six-beat meter that gives the poem its elevated oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah cadence. Mendelsohn’s cadences in An Odyssey are softer and fonder, but there’s a brisk undercurrent. You feel you’re reading the literary equivalent of a Rodgers and Hart song ... he’s written a book that’s accessible to nearly any curious reader. In her memoir Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz remarks that 'early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.' For Homer, that person is Daniel Mendelsohn, and this blood-warm book.

Salman Rushdie

Mixed The New York Times Each sentence in it is a Cirque du Soleil leap into a net that only he can see. Each sentence seems to be composed of stardust, pixie dust, fairy dust, angel dust, fennel pollen and gris-gris powder, poached in single-udder butter, fried and refried, encrusted with gold as if it were a Gustav Klimt painting, and then dotted with rhinestones ... The effect is exhausting — and deadening. Anything can happen, so nothing matters. Rushdie is obsessed with 'characters,' as Alfred Kazin once said of John Irving, yet somehow does not evoke the more difficult thing: character. There is a reason to consider sticking with all 380 pages of The Golden House, however. It has little to do with the novel’s plot ... In Trump, Rushdie finds such a perfect villain that he finds it hard to let him go. The Trump character is named Gary 'Green' Gwynplaine, a wealthy vulgarian, born with green hair, who likes to refer to himself as the Joker. About this Joker, and about the threat he poses to an America this writer loves, it’s a treat to watch Rushdie let fly ... The Golden House has been billed by its publisher as Rushdie’s return to realism. Yet the New York City on offer is so gilded and remote that the novel reads like what one’s impressions would be if all one knew of it came from back issues of Vanity Fair magazine ... The Golden House is a big novel, wide but shallow, so wide it has its own meteorology. The forecast: heavy wind.

John Le Carré

Positive The New York Times The good news about A Legacy of Spies is that it delivers a writer in full. Le Carré’s prose remains brisk and lapidary. His wit is intact and rolls as if on casters. He is as profitably interested as ever in values, especially the places where loyalty, patriotism and affection rub together and fray. He wears his gravitas lightly ... There’s a distant oink of male chauvinism in this tweedy novel, one that goes beyond establishing the sexual atmosphere of swinging ’60s-era Britain ... Le Carré is not of my generation but I have read him for long enough to understand how, for many readers, his characters are old friends — part of their mental furniture. There’s something moving about seeing him revive them so effortlessly, to see that the old magic still holds. He thinks internationally but feels domestically. In an upside-down time, he appeals to comprehension rather than instinct. I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold.

Anthony Marra

Mixed The New York Times A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is set against the tangle of wars, occupations and insurgencies that have racked Chechnya since the early 1990s. It hews to the historical record...As such, Mr. Marra’s novel can be sickening reading … In A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Mr. Marra introduces us to exuberant characters, only to shuffle them into the wings for chapters at a time. Tension is rarely allowed to build. The grease of human existence is kept from plausibly accumulating. I disliked the sensation that I was reading a feat of editing as much as a feat of writing. I admired this novel more than I warmed to it.

Claire Messud

Mixed The New York Times ...there’s a void in The Burning Girl. That void is the absent sound of Messud’s sophisticated and unfettered voice. This novel is small and soft, pensive and diffident. It sneaks in, and out again, as if on cat’s paws. In composing it from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl, the author underwrites so thoroughly that she mostly blots out her own sun. Her virtuosity is in retreat. We burn our retinas on a self-eclipse ... Messud writes with insight about how female friendships dissolve, and about things like how terrifying certain stray glimpses of adult life can be. But The Burning Girl is an oddly distant novel. Its tone is formal and ultimately unconvincing ... This is the first of Messud’s novels that didn’t, on a regular basis, flood my veins with pleasure. It’s the first Messud novel I might have, if I could have, put down before the end. It’s a common book by an uncommon writer.

Kamila Shamsie

Rave The New York Times ...[an] ingenious and love-struck novel ... This novel may seem to wobble in the minutes after its landing gear retracts. There are lurching shifts of tone as it moves between matters of the heart and of state. Do not panic. Order something from the drinks cart. Shamsie drives this gleaming machine home in a manner that, if I weren’t handling airplane metaphors, I would call smashing ... Home Fire builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.

Jonathan Dee

Pan The New York Times This novel is a big machine, and Dee drives it calmly, like a farmer inside the air-conditioned cockpit of a jumbo tractor pulling an 80-foot cultivator. He drives it perhaps too calmly. He has the intelligence to pull off a novel of this size but lacks, somehow, the killer instinct — the ability to move in for intensities of feeling and thought and action. He’s written a lukewarm book that seems far longer than its 383 pages. Consuming it is like being in one of those frustrating dreams in which you run and run but don’t go anywhere ... there are too many lumpy homilies in The Locals, sections that read like monologues from lesser Arthur Miller plays.

Anonymous

Mixed The New York Times The author sugarcoats nothing about her ordeal and the damage done. But her memoir seeks to evoke, in a way few before it have, the transgressive rush some might find in taboo sexual behavior ... This is a book about heat rather than coolness. It is about incandescent libido and the charring that is a result. Among the many disturbing things about The Incest Diary is a sense that the author is working to turn the reader on, too ... The prose in The Incest Diary is clear and urgent. This is not a major book but it has genuine intensities of thought and feeling. I was never happy to be reading it. You may feel that your face is being rubbed too repeatedly in a certain kind of mud ... This book offers more sensation than perspective. The author’s scalded and mixed emotions are best summarized by these two sentences: 'I want him to think that I’m sexy. And I want to savagely mutilate his body and feed his corpse to dogs.'”

Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Mixed The New York Times The author unearths a mostly buried aspect of Russian history. There’s a great deal that’s moving and memorable about the hardships described. But it’s possible to read this book and have reservations about it ... Many of the author’s interviews, in this book and others, are repetitive in their facts and their tone. An original voice is rare. Is Alexievich a gifted, probing interviewer? It’s hard to say. Her own questions are rarely included ... It’s possible to hold these reservations in mind and still recognize a kind of greatness in the amplitude of Alexievich’s project ... The shock and sadness in The Unwomanly Face of War are, at times, crushing. You may wind up feeling like the young female soldier Alexievich interviews who says, 'We no longer wept, because in order to weep you also need strength.'”

Adam Begley

Rave The New York Times ...[a] concise and thoughtful new biography ... It’s among the satisfactions of Begley’s The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera that he delivers a subtle accounting of Nadar’s career as a photographer while reminding us of his subject’s many other talents and exploits ... It’s remarkable that Begley’s is the first [biography] in English. He’s found a great life to delineate — this book, like that life, roars past with a whooshing sound ... This story, in other words, would be hard to mangle, and Begley most assuredly does not.

Madeleine Blais

Pan The New York Times Madeleine Blais has written a strange book. In part it’s a tour of the island’s faux-casual charms, and as such it’s threaded with mindless chitchat of the sort you find in the TripAdvisor comments section ... Most notably, perhaps, as its title hints, To the New Owners is a steaming load dropped on the author’s former doorstep, a book-length act of revenge, a cleat-hitch slap that will reverberate up and down the Eastern coastline ... Everyone feels possessive and sentimental about the houses they occupy, even summer rentals. But Blais squanders what sympathy we might have, the way those noisy spinning extractors force the water out of swimsuits.

Francis Spufford

Positive The New York Times ...an ebullient, freewheeling historical fiction ... Its action is so vivid that you seem to be consuming (imagine Wolf Blitzer’s voice here) breaking news. Delirious storytelling backfilled with this much intelligence is a rare and happy sight ... he’s written a high-level entertainment, filled with so much brio that it’s as if each sentence had been dusted with Bolivian marching powder and cornstarch and gently fried. Some of this swashbuckling action goes over the top, but you will probably be turning the pages too quickly to register a complaint.

Maile Meloy

Mixed The New York Times ...an earnest and surprisingly generic children-in-jeopardy novel, one that makes few demands on us and doesn’t deliver much, either ... These women and their husbands aren’t distinct characters; they’re upper-middle-class types. The crunchy details, the chili-rub and panko crust that would bring them to life, are absent ... Meloy’s portrait of well-meaning but still ugly Americans resonates. So does her depiction of a certain kind of mental state.

Sherman Alexie

Mixed The New York Times As a writer, Alexie wears his heart on his sleeve, his spleen in a go-cup and his cranium in a sleek postmodern headdress. He can be powerfully direct and plain-spoken. He speaks, for example, of hatred that 'felt as ancient as a cave painting.' He picks up many darkly interesting topics, such as anti-Indian racism delivered by Native Americans themselves. He can also be vivid and very funny ... His sentences often seem composed for the ear rather than the mind. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me has a talky, baggy quality, especially in its second half. What begins as speech ends in filibuster ... Like so many writers, and humans of all stripes, however, Alexie is a Möbius strip of self-loathing as well as egomania. As if to pre-empt criticism of his memoir, Alexie also speaks more than once about how he is famous, in his family, as a serial stretcher of the truth. Yet it’s a genuine drawback of this memoir that so little feels reported out and pinned down. The reader vaguely trusts Alexie emotionally. Factually? Hardly at all.

Catherine Lacey

Rave The New York Times Lacey’s sentences are long and clean and unstanchable. They glow like the artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes. In her new novel, The Answers, she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought, and then she drops you down the rabbit hole. She’s the real thing, and in The Answers she takes full command of her powers ... This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds ... it’s a neuronovel that floods with tangled human feeling. Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with ... It comes to be a meditation on fame and art as well as love. A suspension of disbelief will sometimes be required. Lacey makes you happy to submit. She casts a spell.

Grayson Perry

Positive The New York Times The Descent of Man is a short book that remixes a good deal of academic feminist thinking about braying masculinity. Little in it is truly original. But Perry has a quick mind and a charming style of thrust and parry. He’s a popularizer, an explainer, a stand-up theorist. His book is as crisp and tart as a good Granny Smith apple ... Even at fewer than 150 pages, The Descent of Man is too long. In the last third Perry is reduced to stating poorly what he said well earlier in the book. He’s begun to twist a dry sponge. But when he’s on, which is frequently enough, Perry is an eloquent and witty tour guide through the fun house that is modern masculinity. He wants us guys to be weirder, freer, less predictable. He’s just the man for the job.

Rachel Kushner

Rave The New York Times The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember … The Flamethrowers is a coming-of-age novel of a sort, one that has dozens of topics on its mind: speed and sex, reality and counterreality, art and intellect, politics and fear and perhaps, above all, ‘the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine’ … Reno is a persuasive and moving narrator because Ms. Kushner allows her the vulnerability and fuzzy-mindedness of youth while rarely allowing her to think or say a commonplace thing … Ms. Kushner has long since burned down whatever resistance you might have toward her talent or her narrative.

Ben Lerner

Rave The New York Times Mr. Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists … In 10:04, he’s written a striking and important novel of New York City, partly because he’s so cognizant of both past and present. He’s a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman, but also with writers up through Teju Cole, whose protagonists are wide-awake flâneurs … At one point in 10:04, the narrator is having dinner with his agent...He tells her he hopes his novel will be, on some level, ‘a long list of things that quicken the heart.’ At this he has succeeded perfectly.

Rebecca Skloot

Rave The New York Times … one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time … Ms. Skloot, a young science journalist and an indefatigable researcher, writes about Henrietta Lacks and her impact on modern medicine from almost every conceivable angle and manages to make all of them fascinating … Ms. Skloot writes with particular sensitivity and grace about the history of race and medicine in America…[and] makes it abundantly clear why, when Henrietta Lacks’s family learned that her cells were still living, the images that ran through their minds were straight out of science-fiction horror movies … The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is also, from first page to last, a meditation on medical ethics — on the notion of informed consent, and on the issue of who owns human cells. When they’re in your body, it’s obvious — they’re yours. But once they’ve been removed? All bets are clearly off.

Patricia Lockwood

Positive The New York Times She injects whimsical imagery into weightier reveries in a manner that can make your head, like the unlucky little girl’s in The Exorcist, perform what in ice skating they call a double axel. Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris. When her stuff is good, it is very good...When her attention drifts, as it sometimes does in her memoir, the kookiness wears. Each sentence is its own quirky cameo appearance ... Lockwood manages to make her father not only more complicated than he seems, but also oddly lovable in his lurching way ... Priestdaddy is consistently alive with feeling, however, and I suspect it may mean a lot to many people, especially the lapsed Catholics among us. It is, for sure, like no book I have read.

David Grann

Positive The New York Times Grann’s new book, about how dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s were shot, poisoned or blown to bits by rapacious whites who coveted the oil under their land, is close to impeccable. It’s confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet. What it lacks is the soulful, trippy, questing and offhandedly cerebral quality of his last and best-known book, The Lost City of Z ... Killers of the Flower Moon has cleaner lines, and it didn’t set its hooks in me in the same way. But the crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man ... Reading his book reminded me that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, once dreamed of starting a serious true-crime magazine he planned to call Guilty? This never came to pass. Grann’s book investigates one painful splinter of America’s treatment of its native people, and it snips the question mark off Ross’s title.

Sara Baume

Pan The New York Times Another sort of writer might send Frankie up, might make of her an object of aspirational satire. (Samuel Beckett described tears as 'liquefied brain.') But Baume takes her seriously indeed, and we follow her down a rabbit hole of elegiac quarter-life distress ... A Line Made by Walking becomes a wallow, a trunk of oozing funk, a narrative in which very little happens. I’m a fan of a good wallow, in fiction. But by its midpoint, Baume’s novel begins to stall. Rot and claustrophobia set in. It’s a major event in this novel when the doorbell rings ... It’s the work of an intelligent writer who strands her character in the intellectual and moral horse latitudes.

Sarah Gerard

Positive The New York Times Thanks to books by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead) and Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams) and a handful of other young writers, the essay collection has new impetus and drama in American letters. The essay has gained ground on the short story. Sunshine State deserves to be talked about in this company, even if its essays are hit-and-miss. When Gerard is on, she is really on ... The first essay ['BFF'] is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire ... Two of the longer pieces, about work to care for the homeless in Florida and about a troubled bird sanctuary, are serious and impeccably reported. But the author’s voice is lost in the telling. She’s best when her evocations of the frenzy that is Florida are personal.

Mary Gaitskill

Positive The New York Times ...a cool and formidable collection of essays, reviews and other matter ... Gaitskill is the second writer I’ve read in the past year (the other was Jenny Diski, in her memoir In Gratitude) to say about rape something I hadn’t before heard and would not have expected: that it was not a defining event in her life ... There’s an appealing sense that she composed these essays because she wanted to, not because a payday was on offer ... She continues to wield a remorseless little hammer.

Jack E. Davis

Positive The New York Times The author has a well-stocked mind, and frequently views the history of the Gulf through the prism of artists and writers including Winslow Homer, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and John D. MacDonald. His prose is supple and clear ... Davis’s book functions, as well, as a cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin. His book runs up through the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That event aside, he writes, 'Every day in the Gulf is an environmental disaster, originating from sources near and far, that eclipses the spill.'

Wendy Lesser

Positive The New York Times Her biography is not the first we have of Kahn, but it is notable for its warm, engaged, literate tone and its psychological acuity. Lesser’s prologue is almost too tasty, an intellectual fanfare ... Lesser enjoys unspooling the threads of Kahn’s unconventional personality ... Lesser has done a great deal of traveling for this book, and she has an innate feel for Kahn’s architecture ... Lesser’s biography has a flaw, and it’s not insignificant. She races through the eight years Kahn spent in high school and college in eight pages. There’s little exact detail. These are the years most biographers linger on, extracting all the juices, because they’re when an unusual life begins to diverge from the mundane ones that surround it. They’re when a personality is forged.

Edmund Gordon

Rave The New York Times Edmund Gordon has written a terrific book — judicious, warm, confident and casually witty. The ratio of insight to literary-world gossip, of white swan to black swan, is as well calibrated as one of Sara Mearns’s impossible balletic leaps ... This bio unfolds a bit like one of the fairy tales Carter shook to release its meaning. The pages turn themselves ...After her death, Rushdie wrote that 'English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch.' This biography is witchy, in the best sense, as well.

Elif Batuman

Positive The New York Times It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations ... Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. The Idiot builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast ... Sexual heat is at a minimum. This is too bad, because Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust ... There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogol’s...I also liked Selin’s determination to be 'someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity.' She’s an interesting human who, very much like this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one.

Jon Else

Positive The New York Times His book does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography of Mr. Hampton, who grew up in an upper-middle-class black family in St. Louis. On another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement. It’s also a book about how a long and complicated documentary is made ... Mr. Else, who has a clear and easygoing prose style, has things to say about many topics: the bravery of the network cameramen who filmed in Selma and elsewhere; the roadblocks to documentary work set up by misguided intellectual-property laws; and the difficulty of getting old segregationists to talk on camera. I wish this book were 75 pages shorter. I wish it had gotten a bit closer to Mr. Hampton ... [a] warm and intelligent book.

Megan Marshall

Pan The New York Times Marshall’s biography is dull and dispiriting. The author, who studied briefly with Bishop at Harvard in the mid- to late-1970s, has made the awkward decision to interlard the text at regular intervals with detailed stories from her own life: her youth, her depression, her attempts to study music and poetry ... Marshall’s attempts at memoir are painfully earnest ... This book does not contain strong or especially perceptive readings of Bishop’s poems. Marshall fails to fully set the milieu of midcentury American poetry. She lacks seizing talons for detail ... As Bishop aged, she increasingly took on younger lovers, sometimes women less than half her age. After decades of reading about the late-life sexual exploits of male poets, this is tonic.

Ali Smith

Rave The New York Times \"There’s a bit of a Harold and Maude thing going on here. Daniel is a Manic Pixie Dream Oldie, to twist a phrase, as was Harold’s much older friend, played by Ruth Gordon in Hal Ashby’s indelible 1971 movie ... As Elisabeth and Daniel talk, and as Elisabeth processes the events of her life, a world opens. Autumn begins to be about 100 things in addition to friendship. It’s about poverty and bureaucracy and sex and morality and music...All along, in the background, like the lounge music of the damned, there is a sense that a certain kind of world is coming to an end, post-Brexit ... Ali Smith has a beautiful mind. I found this book to be unbearably moving in its playful, strange, soulful assessment of what it means to be alive at a somber time ... Autumn has a loose structure, almost like that of a prose poem. This form is perfect for Smith, because her mind will go where it wants to go. And where her mind goes, you want to follow.\

Patricia Bosworth

Mixed The New York Times The material she has to work with is, once again, ridiculously good ... Ms. Bosworth does not recount these stories as a striding march through Manhattan and Hollywood. The Men in My Life attends just as fully to loneliness and darkness, to the slivers of dread that prickled her psyche. There is a good deal of talk in this book about what she calls 'the bereaved creature inside me' ... She writes deliciously, in this memoir, about her sexual awakening, her pursuit of ravishment ... This book’s anecdotes are struck like matches, and there are small glowing moments, but no warming narrative fire results. The tone is detached, and the many cameos by the talented and famous are not sharply drawn ... There is something impacted at this book’s core. It’s a survivor’s memoir, a book by an adult child of alcoholics, and Ms. Bosworth evokes her suffering with patience and care. But the psychological knots this book presents are not profitably untangled.

Gregor Hens

Mixed The New York Times It doesn’t always click. There are passages that, in this translation by Jen Calleja, veer close to psychobabble. But when Nicotine stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well ... He is especially good on how those who quit become vicarious smokers ... Like any author worth reading, Mr. Hens is sometimes best when he goes off-topic, dispatching obiter dicta. He is brutal about the Midwest. ('The most insignificant city in the United States is Columbus, Ohio.') ... This edition of Nicotine includes an introduction by the English writer Will Self that belongs in the hall of fame of bad introductions. Mr. Self (never has his name seemed so apt) tries to one-up Mr. Hens by bragging at length about his own peerless nicotine addiction. This introduction is profitably torn out, the way smokers of unfiltered cigarettes tear the filters from Marlboros.

Rachel Cusk

Positive The New York Times ...[a] transfixing new novel ... These two short books are part of a projected trilogy, and together they’re already a serious achievement: dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice distilled. Increasingly, I’m more interested in getting my hands on the final installment in Ms. Cusk’s series than I am the last of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle books. Ms. Cusk is perhaps more profitably compared to writers like J. M. Coetzee and Mr. Roth himself. Her writing offers the iron-rich pleasures of voice instead of style. Each sentence is drilled down, as with an auger ... Transit is fat with substance, as August Wilson once said he wanted his plays to be. There’s a lot of humor in its talk ... Faye occasionally makes the kind of oracular pronouncements that make you want to ask the waiter for the check, please. Such moments are few, but there are more than in the last book, and it’s a worrisome trend.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Positive The New York Times Shakespeare told us, in Sonnet 118: 'We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.' Moshfegh’s men and women cannot quite cope with this world. They are desperate and lonely and estranged. They want to tear the pain from their hearts, and it is less complicated to void their stomachs. Our empathy for them blends with disgust, which is nearly the definition of the grotesque in literature ... Moshfegh uses ugliness as if it were an intellectual and moral Swiss Army knife. The transgressive sex in her stories can put you in mind of Mary Gaitskill. Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter ... If her work has echoes of other writers, her tone is her own. At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood ... A few of these stories are dead ends or semi-stunts, vignettes that strain for eccentricity. More often, one by one, they click and spin like bullets in a revolver.

J.D. Daniels

Mixed The New York Times ...from the moment you crack it open, you’re in the presence of an original voice ... These essays and stories move high and low at once. Some read a bit like the earthy and doomed short stories of the West Virginia writer Breece D’J Pancake, as tweaked by an ironic miniaturist like Lydia Davis. It’s an intoxicating combination ... The problem that confronts the reader of The Correspondence is that, after the near-brilliant first three essays, the pieces begin to display glitches. The second half of the book (two stories and another essay) is lesser work, uneven in tone. Given that the first three essays fill only 76 pages, this entire book begins to seem like a premature birth. The second half can’t come close to cashing the check the first half has written. This is a book proposal as much as a book. The short stories are of a piece with the essays; they’re essentially written in the same voice and fit inside the same loose narrative arc. But they lack the gravitas of the earlier letters, and the wit fizzles ... The Correspondence doesn’t have a proper ending. But its beginning is packed with so much promise that 2017 looks better already.

Aravind Adiga

Rave The New York Times Selection Day, Mr. Adiga’s third novel, supplies further proof that his Booker Prize, won for The White Tiger in 2008, was no fluke. He is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer, a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant ... Mr. Adiga’s take on the world often makes you consider what the apocalypse might sound like as reported by the BBC’s Hindi service ... Mr. Adiga, who was born in India and attended Columbia and Oxford, again displays what might be his greatest gifts as a postcolonial novelist: His strong sense of how the world actually works, and his ability to climb inside the minds of characters from vastly different social strata ... Selection Day is not perfect. Its plot loses altitude on occasion...But I don’t come to novels for plot — or I rarely do, at any rate. What this novel offers is the sound of a serious and nervy writer working at near the top of his form.

Kathleen Collins

Positive The New York Times The best of these stories are a revelation. Ms. Collins had a gift for illuminating what the critic Albert Murray called the 'black intramural class struggle,' and two or three of her stories are so sensitive and sharp and political and sexy I suspect they will be widely anthologized. If the bulk of the 16 stories in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? are less fully realized, they point in directions she might have taken had she lived. They have a talky, crackling quality that keeps them afloat even when they veer toward the pretentious ... This foreword is titled 'In Search of Kathleen Collins,' yet Ms. Alexander writes almost entirely about herself. On the back flap, Ms. Alexander’s paragraph of biographical details is longer than the author’s. Ms. Collins deserves a proper introduction to American readers, one she does not receive here.

James Stourton

Positive The New York Times ...[a] crisp and authoritative new biography ... He tells Clark’s story with dispassionate grace and wit. His prose is unobtrusive but well tailored. He delivers any number of well-observed set pieces, such as the time Clark visited Andy Warhol’s Manhattan studio and found the art so bogus he had a sneezing fit.

Robbie Robertson

Positive The New York Times Testimony ends when its author was still relatively young, but it is packed with incident ... His memoir is confident and well oiled. At times it has the mythic sweep of an early Terrence Malick movie ... Mr. Robertson, in Testimony, occasionally leans too heavily on mythopoeticism. But just as often his writing is wonderfully perceptive.

Wesley Lowery

Rave The New York Times His book is electric, because it is so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart ... Mr. Lowery’s book is valuable for many reasons. He circles slowly and warily around the question of why, during Barack Obama’s presidency, so little has seemed to improve on the racial front ... Mr. Lowery collected hundreds of interviews for this book, and he recounts his visits to many cities to cover shootings. But his book never reads like a data dump. It has a warm, human tone.

Marina Abramovic

Pan The New York Times A tolerance for a certain amount of pomposity is a prerequisite for keeping up with serious art...Ms. Abramovic pushes this tolerance to its limits ... There’s a self-help aspect to this memoir that blends poorly with the implicit injunctions to warm one’s hands on the blaze of her greatness ... [a] shallow and misconceived memoir.

Paul Beatty

Positive The New York Times The first 100 pages The Sellout are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade...like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility ... Broad satirical vistas are not so hard for a novelist to sketch. What’s hard is the close-up work, the bolt-by-bolt driving home of your thoughts and your sensibility. This is where Mr. Beatty shines ... The Sellout I am sad to say, falls into a holding pattern in its final two-thirds. Mr. Beatty still writes vividly, and you’re already up there at 30,000 feet. But the sense of upward thrust is mostly absent.

Sharon Olds

Positive The New York Times Odes picks up where Stag’s Leap left off, which is to say that it contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her career ... Ms. Olds renders the personal universal ... There is a good deal of lesser work in Odes. When Ms. Olds’s poems miss, they really miss, more so than most poets at her level ... The book’s warmth comes from the intensities of its language and the intensities that emerge from a life that seems well lived.

Jonathan Lethem

Positive The New York Times Mr. Lethem’s backgammon writing has a satisfying crunch. It’s witty and sexy, too. ... It’s when the novel returns to the Bay Area that it fully becomes a Jonathan Lethem production. That is, the author begins to pour many of his abiding concerns into it: radical politics, underground art, an interest in literary genre (here a loose-leaf tea blend of detective fiction and science fiction), misplaced memories, a missing mother ... A Gambler’s Anatomy is a fluky novel, not among Mr. Lethem’s very best. Its themes are underdeveloped, and it moves in zigs and zags, like a squirrel in headlights ... This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a Twilight Zone episode filmed by the Coen brothers. At its worst, nothing is at stake — the characters are breezy ciphers.

David Szalay

Rave The New York Times David Szalay writes with voluptuous authority. He possesses voice rather than merely style ... This cosmopolitan author is not overtly funny; his humor seeps organically to the surface, like a rising water table ... Mr. Szalay’s own stream of perception never falters in its sensitivity and probity. This book is a demonstration of uncommon power. It is a bummer, and it is beautiful.

Nell Zink

Positive The New York Times ...like her previous books, it’s a mess: anarchic in its plot machinations, scrambled in its themes, mostly shallow in its emotions ... The strange thing is that you’re never tempted to put Ms. Zink’s novels aside. They contain so much backspin and topspin that you’re kept alert by the leaping motion ... Ms. Zink has a confident feel for the dynamics of a group house, and for the lives of young, earnest, befuddled, middle-class kids who will sacrifice a good deal in order to believe in something ... I could listen to Ms. Zink’s dialogue all day; she may be, at heart, a playwright.

Bruce Springsteen

Rave The New York Times ...[a] big, loose, rangy and intensely satisfying memoir ... The book is like one of Mr. Springsteen’s shows — long, ecstatic, exhausting, filled with peaks and valleys ... Born to Run is, like his finest songs, closely observed from end to end. His story is intimate and personal, but he has an interest in other people and a gift for sizing them up.

Robert Kanigel

Pan The New York Times Alas, the book is a word-heap. Eyes on the Street is graceless, infantilizing of its subject and strangely unbuttoned in tone. It often seems to be muttered as much as written, like one of those garbled subway announcements you cannot understand but suspect might matter ... Mr. Kanigel quotes his interview subjects haplessly. His analogies are inane ... His book somewhat finds its feet in its second half, as Mr. Kanigel increasingly gets out of the way and lets Jacobs’s story tell itself. Many readers will have already returned to their apartments, run their fingers through some gin and ice, and slammed the door.

Robert Gottlieb

Positive The New York Times Avid Reader manages to cover all this territory, as well as Mr. Gottlieb’s decades-long association with New York City Ballet, with grace and guile and a sometimes-barbed wit ... And at times this book has, perhaps justifiably, a self-congratulatory ring. But this is an indispensable work of American publishing history, thick with instruction and soul and gossip of the higher sort.

Tom Wolfe

Positive The New York Times ...a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution ... Because this is a Tom Wolfe production, there is a great deal of funny and acid commentary on social class ... Mr. Wolfe’s prose here is mostly sure-footed, but there are moments when he seems on the verge of losing it, of falling into fragments of Morse-code nonsense ... The Kingdom of Speech is meant to be a provocation rather than a dissertation. The sound it makes is that of a lively mind having a very good time, and enjoying the scent of its own cold-brewed napalm in the morning.

Stefan Hertmans, Trans. by David Mckay

Rave The New York Times \"... an uncanny work of historical reconstruction ... The result is a gritty yet melancholy account of war and memory and art that may remind some readers of the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald ... Urbain Martien was a man of another time. This serious and dignified book is old-fashioned, too, in the pleasant sense that it seems built to last.\

Jonathan Safran Foer

Positive The New York Times This is a big spread, in other words, an ambitious platter of intellection and emotion. Its observations are crisp; its intimations of doom resonate; its jokes are funny. Here I Am consistently lit up my pleasure centers. Like Kedem kosher grape juice, it is also very sweet, in ways that later made me a bit ill ... Mr. Foer’s dialogue is so crisp you can imagine him writing for the stage ... This book offers intensities on every page. Once put down it begs, like a puppy, to be picked back up. But its insistent winsomeness cloys.

ed. Jesmyn Ward

Positive The New York Times A few essays scratch at the surface only to find more surface. They’re the mussels, in this fragrant bowl, that fail to open ... There are five excellent reasons to buy this book: The essays by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Garnette Cadogan and Ms. Ward. Each is so alive with purpose, conviction and intellect that, upon finishing their contributions, you feel you must put this volume down and go walk around for a while.

Terry McDonell

Positive The New York Times The Accidental Life is by and large a fond book. It’s a fan’s notes from a man who, before the apocalypse, edited and often befriended many of his literary heroes ... Don’t come to The Accidental Life looking for score-settling or acid gossip. Mr. McDonell is writing about his friends. He isn’t opening his vault or baring his soul ... Mr. McDonell is proud of each of his teams at the magazines he’s edited, but this memoir is far from self-congratulatory. He writes winningly about his regrets ... intelligent, entertaining and chivalrous. It’s a savvy fax from a dean of the old school.

Tracy Tynan

Mixed The New York Times The conceit of Wear and Tear is that Ms. Tynan, who was born in 1952, recounts her life through the clothes she wore in each era: private-school uniforms and bikinis and apple-green shoes and plaid pinafores and Ossie Clark dresses. This works except when it feels forced, which is about half the time ... Wear and Tear is written cleanly and well, even if it deflates a bit each time Tynan and Dundy aren’t around. 'Watching them was like watching a horror movie,' Ms. Tynan writes. When the monsters slink off, our pulse rate declines.

Charles Foster

Rave The New York Times ...[an] intensely strange and terrifically vivid new book ... reads like what you might get if you took a writer like Julian Barnes or Anthony Lane and dropped him into the woods with only a granola bar and a pointy stick ... His awareness of his failures makes him all the more winning ... an eccentric modern classic of nature writing.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Mixed The New York Times These sorts of arguments — that we are living in the world that X made — have become coma-inducing. X can be solved for anyone and anything: Betty Boop, Betty Crocker, Henry Ford, Hedda Hopper, Bo Diddley, Twiggy, Daniel Ellsberg, Boris Johnson. The reasons to come to Seinfeldia are its carefully marshaled history lesson, and Ms. Armstrong’s way of laying out her produce as if she were operating a particularly good stall at a farmer’s market...I haven’t watched Seinfeld reruns for a while. I overdosed years ago and went cold turkey. Perhaps the highest praise I can give Seinfeldia is that it made me want to buy a loaf of marbled rye and start watching again, from the beginning.

Claire-Louise Bennett

Rave The New York Times \"There’s little in the way of conventional plot. But Ms. Bennett has a voice that leans over the bar and plucks a button off your shirt. It delivers the sensations of Edna O’Brien’s rural Irish world by way of Harold Pinter’s clipped dictums ... You swim through this novel as you do through a lake in midsummer, pushing through both warm eddies and the occasional surprisingly chilly draft from below ... Sometimes first novels like Pond are one-offs. They deliver a voice the author can’t tap again. Ms. Bennett’s sensibility here feels like the tip of a deep iceberg, and I’ll be in line to read whatever she publishes next.\

Gay Talese

Positive The New York Times He is right to stand by his book. Mr. Talese makes it abundantly clear in The Voyeur’s Motel that Mr. Foos is not an entirely reliable narrator ... I’m not altogether certain I can make an airtight ethical case for Mr. Talese’s journalism in The Voyeur’s Motel, at least not in the space remaining in this column, but I can make a literary one. This book flipped nearly all of my switches as a reader. It’s a strange, melancholy, morally complex, grainy, often appalling and sometimes bleakly funny book ... one reason The Voyeur’s Motel is gripping is that Mr. Talese doesn’t fletcherize his material. He lays out what he knows and does not know in sentences that are as crisp as good Windsor knots. He expresses his qualms, but trusts the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. Nor does he demonize Mr. Foos ... You will often feel shabby while reading The Voyeur’s Motel. You are meant to. It’s an intense book that reminds us that a problem of being alive is seeing things you hate but are attracted to anyway. It’s possible to admire it while wanting to pluck out your own prying eyes.

Calvin Trillin

Positive The New York Times Not everything in it is top shelf. Some of the early articles are tentative and straightforwardly reportorial; Mr. Trillin was still finding his voice. But everything in Jackson, 1964 resonates. The book builds, and the payoffs in some of its later pieces (the most recent is from 2008) are generous. The volume is more than a history lesson. The issues it considers — police shootings, voter suppression tactics, race-based acts of terrorism — seem taken from today’s headlines. We’ve come so far, yet we haven’t come very far at all ... Jackson, 1964 is a memorial of sorts. It contains the names of many forgotten figures in the civil rights struggle. The biggest honor Mr. Trillin paid these men and women was to write about them so honestly and so well. These pieces have literary as well as historical merit, and they will continue to be read for the pleasure they deliver as well as for the pain they describe.

Nancy Isenberg

Rave The New York Times [Isenberg] has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents. Viewed from below, a good angle for no one, America’s history is usefully disorienting and nearly always appalling. White Trash will have you squirming in your chair ... From this beginning, Ms. Isenberg moves confidently forward, through, for example, the class issues that undergirded the Civil War and the popular eugenics movement, favored by Theodore Roosevelt, that marked many as targets for sterilization. Slavery and racism are hardly discounted in this book, but she maintains her focus on poor whites ... This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification ... White Trash is indeed a bummer, and a thoroughly patriotic one. It deals in the truths that matter, which is to say, the uncomfortable ones.

Ted Geltner

Positive The New York Times [Geltner has] written a lean and pleasingly consumable book by sticking to essentials. He’s delivered what Vladimir Nabokov said a biographer should: 'plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions, no Marxist bunkum, no Freudian rot' ... This biography comes to weird, florid life in its middle sections. As Crews’s star rose in American fiction, he reveled in his outsider status ... Harry Crews led a big, strange, sad and somehow very American life. It is well told here.

Annie Proulx

Pan The New York Times Slaughter of every variety is on Ms. Proulx’s mind. Barkskins — the title refers to woodcutters — is a Baedeker of doom. Characters die from cholera and measles and smallpox, from shipwrecks and scalpings and botched amputations and occult tortures. More often, they perish in grisly logging mishaps. Ms. Proulx is adept at this culling. She has a lesser knack for first bringing her men and women to life. Barkskins rarely warms in your hands. Its ideas are more finely beveled than its people, never a good sign. Ms. Proulx favors 'characters' rather than character, as Alfred Kazin complained about John Irving. (Among the names here: Blade Scugog, Dud McBogle and Hudson Van Dipp.) Watching its action is like strolling around the world’s largest ant farm. There’s more wriggling than drama ... At its best, it is vivid, mean and wordy, as if the film The Revenant had been annotated by Bob Dylan ... Op-ed sound bites light the way toward this novel’s truly abysmal ending, in which a modern scientist solemnly warns about global warming that 'a great crisis is just ahead' and a woman wants to cry out 'The forests, the trees, they can change everything!' You feel your synapses, as did the forests, turn to pulp.

Arthur Lubow

Mixed The New York Times ...written a tepid and bloodless book, one that demonstrates the defects and virtues of consummate professionalism. It’s all here, but the details remain flat on the page, as if pressed on with Fun-Tak ... Mr. Lubow does get Arbus’s life onto paper, however, and there is no denying that her story is a whirlpool, sucking you in ... One of his book’s achievements is to take us inside the making of famous image after famous image.

Jenny Diski

Rave The New York Times With In Gratitude, she has written a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one, simply by writing a typically sui-generis Jenny Diski book. Which is to say, a book that pushes in five or six directions at once...There’s a raw, almost feral quality to Ms. Diski’s writing about cowering in Lessing’s long shadow. It’s a trait she brought to so much of her writing. It’s just like her to leave us a title, In Gratitude, that slowly sheds its softness and sends up a mischievous flare.

Rita Dove

Positive The New York Times There are so many casual pleasures in Ms. Dove’s poetry that the precision and dexterity in her work — the darkness, too — can catch you unawares ... Ms. Dove’s poems have earthiness, originality, power and range. Despair and loss are among her central themes, but so is the hunt for bedrock human pleasures.

Emma Cline

Pan The New York Times Ms. Cline can’t come close to sustaining her novel’s early momentum. After 30 or 40 pages, my enthusiasm for The Girls began to wane. After 60 pages, I was scanning for the exit signs. The storytelling becomes vague and inchoate, as if you are reading a poem — a windy poem of the Jorie Graham variety — about the novel you’d rather be consuming. This humorless book whispers when you wish it would scream. Its sentences go soft, like noodles in a pot ... It’s not that Ms. Cline doesn’t possess obvious talent. She has an intuitive feel for the interiors of a 14-year-old’s mind, especially the way that Evie, with her fragile sense of self, becomes party to her own abasement at the hands of Russell, the charismatic cult leader ... Everything in The Girls is pre-elegized. Thesis statements jam this novel’s circuitry, as well. Ms. Cline has a good deal to say about how young women move through the world, except when she tells instead of shows. Then her book simply collapses.

Stephanie Danler

Positive The New York Times t’s an unpretentious, truth-dealing, summer-weight novel — bought by Knopf in an attention-grabbing six-figure deal — that reads like a letter home from a self-deprecating friend...At the beginning there are gimmicky interpolated sections about things like the nature of sweet versus sour. You fear you may be headed into a genre fiction tunnel of love. Those fears are quickly dispelled. Ms. Danler is a gifted commenter (chilly autumn air in Manhattan 'tasted of steel knives and filtered water') on many things, class especially. An awareness of privilege runs through this novel like a tendon.

Carlo Rovelli

Rave The New York Times The essays in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics arrive like shots of espresso, which you can consume the way the Italians do, quickly and while standing up. As slim as a volume of poetry, Mr. Rovelli’s book also has that tantalizing quality that good books of poems have; it artfully hints at meanings beyond its immediate scope ... Mr. Rovelli imparts a sense that we may have begun to wave farewell, and his book is a roll call of the scientists who have taken us so far, from Einstein and Niels Bohr through Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking. Like us and everything else in our universe, they emerged from one small, dense hot cloud. These men’s intellects simply burned a bit brighter. The lessons in Mr. Rovelli’s book, as elegiac as they are incisive, do them justice.

Lucia Berlin

Positive The New York Times There’s a radical kind of transparency to her work. Ms. Berlin has a gift for describing the intimate lives of her characters, many of them harried and divorced single mothers who have been, or are, addicted to strong drink or far worse ... She was unusually perceptive about working life, a subject that still gets short shrift in American letters. The title story, a near masterpiece, is told from the perspective of a woman who cleans houses, including those of her friends, to survive after her husband has died ... This book should have been better. The foreword by Lydia Davis and the introduction by its editor, Stephen Emerson, maddeningly overlap. Each says the same thing many times (basically, 'Look how talented my friend Lucia Berlin was') while skimping on what you really want, which is context and biographical detail ... This book would have been twice as good at a bit more than half the length. Ms. Berlin is a writer you want in your back pocket; this volume’s tombstone heft turns her into homework. Stories could have been omitted. In some she went in for twist endings you see coming a block away. She could veer toward melodrama.

C.E. Morgan

Positive The New York Times Ms. Morgan’s literary sins, if sins they are, derive from her muse, which appears to be almost too big to carry. Because she can do anything, she tries to do everything. In The Sport of Kings she has clearly written a serious and important novel if not a great one. She has constructed an enormous bonfire that never fully lights. What’s interesting about it is her almost blinding promise.

Philip Norman

Mixed The New York Times If there aren’t many grace notes in his prose, neither is there much perceptive musical criticism. When Prince Charles presents Mr. McCartney with an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Music, for example, Mr. Norman writes, 'Never again would the classical music world be able to condescend to him.' Does Mr. Norman understand how condescension works? I don’t wish to be too hard on Paul McCartney: The Life. The story of its subject’s life from his childhood in Liverpool through the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 has lost none of its ability to charm. The first 400 pages relate, once more, one of the best stories the past century has to tell.

Amiri Baraka

Positive The New York Times You can open to nearly anywhere in the first third of S O S: Poems 1961-2013, a career-spanning new collection of his work, and find fresh evidence of his capacities ... What’s best about Baraka’s verse is that this historical sensibility and sense of historical dread bump elbows with anarchic comedy ... S O S is the best overall selection we have thus far of Baraka’s work, but he is served poorly by it. The introduction by Paul Vangelisti, the volume’s editor, is an anthology of unforced errors. Mr. Vangelisti neglects to provide the most basic details of Baraka’s life, so these poems are shorn of context. He also writes academic jargon of the sort Baraka despised ... Baraka’s poems are filled with tantrums and sophistries, stances and dances. There are many, many deficiencies of coherence. Some make only the dead, clicking sound cars make in the frost. But others plant a hatchet in your skull that you won’t be able to pull out for weeks.

Jorie Graham

Rave The New York Times [Graham's] new book, From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, is an important consolidation of her work. It reshuffles but does not essentially alter our sense of her verse, which has grown somewhat more political and environmentally minded over time. We watch the length of her lines expand and contract. But her voice has barely changed. This is a poet who, for better and sometimes worse, arrived almost fully formed ... Her poems tend to be difficult, but not in an academic sense. She leads you to the door of comprehension, often enough, only to close it on your ankle. To remain with her, you must be willing to suspend reason and allow her language to flow over you like a syntactic spa treatment.

Robin Coste Lewis

Positive The New York Times Ms. Lewis arranges this material with genuine technical ingenuity, until its incremental emotional force begins to make you feel you have an elephant lowering itself onto your chest ... In the lesser poems in this volume, Ms. Lewis’s language can turn gauzy. In one poem we read, for example: 'Pray/the stars/are all the feelings.' This kind of thing is rare in Voyage of the Sable Venus, however. More often, her poems land with defoliating force.

Sarah Hepola

Rave The New York Times The first two-thirds of Blackout are simply extraordinary. Ms. Hepola’s electric prose marks her as a flamingo among this genre’s geese. She has direct access to the midnight gods of torch songs, neon signs, tap beer at a reasonable price, cigarettes and untrammeled longing.

Helen Macdonald

Rave The New York Times Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative ... H Is for Hawk is good about death, about parents, about depression, about solitude and about keeping small cute, dead animals in your freezer to toss to your hawk. But it is especially good about class and gender.

Jill Leovy

Rave The New York Times Ghettoside is old-school narrative journalism, told strictly in the third person. It’s as square as a card table. Yet the book is a serious and kaleidoscopic achievement ... Ms. Leovy’s greatest gift as a journalist [is] her ability to remain hard-headed while displaying an almost Tolstoyan level of human sympathy. Nearly every person in her story — killers and victims, hookers and soccer moms, good cops and bad — exists within a rich social context ... Ms. Leovy’s narrative has its share of clichés and mildly soggy moments, yet on the whole she’s a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.

Asne Seierstad

Rave The New York Times Ms. Seierstad has read everything about Mr. Breivik and the case, interviewed everyone. (Her epilogue, about her methods, should be required reading in journalism schools.) She is determined to see Mr. Breivik, so much so that her steely approach put me in mind of something Roy Blount Jr. once said: 'If you won’t talk to me I’ll write about your face. If you won’t look at me I’ll write about the back of your head' ... The roughly 70 pages Ms. Seierstad devotes to it are harrowing in their forensic exactitude. She seems to note the trajectory and impact of every bullet Mr. Breivik fired ... It’s said that exact detail is uniquely helpful when it comes to mending after terrible events. If it is true, as Stephen Jay Gould contended, that 'nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail,' then Ms. Seierstad has delivered a holy volume indeed.

William Finnegan

Positive The New York Times No pretension or flab here. Just sturdy verbs, a casual flowing power, tantric masculine reticence, a melancholy sense of a sidewise-drifting life, little humor. There isn’t a line the most mischievous critic could single out for ridicule. Barbarian Days reminds you, though, that not being able to find fault with something isn’t the same as loving it. This is a very long book with excellent things in it, but it can be like watching a brooding film that’s mostly fine cinematography. The characters (including Mr. Finnegan) only rarely squeak to life ... As both travel writing and memoir, Barbarian Days often slips into the horse latitudes between the ode to joy that is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the misanthropic wit that fills Paul Theroux’s accounts of his adventures. There’s little sting in its tail.

Michael Kinsley

Rave The New York TImes Mr. Kinsley is now 65, with body more or less intact, and wits entirely so, if his superb new book is any indication. Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide isn’t really about Parkinson’s. It’s about aging in general. More specifically, it’s about how the baby boomer generation, which is now rounding third base like a herd of buffalo and stampeding for home plate (which is a hole in the ground, as the novelist Jim Harrison liked to say), will choose to think and act in the face of it.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rave The New York Times There are moments in My Struggle: Book Five that drag. Once or twice, I wrote 'Help Me' in the margins and doubled down on the double espressos. These were small eddies in an onrushing river. The critic James Wood has captured my sense of Knausgaard: 'Even when I was bored, I was interested.' My Struggle is fundamentally a confessional work, and Karl Ove has admitted, in Book Three, that he is writing in part to exact revenge on those who pitied, dismissed or bullied him. He wants to return home a literary champion, someone who is impossible to ignore. As we await the concluding volume in this series, it’s a reminder, for those who still need it, that great impulses are not required to make great art.

Rebecca Schiff

Positive The New York Times [Schiff's] dark wit gives her stories genuine tensile strength, even when they misfire. She dips into her own braininess as if it were a bottomless trust fund...If these stories are not the real thing, they’re such a good imitation of it that the distinction is meaningless. Ms. Schiff has an almost Nabokovian boldness and crispness of phrase.

Mischa Berlinski

Positive The New York Times [T]his book’s depths reside in Mr. Berlinski’s rich portrait of a society, and his cool, probing writing about topics like sex, politics, journalism, race, class, agriculture, language and fear.

Dan Lyons

Positive The New York Times ...a cooly observant book ... you couldn't have written a tastier ending, even for HBO.

Arlene Heyman

Positive The New York Times In Arlene Heyman’s first book, the short-story collection Scary Old Sex, she pays such sustained and stylish attention to late-life lovemaking, however, that you may feel you are reading about it for the first time...A few of these seven stories don’t entirely work. Some sag somewhat toward the middle, like the insides of some of the thighs she describes. But Ms. Heyman is never an uninteresting writer.

Adam Hochschild

Rave The New York Times What makes his book so intimate and moving is its human scale. Mr. Hochschild follows the paths of a handful or two of American (and occasionally English) volunteers, as well as journalists, and tells the larger story of the war through their tribulations ... [Hochschild is] a generally sympathetic observer of this conflict’s journalists, but he can also be stern. He criticizes the herd mentality that led journalists to miss one of the war’s biggest stories — how Franco’s side was propped up with oil delivered by Texaco, at the behest of an executive with Nazi sympathies.

Rick Bass

Pan The New York Times ...I’d be lying if I didn’t say that reading For a Little While mostly made me wish I’d left my fond memories of Mr. Bass’s work alone. Read in bulk, his stories begin to seem soft and similar and frequently shapeless. They drain the life from each other rather than striking sparks....Stories like 'Wild Horses,' 'In Ruth’s Country,' 'Pagans' and 'Elk' more than hold up. They display clarity and heart and moral vision, and glow like a well-stoked wood stove. Still, their heat can’t warm the entire structure of this long book.

Greg Jackson

Rave The New York Times The writing in Greg Jackson’s first book of stories, Prodigals, is so bold and perceptive that it delivers a contact high. You know from the first pages that, intellectually, you’ve climbed into a high-performance sports car. Only one question remains: Will the author smash it into a tree?...Best of all there’s that sense — only the excellent ones give it to you — that whatever topic the author turns his mental LED lights toward will be powerfully illuminated.

Olivia Laing

Positive The New York Times The sorts of loneliness that can envelope you in a big city have been much explored in music and art and literature, where a plump blue moon is always shining down on someone. The British writer Olivia Laing, in her new book, The Lonely City, picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Pan The New York Times “In Other Words is, sadly, a less ecstatic experience for you and me. It’s a soft, repetitive, self-dramatic and self-hobbled book, packed with watercolor observations like: 'There is pain in every joy. In every violent passion a dark side.' That someone gets a lot out of writing something does not necessarily mean anyone else will get a similar amount from reading that thing.

David Hare

Rave The New York Times What’s extraordinary about The Blue Touch Paper is how much intellection and drama and sensibility and wit Mr. Hare squeezes into the telling of his first three decades or so. This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life. Mr. Hare is a man who seizes on details and ideas, and who writes as if words matter.

Christopher Sorrentino

Pan The New York Times Christopher Sorrentino grafts a halfhearted, Elmore Leonard-style casino heist plot onto what is fundamentally the mournful story of one man’s failures as a writer, a husband and a father. The result is something close to a disaster. The elements don’t mesh, and what we’re left with is what’s called, in the video game world, at least, a mutual kill: Each side is fatally damaged.

Darryl Pinckney

Pan The New York Times This is the sort of novel you find yourself reading aloud to those within earshot, because you can’t quite believe how often the autumnal-intellectual tone Mr. Pinckney searches for veers instead toward ripe nonsense ... Black Deutschland works best, and loses its hydroponic quality, when it is grounded in the soil of close observation. Mr. Pinckney is very good, for example, on the intricacies of race and class.

Christopher Hitchens

Positive The New York Times ...a very good new collection of Mr. Hitchens’s work previously unpublished in book form.

Garth Greenwell

Rave The New York Times Mr. Greenwell writes long sentences, pinned at the joints by semicolons, that push forward like confidently searching vines. There’s suppleness and mastery in his voice. He seems to have an inborn ability to cast a spell.

Robert Hughes

Pan The New York Times This large volume, welcome though it is, is unwieldy. The excerpts from some of Mr. Hughes’s other books — The Fatal Shore, about Australian history, Goya, Barcelona, Rome — rest uneasily next to his criticism and more personal writing. Out of context, these lumps feel undigested.

Ed. Nile Southern and Brooke Allen

Pan The New York Times Book Review Southern’s letters were antic, but they were also surprisingly unlettered and juvenile in an ur-Judd Apatow sort of way. (A lot of penis jokes.) He was not a close observer of people, in these letters, nor of his environments. He didn’t reveal much about his own life. There aren’t many facts to hang onto.

Iris Murdoch (Edited by Avril Horner & Anne Rowe)

Positive The New York Times ...anyone who misses the regular appearance of new Murdoch novels will find plenty to enjoy and admire in these letters. They pitch us back into her cerebral yet vaguely surreal and magical intellectual world. Her mind, here as in everything she wrote, is formidable.

Rick Moody

Positive The New York Times This is Mr. Moody’s best novel in many years. It’s a little book, a bagatelle, but it’s a little book of irony and wit and heartbreak.

Peter Guralnick

Rave The New York Times ...beautiful and meticulous...Mr. Guralnick is the perfect man to tell this story.

Mary Beard

Positive The New York Times It’s a weakness of SPQR that Ms. Beard seems more eager to tell us what historians don’t know than what they do...You push past this book’s occasional unventilated corner, however, because Ms. Beard is competent and charming company. In SPQR she pulls off the difficult feat of deliberating at length on the largest intellectual and moral issues her subject presents (liberty, beauty, citizenship, power) while maintaining an intimate tone.

Mary Gaitskill

Mixed The New York Times Ms. Gaitskill is such a preternaturally gifted writer that nearly every page of The Mare shimmers with exacting and sometimes hallucinatory observation...As this novel moves forward, however, we begin to feel we’ve been here many times before. The Mare trots, in fairly docile fashion, along the path of nearly every sports-underdog story ever written.

John Irving

Pan The New York Times Avenue of Mysteries is to fiction, it can seem, as the Cirque du Soleil is to gymnastics. There’s athleticism and a degree of difficulty, for sure, in Mr. Irving’s storytelling. There are also a lot of sequins and canned melodrama and hammy showmanship.

Juan F. Thompson

Mixed The New York Times a careful yet harrowing account of an offbeat childhood, and of a father-and-son relationship that grew very dark before it began to admit hints of light.

Paul Theroux

Pan The New York Times Early on, you notice a certain defanged quality. More alarming are the slack passages, the repetitions, the lack of anything truly fresh to say.

Howard Axelrod

Mixed The New York Times A few crucial topics feel underexplored. At various points in this memoir the author is at work on poems, or a novel. Yet he never says if one reason he wanted that remote house was simply to clear space to write. (He supported himself on meager savings.) The literary motive, if there is one, is left to the side.

David Mitchell

Mixed The New York Times Slade House is Mr. Mitchell’s shortest and most accessible novel to date, and you don’t have to have read The Bone Clocks to comprehend it. Readers who come to this book first, however, will get only a slivery glimpse of this writer’s talent. Our seats are the intellectual version of 'obstructed view,' as cheap theater tickets sometimes say.

Bill Clegg

Pan The New York Times “This is one of those novels in which digression piles upon digression until the digressions become the thing itself. You float on a raft of misdirection ... We get the author’s point. Life is easy for none of us and, as he might put it, funny how time slips away. But these events don’t resonate as they scroll past. It’s like watching someone stir plastic toads in an unlit caldron.”

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

November 21, 2024