About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Roddy Doyle
Rave The New York Times Book Review I don’t want to hear from a man writing in the voice of a battered, alcoholic older woman (a well-worn template of female suffering). I just don’t ... The good news for Doyle is that I read his new Paula Spencer novel, The Women Behind the Door, anyway. And that he’s excellent at capturing the kind of tension I’m describing and the fraught stories we tell about ourselves as a result ... There’s much to admire here. And for Doyle fans, the novel will feel familiar: It is unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.
Jennifer Croft
Rave The New York Times Book Review Incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn’t put it down ... What I did not expect was that Croft’s debut would frolic so joyfully, so rigorously, in the absurd, the inane, and stay there from start to finish. Or that I’d end up frolicking with her. Reader, if you’re looking to get your heart thrashed, this may not be the novel for you. But if you’re up for a romp through a wilderness of ideas, innuendo and ecological intrigue (who knew there even was such a thing?), stay with me ... None of this craziness feels frivolous. On the contrary, the novel’s staked in anxieties about climate change, extinction and the unbalancing of nature thanks to art ... Mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art.
Paul Auster
Positive The New York Times Book Review I can hear the whingeing already: Nothing happens in this novel. It’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s not high concept or high event ... What kind of a novel is “Baumgartner,” then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate Baumgartner in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty ... Early pages showcase some gorgeous passages about his wife ... The novel begins to lose some of its urgency. Let’s call it a lull between chapters for Sy, though his final chapter is unclear. The novel doesn’t tell us where he’s going, settling instead for irresolution and ambiguity.
Ed Park
Rave Bookforum What is the right adjective here? discursive? fascinating? bewitching? ... We’re looking at three narrative threads that interweave ... Really what we have here isn’t so much a novel about history as a novel about us—which is of course the same thing. Or is it.
Hilary Leichter
Rave Bookforum About family, love, loss—it’s pretty gutting throughout—but what gives it presence is the forgone conclusion that it’s all gonna be over soon ... What stands out for me about this section—this novel, really—is how well it depicts joy. Small moments—fleeting and sad in retrospect for the unhappiness they precede—but all the same: wow. It’s a lot easier to write about despair than joy ... So much of this novel—most every sentence—is freighted with subtext and implication. If you rush, you will miss all the wordplay and ideation happening throughout ... Mostly I found both the work and the novel’s perseverating on theme enjoyable—at once claustrophobic and performative as a result.
Catherine Lacey
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... a timely entry into the conversation this country’s been having for years about \'otherness.\' ... Who are these people? You’ve seen them before, which forecloses on opportunities the novel might have taken to explore a more nuanced version of, for instance, your standard missionary who patronizes the savages in the name of saving them. Still, it’s interesting to see all this from the \'savage’s\' point of view.
Susan Choi
Rave Bookforum Fifty pages into this novel—Susan Choi’s fifth—I was ready to write about it. I understood its design and I admired its execution ... Choi documents with flair what happens to these kids over the course of the school year. There’s almost an anthropological component here ... It might bear mention that it is pretty difficult to write about teenagers—especially young teenagers—and expect an adult readership to care ... Only an exceptionally good writer with a surfeit of guile and guts will be able to pull that off. Which makes the first half of Trust Exercise a feat in its own right ... And yet, something about these early pages felt off. The plotlines that never got going. The red herrings ... I expected a sentence maker of Choi’s caliber—and she is first-rate—to know something was off. Which, it turns out, she did ... Consider the latter half of the novel full of new perspectives on the material we’ve just lived through ... What once flew in the rarefied air of teen feeling plummets into the dark, petty, and mean streets of adulthood. If nothing else, this new voice is testament to Choi’s facility with voice—she can do it all ... This novel is bold ... Choi is a master at depicting how mutually exclusive feelings often coexist ... In the end, there’s no shortage of insight in this novel.
Leni Zumas
Positive Bookforum \"Leni Zumas’s spry new novel, Red Clocks, does a nice job both of denaturing the world and of riffing on extreme versions of it ... Zumas showcases their experience of femaleness and, in so doing, asks us to rethink what it really means to be female in a world that’s written almost exclusively by men and, in particular, by men who know nothing—and care nothing—for women’s rights. If this sounds all too familiar, your dread reading this novel will be palpable … For all its polemics, Red Clocks is actually most notable for the brio of its prose—its excellent sense of timing and cadence. The novel moves at a clip. Often it’s downright jaunty. This has the benefit of ensuring that we never get stuck in any one place.\
George Saunders
Rave Electric Literature While some of the fiction here trucks in the high jinks we’ve come to associate with a Saunders story — the crazy venues and vocations — many of the stories break new ground, even as they reprise some of Saunders’s more familiar obsessions … What’s at stake here — and, I’d argue, throughout all of Saunders’s work — is moral fortitude and forgiveness and how these qualities can be mobilized in the effort to be good — a good parent, a good kid, a good person … He’s got one of the most refined and sensitive empathic facilities of any writer I know.
Dave Eggers
Positive Bookforum The Circle becomes interesting when Eggers begins to invoke the quandary presented by Edward Snowden and his release of classified information regarding the government’s surveillance of our phone conversations and e-mails. Snowden has raised awareness of the extent to which our government values privacy less than security. Ironically, the Circle would agree … The Circle is meant to hold up a mirror to a moment in our cultural history in which we spend more time online than we do with each other … The novel is not so much about what the tech world is like—it’s about what we are like, what we do with technology, and where we very well might be headed.
Steve Erickson
Rave The New York Times Book Review It’s hard to know where to begin. Steve Erickson’s 10th (10th!) novel is: compassionate, weird, unpredictable, jaunty. It’s sad, and it’s droll and sometimes it’s gorgeous. Some readers will be confused by its 'plot' until realizing there’s little point trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Others will find their footing in Erickson’s supremely engaging interest in the landscape of American music ... It’s really not a novel in which (snore) A and B do X, Y, Z. It’s more like a polyphonic dirge for an America that has perhaps never lived anywhere but in the imagination of those of us who keep fighting for it anyway ... Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless ... The mockery, longing and disillusionment of this music are splashed all over Shadowbahn ... In 2017, it reads like an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come.
Karan Mahajan
Rave The New York Times Book Review “The Association of Small Bombs, is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives — about grief, death, violence, politics — I suggest you go out and buy this one.