RaveChapter 16An endearing, eloquent, exuberant, frequently humorous and consistently engaging 381 pages. The novel is at once a thriller, a cultural history, a love story and an ensemble comedy with a Dickensian cast of characters, all made unforgettable by James McBride’s swinging prose and uncanny knack for blending social realism and nimble storytelling ... A terrifically entertaining read.
Mesha Maren
RaveChapter16Elana’s search for Alex gives the novel a narrative arc and elevates the tension ... but the heart and soul of Perpetual West dwell in the intersections and conflicts between the psychological struggles of the characters and the frequently staggering cruelty and absurdity of life along the border. Maren is at her best in the minute observation of the culture and rituals of El Paso and Juarez ... The richness and depth of description lends the text authenticity and authority. Mesha Maren is a gifted stylist and a morally serious observer of human frailty. Her intentions are bold, her mastery of language and narrative tension consistently remarkable and occasionally stunning. Simultaneously deep and thrilling, pleasurable and provocative, Perpetual West is a fine next step in the career of a promising talent, as well as a fearless record of a West the world can no longer afford to ignore.
Chris Offutt
RaveChapter 16A taut, gripping thriller, it also draws us deep into the lives of its troubled characters with wit, compassion, and insight ... The same knack for propulsion, characterization, and snappy dialogue that made Chris Offutt a natural for Hollywood are on ample display in The Killing Hills. The sentences and chapters are crisp and crackling, the mood and tone dark and ominous but not devoid of humor. Put simply, the man knows how to keep the pages turning ... The result is a novel that, like fine Kentucky bourbon, goes down easy and leaves a long, lingering burn.
Gish Jen
PositiveChapter 16Jen masterfully builds her dystopian world, depicting how easily such a change can creep over a populace too ready to trade liberty for convenience ... Though Jen seems to relish the world-building aspect of dystopian science fiction, The Resisters is, at heart, a story about love, family, and the core values of freedom and independence. The humor here is drier and more wry than in Jen’s past efforts; the bleak reality of AutoAmerica (and the degree to which it feels credible, if not inevitable) darkens the moments of levity.
Ben Folds
PositiveChapter 16Ben Folds’ memoir, A Dream About Lightning Bugs, is as refreshingly iconoclastic as the extraordinary career of its author ... Folds writes with self-deprecating wit, as well as deep sincerity and earnest belief in the concept of what Folds’ father calls \'cheap lessons\'—which Folds himself defines as missteps with \'severe-enough consequences for my actions that I might learn something but not so severe that I would end up losing a limb.\' The point, Folds suggests, is not to avoid mistakes or suffering, but to be capable of moving forward.
David Maraniss
RaveThe Nashville Scene\"Maraniss has produced a book which transforms personal history into a rich and penetrating exploration of the complexities of American life and culture that speaks to our time, too ... Maraniss may have only theories about the evolution of his parents’ political beliefs, but in A Good American Family, he makes a strong case for the necessity of thoughtfulness, careful reflection and learning how to live at peace with the contradictions of this American life.\
Michael Knight
RaveThe Knoxville News Sentinel...Michael Knight has cultivated an acute sensitivity to the sensation of haunting. He is particularly adroit with the haunting clarity that follows some act or occurrence that forces a reckoning with the simultaneous complexity and triviality of human experience. The influence of Walker Percy hovers, fittingly, like a benevolent ghost over Knight’s elegant sentences, his unsentimental but broadly sympathetic rendering of the genteel South and his gift for seeing the spiritual dimension underlying what Percy calls \'everydayness\' ... Knight borrows capably from the lore of [an] odd chapter of Virginia history, making it a resonant metaphor for the lessons of the past ... Knight deftly ties the disparate threads of individual and community experience together in the novel’s denouement ... Knight manages somehow to employ a number of tropes—coming of age, the conflict between progress and preservation, the tricky politics of private schools and the yearnings of midlife—while nimbly shunning their familiar conventions, making them altogether his own. The result is a deep, luminous work of art, as pleasing as it is—yes—haunting.
Michael Knight
RaveNashville Scene[Knight] is particularly adroit with the haunting clarity that follows some act or occurrence that forces a reckoning with the simultaneous complexity and triviality of human experience. The influence of Walker Percy hovers, fittingly, like a benevolent ghost over Knight’s elegant sentences, his unsentimental but broadly sympathetic rendering of the genteel South and his gift for seeing the spiritual dimension underlying what Percy calls \'everydayness.\' At Briarwood School for Girls also echoes with the voice of Muriel Spark, whose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie will forever remain the girls-school novel against which all others are measured ... Knight borrows capably from the lore of this odd chapter of Virginia history, making it a resonant metaphor for the lessons of the past ... Knight manages somehow to employ a number of tropes—coming of age, the conflict between progress and preservation, the tricky politics of private schools and the yearnings of midlife—while nimbly shunning their familiar conventions, making them altogether his own. The result is a deep, luminous work of art, as pleasing as it is, yes, haunting.
Mesha Maren
RaveNashville Scene\"... for my money this accomplished debut novel’s greatest strengths are Maren’s entrancing sentences and the complexity of her characters, who in other hands would be reduced to stereotypes and/or objects of pity. There are no heroes here, but Sugar Run’s fallen characters nevertheless earn our respect and sympathy thanks to Maren’s full-bodied exploration of their interior lives and the forces that have bent and broken them ... Maren’s approach is insightful and original, fierce and unflinching. The result is a captivating, troubling and timely debut from a writer to be reckoned with.\
Kevin Wilson
RaveChapter16\"\"Kafkaesque absurdism, Southern Gothic, domestic dysfunction, sci-fi playfulness—throw it all in a blender, and what comes out will look something like Kevin Wilson’s new story collection ... In style, the collection is divided between what used to be called dirty realism—moody tales of sordid lives, though those here are infused with Wilson’s knack for levity, even in the most dismal circumstances—and magical realism ... a writer as nimble and generous as Kevin Wilson reminds us that a great story can assure us, at least, that we’re not alone.\
Jamie Quatro
RaveChapter 16... rich, illuminating images which distinguish Fire Sermon from the many other literary novels about infidelity ... transcends the familiarity of its subject matter through its formal originality, its erudite meditations on the intersections of religious devotion and erotic desire, and the breathtaking lyricism of Jamie Quatro’s prose, which manages somehow to be both intensely elegiac and as fluent as good conversation ... fulfills Quatro’s promise in dazzling fashion, meeting and at times exceeding the precocity and daring of her first published work ... There are so many moments in this fine debut that call to be read and re-read, flipped over and scrutinized—moments of searing, painful truth and gorgeously articulated delusion which ring with their own sort of truth about the lengths to which we will go to make sense of the inexplicable. Isn’t this the task of great fiction? Isn’t mystery, ultimately, as much as anything else, what God and Love have in common?
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe Nashville Scene...a remarkable collection of stories ... Most of the stories in Anything Is Possible follow similar trajectories, calling to mind the epiphanies of James Joyce’s Dubliners and the enigmatic revelation of grace in the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Strout ingeniously links these tales ... This rich, luminous volume makes clear why Elizabeth Strout has become one of the most celebrated and beloved literary voices of her generation.
George Saunders
RaveThe Nashville SceneLincoln in the Bardo is a remarkable achievement; it’s also so unique in form and style that readers new to Saunders may feel a bit confounded ... Saunders’ experiments are situated firmly in the style of postmodern pastiche, in both senses of the term: a collage of voices and perspectives, and an homage of sorts to the great poets and writers contemporaneous to Lincoln ... I recommend both formats [text and audiobook] simultaneously. Hearing skilled voices inhabit the characters will no doubt enhance the story’s resonance, but you’ll want to read along and hit the pause button to meditate on the novel’s finer aphorisms.
Richard Russo
PositiveThe Nashville SceneGiven the profundity of Raymer's crisis and the misfortune that abounds in Bath in the course of a short two days, is it impertinent to report that Everybody's Fool is frequently uproariously, laugh-out-loud funny? Few writers can match Russo's knack for comic sarcasm and wisecracking dialogue, particularly through the voice of Sully. Nor can many top Russo's gift for cascading absurd calamity on his characters alongside naked mirth. In Everybody's Fool, we see a police chief who faints into the open grave at a local judge's funeral, an escaped cobra and a chapter titled 'Rub's Penis.' To say that hilarity ensues alongside the grimmer elements of life in Bath is a gross understatement, and a tribute to Russo's prodigious gifts as a storyteller.
