‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Rebecca Nagle

Rave The Washington Post Nagle is skilled at explaining the intricacies of the legal arguments in terms that a layperson can understand ... The most compelling moments in the book — which can feel dense at times because of the amount of information packed into fewer than 250 pages — are when Nagle zooms in on particular people and experiences ... Impeccably researched, with more than 70 pages of meticulous endnotes in which Nagle cites her sources for every fact, claim, quote and narrative she covers. It’s a fascinating book and an important one.

Ursula Villarreal-Moura

Rave NPR \"Villarreal-Moura has tapped into something as resonant as it is recognizable, and in Like Happiness has given us a beautiful work of fiction that dwells in the gray areas between celebrity and fan, victim and victimizer, absolution and blame.\

Lauren Oyler

Positive The Los Angeles Times Although I’m revealing my inane approach to sidebar commentary...this holds true for much of No Judgment: My excited underlined passages or comments of \'haha\' and \'omg so true\' and \'okay, fair\' balanced out with many an annoyed \'uh no\' or \'oookay\' ... Oyler’s liberal usage of the royal \'we\' at various points in her essays...is grating, especially as she is clearly excellent at writing from her own particular perspective and is capable of admitting to the subjectivity of an \'I\' statement. There are moments when she is vague in her arguments or abstracts to the point of confusion, but her writing is so good that it’s easy to gloss over these ... Ultimately, though, I found Oyler’s work invigorating. That I was at times deeply convinced by her arguments and at others wanted to argue right back is, to me, the mark of successful critical writing.

Jennifer Croft

Rave NPR Croft\'s novel is about a lot of things: the complexities and beauties of translation, climate change and the mass extinction of species, art\'s potential to save or destroy the world, obsession, lust, and much more ... Surprised me at every turn, moving between profound observations about nature, art, and communication (which, I\'d argue, always involves various forms of translation) and surreal and baffling happenings that push the characters into a kind of fever-dream reality. Croft has certainly added \'novelist\' to the list of writing-related skills she excels at, and what a joy that is to witness.

Phillip B. Williams

Rave The Los Angeles Times Deeply absorbing ... A book that embraces mystery and the unknown, whether found in conjuring and rituals or in the vagaries of lifelong relationships ... Ours for all its elements of magic, fantasy and mythology, is a realistic depiction of how we might arrive at utopia: through people who are always trying to become, always finding ways to navigate and survive harsh realities, always reaching for moments of joy and intimacy.

Leslie Jamison

Rave NPR There is a circularity to Splinters; over and over again, in different variations of her signature, beautifully frank language, Jamison writes about her fantasy of stability and her uncertainty as to whether it\'s a dream she actually wants fulfilled ... Doesn\'t provide a unifying revelation, and even though it\'s relatively linear, Jamison doesn\'t end up in a place that\'s so different from where she started out. This can be easy to overlook, as she\'s a master at closing nearly every paragraph with what lands as an epiphany ... A beautiful tribute to the continued failure as well as the worthy ongoing attempt.

Maria Hummel

Positive The Los Angeles Times The flawed narrative is in this case a relationship, and Hummel’s larger question is how — or whether — it can survive the expectations faced by women, both then and now ... A novel about agency and friendship whose questions reverberate far beyond its two protagonists and their particular time and place. Haunting and tragic, it nevertheless lands on a hopeful note.

E. J. Koh

Rave The Los Angeles Times Manages to convey sweeping changes and painful events in families and nations through condensed, often lyrical language. In just over 200 pages, The Liberators covers more than 30 years of a family’s life, not counting flashbacks, and explores how the past travels with us, and how we may find solace amid loss through relationships with others ... A knowledge of...history is helpful but not required before reading Koh’s novel, which is flush with careful details, small moments of tenderness and surprising connections.

Naomi Alderman

Rave The Los Angeles Times Less grim; instead, it harbors a stubborn sense of optimism, theorizing that if only people of conscience helmed the richest and most powerful companies, they might be able to steer the ship of humanity to safety ... I could nitpick the details in Alderman’s approach...but I’d rather not. The Future is so pleasing and page-turning a read, so full of intrigue, emotional depth and a delicious conclusion that I didn’t want it to end.

Nathan Thrall

Positive The Washington Post \"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an important book, and one that closely examines the intricacies of injustice perpetrated on the Palestinian population by the Israeli government, its systems and plenty of its Jewish citizens. Yet it does so with an almost clinical remove ... It was difficult, at times, to grasp the sheer horror of what Israeli annexation and strategy have done to Palestinian people and lands when there was no real pathos coming from the author’s narration. Dispassionate reporting won’t protect the book from the political pushback it will receive from Zionists and their supporters. Still, it’s clear that Thrall cares deeply about the topic.\

Isle McElroy

Rave NPR Delightful ... People Collide\'s Freaky Friday concept covers a deep exploration of marriage, love, and the ways we know one another — and don\'t — as well as how slippery a sense of self can be when so much of how we navigate the world depends on how it sees us.

Donovan X. Ramsey

Rave NPR Threaded through the four character studies are details of the era\'s politics, the crime bills that led to the drastic increase in mass incarceration, legacy media\'s insistence on sensationalizing crack and deploring its users, the ineffective War on Drugs and its disastrous consequences, and more, always in clear prose that focuses as much as possible on the flesh and blood individuals who were harmed by the epidemic ... An excellent work of people-first journalism, When Crack Was King offers not only a vivid and frank history, but points to the way communities tend to save themselves even as they\'re being actively targeted by state policy and violence.

Jolene McIlwain

Rave NPR The 22 stories in Sidle Creek charm, surprise, and convey a deep love of the people and place McIlwain has long called home ... Sidle Creek\'s stories largely focus on people who are making their lives where they were born and raised, as well as some who have come from away — and the small and large dramas of their lives are rendered in beautiful prose.

John Wray

Positive NPR \"...masterfully portrays the heavy metal scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s through the eyes of Floridian teenagers. But don\'t let the topic scare you off; like any good novel about a subculture (or several), Wray\'s newest does not require prior knowledge of or interest in metal in order to enjoy it ... I was disappointed, however, with the characterization of Kira Carson, who despite glimmers of real human depth, reads all too often like a collection of damaged woman stereotypes, her sense of her own brokenness rendering her incredibly alluring to, apparently, all men everywhere ... Ultimately, Gone to the Wolves is a powerful and juicy novel about a particular time, subculture, and the ways people can find themselves in — or can deliberately disappear into — fandom.\

Sarah Cypher

Rave NPR There is a particular magic to stories about storytelling, especially when they use the metafictional element to probe into the very nature of reality and how we live inside of it ... A compelling and deeply empathetic narrative ... Grand, imaginative, poetic, loving.

Ramona Ausubel

Rave Alta Climate anxiety—or perhaps, more specifically, ecological grief—looms large over the family at the center of the narrative ... Ausubel has long been brilliant at conveying the strange and improbable alongside the beautiful specifics of the mundane. The Last Animal feels haunted by exhaustion both literal and existential and the dreamlike quality that accompanies such fatigue ... The Last Animal is a wildly plotted romp as well as a deeply felt story of family, grief, and the hope to be found in continuing to live, even under the cloud of an uncertain future.

Sabrina Imbler

Rave The Washington Post Braided through the fascinating account...is Imbler’s own narrative ... Weaving in personal experiences with sexual encounters whose tenor has changed to something sinister over the years, Imbler questions the way the stories we tell and the stories we hear affect what we understand about predators and about ourselves as potential prey ... Beyond their metaphorical significance, though, it’s the actuality of the sea creatures that Imbler beautifully captures and renders meaningful ... There is grief in these essays as well, for the changes that humanity has wrought upon the deep ... I found both solace and hope in Imbler’s ability to portray a world so foreign it’s barely legible to humans, and to bring forth the myriad ways of being that we might draw on to imagine our way forward through the depths.

Stephanie Lacava

Positive BOMB Magazine It’s a familiar story, but...Stephanie LaCava exploits the trope as a shortcut to intimacy between reader and character ... Examines issues of power, how it is or is not inherited, what the consequences of being defined by others are, and the ways pain shapes us.

Barbie Latza Nadeau

Mixed The Washington Post Nadeau describes well the culture of normalized misogyny in Italy, as well as how \'the mafia and the malavita, ‘dishonest lifestyle,’ it produces are just another facet of the culture.\' The trouble is that the book’s tone is all over the place, going from a kind of girl bossification of mafia women to a celebration of anti-mafia prosecutors for imprisoning them — sometimes on the same page ... reads like an overcorrection, and Nadeau — who clearly likes her subjects — still seems invested in the dichotomy between the capital \'B\' Bad mafia and capital \'G\' Good anti-mafia police and prosecutors. This is especially strange as Nadeau admits several times that the various syndicates continue to operate successfully precisely because they’re involved in the highest echelons of legitimate state power. The Italian state — which, Nadeau acknowledges, fails to support its struggling citizens — and the parallel state that encompasses the mafia don’t seem that separate. This makes it all the more troubling that Nadeau relies far more heavily on the opinions and speculations of those most interested in punishing mafia women than on the women’s testimonies, which she often concludes are full of lies and omissions anyway ... Confusingly, Nadeau stoops to the very contempt toward women that she’s criticizing, often describing a women’s physical appearance as if it’s noteworthy ... [Nadeau] implies that women don’t have a choice when they remain inside the mafia social circles they’re born into, but she also implies that they are to blame for staying when they could turn to the state for help — and then describes children being tortured to punish mothers who betray their families ... The nuance is there to be gleaned in The Godmother if one goes looking for it. But because Nadeau’s wrestling with the complexity of her material reads more accidental than intentional, it may leave readers confused as to her sweeping conclusions and assumptions.

Rasheed Newson

Positive The Washington Post ... vibrant ... At one point, Trey admits that among Rustin’s recommended books, he’s able to grasp the biographies but has a hard time with political theory. It appears that the book in our hands is the one he wrote for young people like himself who may also need to learn even as they throw themselves into activist work. Who provided the annotations, which are full of historical context, is less clear; even though they’re helpful — mainly to an audience less familiar with both Black and queer history — they aren’t utilized as well as they might be for a full meta-textual effect. But that’s a small flaw in an otherwise marvelous read ... The book is also a love letter to activism, which isn’t to say it glamorizes it — quite the opposite ... To the well-versed in the era’s politics, the many luminaries Trey meets and the historic events he finds himself at the center of might seem far-fetched, but there’s a sense that Newson is winking at those of us in the know, inviting us into that space of wondering what we might have done or failed to do if we had lived then and there. And as for the majority of readers, the book provides a crash course in the history of a pivotal era via a vividly imagined lived experience. Much like Trey being schooled by Rustin \'with such a light touch,\' readers of My Government Means to Kill Me may not even realize they’re \'getting smarter about gay culture and politics.\'

Akil Kumarasamy

Rave Los Angeles Times Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is under 300 pages, and there is certainly a lot going on, but it all feels beautifully balanced — chapters threaded together nimbly, the translated manuscript and the protagonist’s life echoing each other ... The translation-within-a-novel demonstrates how, across vastly different times, places and cultures, human beings ultimately have similar concerns ... Personally, I love when novels play with form and storytelling modes, but some find these devices gimmicky or too obvious. Meet Us by the Roaring Sea avoids this in part because the connection between the sections is never spelled out beyond the fact that the unnamed narrator is translating a manuscript ... The overarching theme: that existential loneliness exists alongside the deeply porous experience of being a human in a social world. It’s the tension of that seeming contradiction, as well as the sure hand of the book’s guiding intelligence, that makes Meet Us by the Roaring Sea such a pleasure to read.

Casey Parks

Rave NPR As [Park] strives to become a better journalist and continues pursuing information about Roy over the course of more than a decade, she begins to face her own past, too, from the heartbreak of losing church once she came out to her tumultuous and complex relationship with her mother. She does so with remarkable empathy for her family members, Roy\'s acquaintances (even those who abandoned him in his later years), and her own younger self ... Not knowing — not being able to understand or access the full extent of something like Roy\'s story, her mother\'s drug use, the truth of her grandmother\'s stories — can be maddening. But the beauty of Diary of a Misfit is that it sits in that space, allowing Parks to unfold her family\'s history, her understanding of herself, and her obsession with Roy slowly and methodically ... In the process, she also beautifully portrays her interview subjects in the South and what she both loves and finds painful about home...Parks\' book is a wonderful addition to the genre.

Gabino Iglesias

Rave NPR ... riveting ... a barrio noir that invites readers to consider the depths of darkness in this world, its material effects, and the cycles of violence we both willingly and perforce enter into ... written in both English and Spanish — the former outweighs the latter, and any Spanish dialogue too important to the plot or mood is translated — and takes readers on a journey to hell and back. Whether hell is the American racism, the Mexican cartel industry, Mario\'s grief and increasing comfort with violence, or all of the above, it works ... The mix of religious, superstitious, and supernatural elements add a dimension to the novel that heightens its horror, but also its social commentary ... may not be a cheerful book, but it still allows glimpses of love, moments of connection, and glimmers of beauty to exist. Even if those can\'t save us, they point toward what, with some effort and luck, just might.

Anna Dorn

Rave The Los Angeles Times These distinct plotlines do begin to bend toward each other eventually, but at first the connection is tenuous ... a deep character study of two women’s obsessions, compulsions and maladaptive coping mechanisms ... there is, quite simply, a deep satisfaction in seeing Emily and Dawn behave badly, suffer consequences and behave badly again — anything to avoid fully facing themselves ... Despite a fair number of truly terrible decisions, it’s hard not to root for them, in part because they’re both so audacious but also because Dorn allows us glimpses into their vulnerability ... also incredibly funny, keenly tuned in to contemporary internet culture and generational differences. My only real complaint about Dorn’s second novel is how little interest she takes in people with my sign. But then I’m a Cancer, which means I have a bit of a victim complex.

K-Ming Chang

Positive Los Angeles Times Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction ... Some of the stories are less conventional than others ... Gods of Want is unified by recurrences of word and image ... The recurrences create the sense across the stories of a shared history — of colonization of land and language, of immigration, of desire — as well as a shared wealth and depth of myths through which to view the world’s cruelties and glories alike.

David Yoon

Rave Los Angeles Times Yoon manages to imbue...small activities with dramatic tension that works in two very different ways. First, there is the horror in recognizing looming existential threats: death ... Second, and rather unexpectedly, the sequences are sprinkled with gallows humor ... City of Orange is a fast-paced read, and Yoon’s ability to lighten the mood keeps it from becoming as dread-inducing as some end-of-the-world novels can be. While it does have a big twist some readers will see coming, the novel works in part because obfuscation of that twist isn’t the book’s main concern. That honor belongs to the eternal question, relevant to both the apocalypse and everyday life, of how we’re supposed to go on when living seems impossible in the face of all that has been lost.

Sam Knight

Positive NPR The Premonitions Bureau, which oddly doesn\'t include a notes section so that it\'s sometimes unclear who or what is being quoted, is a sprawling book that takes many detours along the way, and Knight\'s arrangement of the main story and its admittedly fascinating tangents left me a little bit baffled. But ultimately, it\'s a thought-provoking and deeply researched book that presents readers with the oddity of realized premonitions but allows us to come to our own conclusions about what to believe.

Noviolet Bulawayo

Rave NPR Glory, peopled with animals rather than humans in a nod to George Orwell\'s Animal Farm, uses these allegorically potent creatures to explore both Zimbabwe\'s particular history ... To be clear, the novel doesn\'t explain away their actions, but it does contextualize them by exploring their histories ... In one of the most stirring threads of the novel, which weaves in and out of the political drama, a goat named Destiny returns to Jidada after the regime change, to her hometown of Lozikeyi ... Throughout, Bulawayo\'s narrative voices are exquisite in their modulation, sometimes drawing out a sentence with repeated phrases or in a particular cadence reminiscent of a chant, and at others using conversational asides or social media posts to convey the strong and varied opinions of Jidada\'s population. She brings in humor and joy, too, despite the novel\'s potently serious subject matters, reflecting the reality of human nature ... glorious in its power.

Rachel Krantz

Rave NPR .... more than anything else, it\'s Krantz\'s sincere and curious reckoning with the cultural messaging we all receive about gendered expectations and power dynamics in romantic and sexual relationships in general. How do we untangle those from our own desires? How do we differentiate between those desires and the things we think we should want, or that our partners want us to want? The highs and lows of a first non-monogamous relationship prove the perfect canvas on which to explore these fundamental questions ... Sex parties, swingers\' meetups, and drug use are unapologetically rendered, but Krantz is no less forthcoming with her anxieties, fears, and attempts to understand what is going on in her primary relationship with Adam. Her vulnerability — along with the 20/20 hindsight she\'s able to bring to her younger self\'s emotional journey — is precisely why the memoir works so well. Her warm tone throughout, laced with sometimes rueful, sometimes tender humor, helps the reader trust that she\'s not working to gratuitously titillate, but to examine sexuality as a vital part of many people\'s lives that need not be cloaked in guilt, shame, or embarrassment (unless, of course, those are part of a person\'s kink).

Melissa Febos

Positive NPR Although the essays in what is arguably [Febos\'] latest act of service to that questionable project are all personal narratives themselves (as opposed to straight-up craft essays with clear dos and don\'ts for the aspiring or practicing writer), they also provide practical and philosophical arguments for the expansiveness that such narratives allow and for their power in the world ... Rather than believing the narrative that stories of trauma are dull or overdone or whiney or gauche, Febos encourages her readers to tell their stories, to write them, for themselves or others. In this way, Body Work, is in itself an example of the strength of personal narrative; it\'s also an argument for how such narratives inevitably create space for community as well as a freer self.

Sarah Weinman

Positive NPR The narrative\'s goal isn\'t to grip readers using a what-happens-next approach...but rather to explore how and why things happened the way they did — and who helped him become one of the most famous convicted murderers of his time ... But why did Buckley become so committed to Smith ... Weinman\'s answer is complex, of course, but might be boiled down to two major ideas: first, that Smith\'s talent as a writer was impressive enough to win him friends and admirers and, second, that he was incredibly manipulative ... Smith clearly was manipulative ... Indeed, the excerpts of his letters that appear in the book were convincing enough to sow doubt in my own mind at first, and I found myself being disturbingly drawn to him and his writing. This is, perhaps, precisely why Weinman does so little editorializing ... Scoundrel is very much a hard-boiled true-crime narrative, detailed and careful. But although Weinman writes that it\'s Smith\'s victims who animate the narrative of the book...it doesn\'t quite read that way ... Still, it\'s clear that Weinman tried to breathe as much life into the women as she could, and the book certainly excels at being an in-depth exploration of how outside influence and support can affect the criminal justice system\'s slow-moving cogs, as well as the narrative of a con artist who managed to hurt a great deal of people.

Hasanthika Sirisena

Rave BOMB The book’s jacket copy suggests the collection is organized around the titular dark tourism, which Sirisena defines as \'tours to former sites of any type of catastrophe, natural or man-made,\' including war tourism. In reality the collection feels more thematically chaotic and intuitively arranged than that, which is a breath of fresh air. So many essay collections today feel forced into strict harmonies, becoming essentially full-length nonfiction narratives. The complexity and breadth of Dark Tourist complements Sirisena’s own take on meaning-making and art. This is not to say the essays don’t hold together—they do. But rather than focusing on dark tourism, per se, their connective threads lie in the author’s ability to weave their eclectic interests and associations into a cohesive fabric ... works as a collection not because of its tight cohesion but because of its moments of rupture and surprise, which work to create a pattern, unique to each reader.

Lan Samantha Chang

Rave NPR The Family Chao is a riveting character-driven novel that delves beautifully into human psychology; Dostoevsky himself would surely approve.

Jessamine Chan

Rave The Washington Post The book doesn’t feel speculative so much as inevitable, which is all the more horrifying ... although the book isn’t billed as a horror novel, I felt consistently spooked while reading, disturbed but propelled on by Chan’s excellent pacing ... absurdities...might be funny if they weren’t so distressingly close to the real-life expectations our culture and institutions have of mothers. But Frida’s personal journey captivated me far more than the sometimes-familiar dystopian elements. She’s a complex character, keenly aware of the racial and gendered dynamics of the group of women she’s with ... It’s easy to judge—and readers may be understandably disturbed by the behavior of some housed at the facility—but Chan’s debut shines a light on its mothers’ humanity, mistakes and all.

Dana Schwartz

Rave NPR ... deliciously macabre ... Anatomy is a love story, so you can guess that Hazel and Jack soon begin developing a slow-burn romance, although I\'d argue that the love story of the subtitle is not only theirs but also Hazel\'s love affair with medicine and the lengths she\'ll go to be able to practice it ... Some readers familiar with the mystery genre will likely guess quite a few of the twists as they\'re signaled pretty early on, but the journey there is nevertheless fun—and, occasionally, squelchy and gruesome, in just the right amount for a gothic love story.

Hanya Yanagihara

Rave The Boston Globe A sprawling,...intimate epic that is also focused on love, shame, and existential loneliness ... Yanagihara’s masterful, transfixing writing, and her ability to plumb the depths of her characters at their most despicable and at their most tender ... To Paradise is more or less three novels in one ... Each explores the possibilities and limitations of idealism and conviction in both the personal and political spheres ... Book I reads like a Henry James novel, complete with long and grammatically impeccable sentences and careful attention paid to unfolding, layer by layer, David’s psychology and emotional depth. Book II...which is divided into two parts, reads more like a contemporary literary novel ... Book III...is the longest and also, perhaps, the most difficult to read right now, since it takes place in a pandemic-ravaged future ... On the surface, what ties the three books together are the repetition of character names...and the house on Washington Square Park that appears in each book in one iteration or another. But there are deeper, more ineffable ties, in the form of moral and political questions: What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be protected? Does the latter preclude the possibility of the former? Are gilded cages any less restrictive for being gilded? To Paradise doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but revels in ambivalence rather than moral absolutes, making it a rich, emotional, and thought-provoking read.

Jean Chen Ho

Rave NPR The friendships that do survive feel precious, unlikely. One such is at the tender, beating heart of Jean Chen Ho\'s debut work of fiction, Fiona and Jane ... These introductions to the girls\' (later women\'s) families are helpful in setting the scene, showing us what they share in terms of background, language, and family, but it\'s the third piece, Go Slow, where we really begin to see their friendship shine on the page. Their dynamic rings beautifully true ... Ho renders both women so real that they begin to feel like people you\'ve encountered and hung out with. She also has a knack for rendering their darker, meaner thoughts, those they\'re sometimes ashamed of, with brutal honesty ... While Fiona and Jane sometimes feels quiet, it is never muted, and its precisely the fact that the women\'s trials and tribulations feel refreshingly life-sized that makes the book ring so beautifully, sometimes terribly, true.

Faith Jones

Mixed The Washington NPost Jones opens her book with a history of the cult and its phases, giving unfamiliar readers a helpful overview ... her disillusionment comes slowly, bit by bit. It takes years for her to fully leave, and her journey out is an often painful one filled with horrors, delusions, traumas, triumphs, moments of tenderness, and the occasional actual humanitarian work alongside all the proselytizing. Where the book begins to falter and become occasionally aggravating is when Jones begins her life in the United States in her early 20s ... she\'s translated her approach to personal survival into a message she seems to think everyone could benefit from, a bootstrap message of personal responsibility above all. Stranger still is Jones\' revelation toward the end of the book in which she describes her approach to life and women\'s liberation as being similar to American property laws ... It\'s also rather uncomfortable, talking about indoctrination, to witness Jones trying to sell her TEDx Talk message at the end of the book, especially when she applies it so broadly as to sound, suspiciously, guru-like ... The book might have had more impact if Jones had shared her story without trying to tack on a single, overarching, packageable message at its end.

Rebecca Solnit

Positive NPR ... a deeply political collection of interlinked essays, and at its center are the tensions between beauty and labor, joy and suffering ... Even when the associative leaps evoke, as they do on occasion, some head-scratching, there is an exuberance to them, and it seems, at least to me, that Solnit is having fun when she makes these connections—finding joy in the intellectual pursuit of writing and thinking. That she allows herself to do so in a book that is in many ways very serious too is in keeping with the very aesthetics it\'s engaging with. \'Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to him, and pleasures,\' she writes about Orwell. But she may as well have been describing her own, or at least this book\'s, aesthetic values and pleasures as well.

Claire Fuller

Rave NPR ... gorgeous, specific descriptions abound throughout the book ... That the twins are resilient is clear early on, as they stoically face their mother\'s death. But it\'s their soft spots, their desires and wishes, their memories, and their musical talent...that slowly unfold throughout the narrative, giving readers glimpses at just how rich people\'s lives can be even when they\'re small, secluded, and private. Unsettled Ground is a terribly beautiful book, and although its premise may seem quiet, it is full of dramatic twists and turns right up until its moving, beautiful end.

Kate Summerscale

Rave NPR ... isn\'t just the narrative of Fodor\'s investigation of Fielding — it\'s also a narrative about women and power, about anxiety of the unknown and the fear of looming war, about the choices people make (consciously or unconsciously) in order to escape certain aspects of their lives ... Summerscale\'s writing is so inviting, the historical details folded into the narrative so well, that The Haunting of Alma Fielding reads like a novel you don\'t want to put down. (The book design is also superb, the typeface somehow evoking something old and mysterious while also being easy on the eyes.) Best of all, it offers a variety of possibilities without definitively landing on one single answer; the book recognizes that, sometimes, the answer to the question \'Was it real or was it fake?\' is simply \'Yes.\'

Lauren Hough

Rave NPR ... revealing and honest ... Hough\'s book isn\'t really a cult memoir — it\'s about so much more than that (and it\'s also quite funny, although you\'ll have to take my word on that because most of the funny bits include expletives I can\'t quote here). Slowly, essay after essay, it becomes clear that she\'s drawing parallels between the Family and good ol\' fashioned American Exceptionalism in all its various facets, from rah-rah-\'Merica attitudes surrounding freedom to the worship of individualism to the demands of capitalism ... [Hough] isn\'t trying to sell us a solution or asking us to join anything. She tells it like it is, and it\'s heartbreaking — but to find our way out, we have to see things clearly first. Any survivor of a cult or an abusive relationship will tell you that.

Sanjena Sathian

Rave NPR Sanjena Sathian\'s debut novel, Gold Diggers, is full of voice ... [a] rollicking, at times painful, and ultimately intensely satisfying tale ... One of the wonderful things about Sathian\'s writing is how imperfect she allows Neil to be: he can be shallow, vain, awkward, and selfish. Yet it\'s so easy to root for him, because he\'s just so terribly alive, his adult narration inhabiting his teenage self honestly, without sugarcoating ... [Eternalism] also lies at the heart of the book\'s structure, which twines historical fictions and truths and family histories into the main narrative, exemplifying how time both does and does not make a linear kind of sense, how past, present, and future\'s paths collide at times in unexpected ways.

Elon Green

Positive NPR Right from the beginning, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green reads like the hardboiled true crime book that it is. \'John Doe\' is the opening chapter\'s title, and on its first page readers are already treated to the stranger-than-fiction language of real people finding themselves in the middle of a horror show they never signed up for ... Last Call is journalist Elon Green\'s first book, but he is not new to the genre of true crime, nor is he a stranger to the problems that lie within it ... the killers often become the focus, the object of fascination.This is not true in Last Call, which puts the victims first, and which, when it does reveal the discovery of the killer, doesn\'t attempt to make him seem like an anti-hero.

Rebecca Sacks

Rave The Los Angeles Times I loved it. By the end of the novel, I was emotionally exhausted but also deeply appreciative of the care and nuance on every page, the characters’ messiness and the plot’s purposeful irresolution ... There are off-key moments that will likely elude most readers: There isn’t a lone tattoo artist in Jerusalem but tattoo shops aplenty; one transliteration collapses two different phrases into one; and the weight placed on whiteness rings false in a place where colorism certainly exists, but ethnicity, religion and nationality are far more meaningful than American connotations of race. For the most part, however, Sacks skillfully balances her characters’ daily dramas and relationships — crushes, parents, siblings, engagements, babies and sex — with the ever-present hum of underlying ideology and potential violence.

Tyler Stovall

Rave NPR Stovall could not have foreseen his book\'s release coming on the heels of such a terrifyingly and precisely relevant event ... [Stovall\'s] arguments are extremely convincing, at least to me, and for anyone doubting his sources, there are some 70 pages of notes at the end of the book that detail his extensive research material.

Melissa Febos

Rave NPR ... takes the task of looking backward seriously ... One of the most powerful themes running throughout these essays is Febos\' nuanced approach to the harms that we live with, both those perpetuated upon us and those we walk into with eyes wide open ... Febos weaves in the voices of women she\'s interviewed about the subject matters at hand, which only benefits the book\'s tolling resonance ... not a universal book: It is Febos\'s experiences readers encounter and her lines of research that they follow. Its specificity is precisely why it resonates. Regardless how distinctly varied our childhoods and adolescences are, so many of us hate or distrust our bodies, have difficulty in saying no. By following Febos\'s distinct paths between the past and present, we might realize there\'s room to forge our own, and that we\'ve just been handed a flashlight that helps illuminate the way.

Nadia Owusu

Rave NPR There are other threads, or cracks in the earth of her life, that she weaves in and out of these narratives, so that at times there is a sense that we are wandering away from the main question a chapter opened with. Owusu always brings us back just on time, so that what seems at first like free association is revealed, instead, as potent context. The effect ties directly into another of Owusu\'s main themes: Storytelling is how we understand ourselves, others, and the worlds we live in, and any story that is too simple or that holds no contradictions is suspect, for that means it lacks the nuance necessary for a deeper understanding. In her capable writing, stories become nearly tangible objects she holds to the light, turns over and over, eager to discover a never before glimpsed sparkle or a surprising divot in their familiar shapes.

Meredith Hall

Rave Portland Press Herald Meredith Hall, who splits her time between Maine and California, and whose memoir, Without A Map, was concerned with the tensions between good intentions, love and the capacity to cause harm, has now turned her quiet and stirring prose to fiction. Her debut novel, Beneficence, brings readers achingly close to these ultimately existential questions of goodness and love by focusing on a single family’s unspooling ... Beneficence is a glorious book, its joy as quietly beautiful as the tragedy at its center echoes loudly through the lives of its characters. Hall acknowledges that each life is very small, on its own, but that the love we each bear for one another is immense, our capacity for it endless.

K-Ming Chang

Rave NPR Violence is not one-dimensional in Bestiary; Chang doesn\'t excuse it, especially when it takes place between the family members, but she has her narrators contextualize it in their stories, reaching back through memories dressed up with myths to find the beauty that coexists with hurt and trauma ... Though Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter each endure traumas, they are storytellers, their words both plumbing and transcending their pain to weave a wide range of additional emotions and experiences. Their stories color their everyday lives with magic ... Chang\'s facility for making even mundane or traumatic events beautiful with words is a reminder that stories are, among other things, some of our very best survival tools.

Melissa Faliveno

Positive NPR She complicates and nuances this narrative [about conservative Midwesterners] in Tomboyland, whose essays are a love letter to, reckoning with, and examination of her midwestern upbringing ...Throughout her essays, Faliveno is constantly straddling just such blurry lines, never willing to let any of her topics lie comfortably still, always turning them over to look at another facet ... Faliveno doesn\'t always definitively answer the questions she asks—and after all, how could she, when existential issues of identity, belonging, language, and the body are rarely if ever static static—but she does manage to get satisfyingly close her essays in emotional or narrative catharsis.

Adrian Tomine

Rave NPR ... full of self-deprecating, self-aware humor ... Indeed, what Tomine has managed to do so well here is reveal something that few artists are able to discuss without sounding unaware or falsely humble: the incredibly hard, exhausting, and often can\'t-see-the-trees-for-the-forest kind of work involved in building a career in the arts, where there is too little funding, an overabundance of egos running rampant, and layers upon layers of gatekeeping. By using humor and framing his trajectory via professional and personal setbacks and moments of mortification, the cumulative effect of Loneliness is mesmerizing, funny, and deeply honest. Tomine refuses to dwell in the lie that much artistic success publicly perpetuates (whether or not by choice) that it\'s always fun, or that it even feels like what many of us imagine success to be. It\'s work — work that Tomine is conscious of being lucky enough to be able to keep doing, and there have been perks here and there for sure, but work nonetheless. No one made it easy for Tomine to get to where he is — least of all himself.

Erin Khar

Positive NPR Khar writes candidly ... One of the strengths of the book is Khar\'s frank discussion of her relapses, the profound difficulty of those experiences and their utter mundanity ... It\'s notable that Khar makes no secret of the particular advantages she grew up with — her white-passing privilege, her parents\' affluence — and doesn\'t claim at any point in the book that there is one correct pathway towards recovery. She knows that she had access to facilities and healthcare and a safety net that other people didn\'t.

Ben Okri

Rave NPR ... isn\'t a simple, direct comment on our present era; instead, it\'s a questioning book, one that puts its faith not in any particular social justice movements but rather in a collective, existential desire for freedom and a plurality of stories and myths ... acts as a series of fables that interlock and lead to what is a pretty clear moral, but one that has to be deeply felt, and truly believed, because it\'s not actionable in any immediate way ... Another way to look at it is as a set of richly symbolic and evocative dreams that explore themes of storytelling and what humanity as a whole loses when stories told for the sake of forging connection are replaced with stories spurred by a desire for money, social cache, or power. In other words, it\'s a complex book to talk about. And yet, it\'s a deceptively simple read, written in a style that manages to convey certain rhythms of oral storytelling despite being a printed text ... an unsettling read — its tone lulled me, as if I were a child reading a fairy tale, into a sense of comfort, only to yank me to attention when it reminded me this wasn\'t the Disney version, as it were, but the one with all the blood and injustice left in — but it is not hopeless. Hope is everywhere in it, because its very form — storytelling — is a slap in the face to the terror looming over it.

Kiley Reid

Rave NPR The title of Kiley Reid\'s debut, Such a Fun Age, works on so many levels it makes me giddy—and, what\'s better, the title\'s plurality of meaning is echoed all over the place within the novel, where both plot and dialogue are layered with history, prejudice, expectations, and assumptions ... a page-turner with beautifully drawn characters and a riveting plot ... This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences—funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others—but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira\'s millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar\'s still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.

Amber Sparks

Rave NPR Each story feels like it belongs here, but also like it stands alone so well you want to read it on repeat, and while the range of emotions evoked in the collection as a whole is broad, I found myself most often sitting with that indescribable ache that characterizes the bittersweet ... It\'s hard to overstate the unspeakable sorrow of friendship breakups to those who haven\'t gone through one, but how incredible—and painful—it is to witness Sparks holding up such a clear mirror to it ... many titles in this collection should win awards all by themselves ... It\'s a terrible thing to pick favorites among so many stories full of vivid language, compelling imagery, sharp wit, and an abiding tenderness, and so I won\'t.

Burhan Sönmez, trans. by Umit Hussein

Mixed NPR ... deeply concerned with how memory and the body — and the links between them — define us ... subtle, quiet ... The overarching metaphor that makes the novel avoid entirely solipsistic concerns seems to be that Boratin is demonstrative, perhaps, of what a society could be if it forgot its past as well as all the things it couldn\'t...But this metaphor doesn\'t entirely hold water, for Boratin is uniquely situated to think about himself in a way many individuals, never mind societies, cannot: He is independently wealthy, and his friends and his sister are all patient and loyal and willing to help him through this difficult time without giving up on this man who both is and isn\'t who they once knew ... Boratin\'s unstable identity is entirely believable and often stirring, and the narrative\'s moves between first and second person, sometimes within the same chapter, certainly press home his dissociation. But Sönmez seems to shy away from some of the most interesting existential questions he asks ... These narrative decisions made me wonder — how is Boratin\'s permission to dwell in such mediations tied to his positioning in the world? ... A thoughtful novel that asks many unanswerable questions worth pondering, Labyrinth is a mind-twister that may leave some wanting more.

Saud Alsanousi Trans. by Sawad Hussain

Rave NPR ... translator Sawad Hussain has succeeded in bringing this beautiful, affecting novel to an English-reading audience and has captured clearly the emotional, political and aesthetic concerns preoccupying the book ... Right in the center of the book comes a long, unbroken portion of Katkout\'s novel that deals entirely with Iraq\'s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990. Alsanousi creates in these chapters a deeply moving portrait of the effects of occupation and war through the eyes of a boy growing up too fast, relying on stories and chosen family to get through the fear, uncertainty and grief ... a rich and resonant book that asks more questions than it (or anyone) can answer ... Alsanousi\'s book, reflective of his own particular country, culture and sociopolitical context, can serve as both window and mirror to Western readers.

Joanna Kavenna

Positive The Washington Post ... often humorous descriptions ... Kavenna’s cleverness doesn’t come at the expense of the book’s depth (and I was impressed at her restraint, for example, in managing to avoid the term \'Beetlemania\'). Rather, her wit helps ease readers into what becomes a novel of ideas ... Definitive answers are dangerous, Zed

Richard Bell

Rave NPR Meticulously researched — the footnotes take up about a sixth of the book, and are worth looking at ... Stolen is a remarkable narrative, in part, because of how Bell manages to clearly relate the complex politics of the time without ever legitimizing the choices made by those who bought and sold human lives. It\'s also wonderful for the ways in which Bell infuses each stage of the children\'s harrowing ordeal with empathy, focusing in on what they might have been feeling, drawing either from the precious little that remains of their own voices or from contemporary accounts of similarly traumatic kidnappings. In telling as full a story as he can, Bell gives voice to the broader implications of this episode while not losing sight of all that is specific and singular about Tilghman, Manlove, Johnson, Sinclair, and Scomp\'s experiences.

Meghan Tifft

Positive The Washington Post ... a deeply satisfying and mysteriously tear-inducing story to those willing to follow this sometimes confounding journey ... It can be frustrating at times, feeling always in the dark, but the interactions nevertheless keep propelling us forward ... [has] a dreamlike quality, as we stumble around in scenes that alternate between fantastical and achingly, if absurdly, real ... In its opaquest moments, the novel serves ingeniously as a Rorschach test for our own perceptions and concerns, leading us to look for the answers and logic we want and maybe even find them — until the next scene upends our previous analysis, the blots all changing shape. It takes a certain kind of reader to go for this book, but anyone enjoying the experimental, the strange and the dreamy — not to mention Tifft’s exquisitely specific and strange descriptions — will surely find much pleasure in From Hell to Breakfast.

Jeannie Vanasco

Rave NPR This meta-commentary about the book itself is all over, making a reader feel like we\'re going through the process — of writing, of remembering, of approaching a deeply nuanced topic — in real time along with the author ... Even though Vanasco worries, in these pages, that some readers will be upset at how much of a voice she gives the rapist, I think all the other voices — hers, especially — overpower Mark. But he, of course, was granted the choice to consent.

Robert Harris

Positive NPR ... a pleasingly genre-bending novel ... the novel\'s premise could have been hokey, but Harris doesn\'t rely too heavily on references to our present. Instead, through Fairfax\'s shifting beliefs about the past causing changes to his present, Harris makes a more subtle point — both a dire warning and a somewhat hopeful possibility.

Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Mixed NPR While there\'s something of value in each of these essays, partially because they don\'t toe to a single party line but rather explore the nuances of various disabilities, there\'s an unfortunate dearth of writers with intellectual disabilities in this collection. I also noticed that certain sections focused more on people who\'ve acquired a disability during their lifetime and thus went through a process of mourning, coming to terms with, or overcoming their new conditions. While it\'s true — and emphasized more than once — that many of us, as we age, will become disabled, the process of normalization must begin far earlier if we\'re to become a society that doesn\'t discriminate against or segregate people with disabilities.

Adrienne Brodeur

Rave NPR Wild Game is a memoir, but it reads very much like a novel with a first-person narrator, bringing readers closely into scenes with vivid sensual detail that paints the atmosphere with the adoring eyes of the enthralled daughter the author once was ... what makes this book especially novel-like is how close Brodeur remains to the mindset she was in at the time of the events unfolding. For the first third or so, even as occasional lines hint at the more mature and removed author, the narrative stays close to the Brodeur\'s inability to see her mother as anything but a wonderful, glamorous, wounded woman who led a hard life and deserves happiness, no matter who might get trampled along the way ... It\'s not often we get to read about the sexual and romantic lives of people past middle age, since they\'re so often condemned by popular imagination to sexless existences, but Wild Game, for all its luscious prose and tantalizing elements, is ultimately about the slow and painful process of losing a mother.

Jan Stocklassa, trans. by Tara F. Chace

Rave NPR Stocklassa closely examines the work Larsson did on the Palme case and picks up the thread where it was left off, delving even deeper into the mystery ... In the first half of the book, Stocklassa does a fantastic job at illustrating how Larsson went about trying to get to the bottom of it all, using letters, original research and summaries from the archives to bring the man\'s voice to life as well as to walk readers through the timeline of Larsson\'s detective work and his two main theories ... While the \'Stieg\' section is fascinating, it also dramatizes Larsson\'s life and work in invented scenes that, like dramatic reenactments in true-crime documentaries, are a matter of taste for readers who will likely find them either annoyingly distracting or helpful in entering the dense political detail of the subject matter ... Especially interesting, and honestly thrilling, is how one of Stocklassa\'s attempts to reach out to all possible leads brought him into communication with an ally of such dedication and talent that it\'s hard not to compare her, at least a bit, to Lisbeth Salander of Larsson\'s books ... It\'s rare, I\'ve found, to see true-crime narratives that convincingly and humbly enter the realm of spy thrillers, but Stocklassa\'s book really, really does. Whether or not you buy his conclusions — they\'re well-argued, to be fair, and have led the Swedish police into renewing old lines of inquiry — Stocklassa certainly reveals the sinister underbelly of governmental operations.

Karen Abbot

Mixed NPR There\'s a bit of a Law & Order structure to Ghosts, as Abbott sets up the events chronologically and at a sometimes dizzying pace — I wished in vain for a cast of characters section — and explores crime followed by trial, crime followed by trial ... Yet for all the successful and suspenseful storytelling, much of it gleaned from a 5,500-page-long trial transcript, it\'s somewhat unclear who and what we\'re meant to believe ... I personally needed more context about the time and place ... I wanted more of this in Ghosts of Eden Park, a deeper understanding of the politics surrounding Prohibition as related to immigrants (like Remus himself), African Americans, and the Ku Klux Klan\'s use of the new anti-liquor laws to recruit members and terrorize \'un-American\' communities. But this might speak to my own sentiments regarding true crime and its ability to showcase the repetition of history ... As it stands, Karen Abbott\'s newest is a page-turner, teasing readers with its central mystery, and reaching its climactic final trial with a satisfying bang.

Patrick Coleman

Positive NPR The novel\'s setup and inciting incident suggest it will be a simple whodunit, a novel whose central mystery is discovering the ins and outs of Mike\'s murder. Instead, it\'s a story of obsession ... The Churchgoer uses all the hallmarks of its genre — from punchy sentences to profound and sometimes overwrought observations about the gloominess of life and the terribleness of people, to the youthful ingénue, to the unfolding of a possible conspiracy — in order to tell a story that criticizes every element of these dynamics ... As a narrator, Mark is fantastic precisely because he\'s self-aware in a way that noir doesn\'t tend to showcase.

Rachel Monroe

Rave NPR ...a new, necessary and brilliant book ... Monroe treats each individual narrative with nuance, empathy and transparency, allowing both the protagonists and their supporting cast to remain complex. She delves into the social and political ramifications of each narrative, making accessible and visible what so often gets overlooked in these stories because it\'s too complicated to put into a headline or summary. Monroe\'s book is a pleasure to read because it is smart, well-researched and well-written — beautifully, really ... But more than that, Savage Appetites is important because it refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator, innocent victim vs. mastermind criminal. It doesn\'t give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren\'t any because women as a category are not monolith and because it\'s complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.

Kira Jane Buxton

Rave NPR ... Buxton takes a joyfully original approach to apocalyptic fiction ... don\'t read this book while you\'re eating if you\'re squeamish. Buxton is extremely talented at writing the more horrifying descriptions of the MoFos\' physical condition ... S.T. is a brilliant narrator, partially because he has reverence for human things like Cheetos and baked goods and football fandom, but also because he has only half a grasp on what certain human things mean ... But S.T.\'s love of MoFos, and the deep ache he feels for Big Jim and the life he used to lead read as incredibly sincere ... While it\'s deeply disconcerting, reading about our own extinction, there is a lot we can learn from S.T. and Dennis the dog\'s symbiotic relationship in this novel. There\'s a lot we can learn from S.T.\'s getting over his own prejudices about other animals — like seagulls and penguins — in order to work with them ... S.T. ultimately gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, we still have a chance to turn things around before Nature is so fed up that she really does set her sights on destroying us for good.

Nell Fink

Mixed Fiction Advocate I can already hear the roars of dismay from various factions of the feminist and LGBTQIA communities; as someone who considers herself a part of both, it is often hard to remember that the novel’s irreverence toward political correctness is (probably) purposeful. Whether it is satirical, however, is harder to decipher. Whatever the intention, there is no doubt that Mislaid is full of social criticism from start to finish ... The novel is rife with...dry statements (pretty much one per page) that reveal a deeply cynical core ... The novel’s climax and denouement become a screwball comedy that feels like a racy, drugged-out version of The Parent Trap with a smatter of campus-rape issues thrown in. I’m not going to spoil what actually happens, if only because it matters so very little. The ending is not satisfying, and it feels rushed ... At a mere 242 pages, Mislaid is a manifesto for every social issue being talked about in America today ... It’s a mirror to our social conscience, and as such it is effective ... But the novel, though well-written enough, isn’t much more than shaggy-dog morality tale. The plot is convenient and occasionally amusing and sometimes gasp-out-loud politically incorrect in the way a Louis CK standup is...Zink tells us we’re all complicit in the issues, but reading her novel felt like being underneath a trampoline she was jumping up and down on. She seemed to be having lots of fun; all I got was a nose bent out of shape.

Amanda Lee Koe

Rave NPR It is hard to summarize a sprawling and ambitious novel like this, so I won\'t—but it is expertly woven, its characters alive and full-bodied. Blending questions about pop culture, war, and art, Delayed Rays of a Star is that rare book that is neither high- nor low-brow, refusing such facile dichotomies and playing, instead, in the messiness of the grey areas.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Positive The Washington Post ... deftly and confidently written, full of experimental fun ... Bob-Waksberg manages to balance his ironic humor with a deep sincerity that continues to surprise and delight. While some pieces are certainly more successful than others — a couple of stories rely too heavily on their structural gimmick or go on too long without giving us a reason to care — the majority do that mysterious thing that good art can do: make your heart clench with feeling, your eyes fill with tears, your lips twitch toward a smile or all three at once.

Lindsey Drager

Positive NPR If the links between these disparate moments seem tenuous, that\'s only because listing them doesn\'t do justice to the way Drager weaves together their themes ... There is something both nihilistic and deeply hopeful in Drager\'s looping novel. Nihilistic, because in so many ways it indicates that as parts of a continuum of human storytelling, life, love, and hate, none of us matter; but hopeful because that continuum means our stories are related, our narratives interlocking, and so while we may be insignificant, we are also never alone.

Jessica Francis Kane

Positive NPR ... has too many fun, hilarious, and extremely touching twists and turns to detail further here, and its coming out right around Mother\'s Day is no coincidence. By the end of the book, I loved May as a character, and I understood her; she reveals elements of her own history and choices slowly, in dribs and drabs. She doesn\'t need me to like her, though. She has her plants, her father, some new or revitalized friendships, and her own sharp and witty mind to keep her company. She is no Grendel — only a deeply alive human.

Josh Levin

Positive NPR Through incredibly involved reporting that clearly required not only a slew of interviews but a vast swath of documents that had to be cross-referenced and compared in order to figure out the timeline and the many names—including alternate spellings—that Taylor used, Levin has managed to bring the human being out from under the stereotype. He does so in clear, concise writing that refrains from overwrought editorializing, and though there is so much material in the book that it sometimes seems to lose the plot, Levin succeeds in always drawing readers back to his main subjects: systemic oppression, the rhetoric that feeds it, and how Taylor fits into both ... The Queen isn\'t about trying to exonerate Taylor—it\'s an attempt to put her in the proper context. She learned early that race marked her ... Taylor was a lifelong criminal, yes, and she was also the product of racism that shamed her from birth.

Kristen Arnett

Rave NPR Grief can be a kind of deadening, a latching onto the past in order to fill in the gaps left by the person who has died or exited our lives. Yet life goes on, no matter how absent from it a mourner may feel. It\'s in this precarious emotional space that Kristen Arnett\'s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things is set. But lest you cringe at what sounds like a difficult read, this isn\'t a depressing book: it\'s darkly funny, both macabre and irreverent, and its narrator is so real that every time I stopped reading the book, I felt a tiny pull at the back of my mind, as if I\'d left a good friend in the middle of a conversation ... One of the best things about the book is its description not only of the work involved in taxidermy but in its ability to render that work beautiful and loving, an art all its own ... [a] queer, boozy, sexy growing up story.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Rave The Washington Post ... methodically and unapologetically engages with choices women do and should be allowed to make, and as with her last novel, Here Comes the Sun, does so with nuance and grace ... Dennis-Benn explores themes of gender, sexuality, motherhood and freedom, as well as colorism and classism and the ways the two intertwine both in Jamaica and here in the United States. But none of this feels didactic or moralistic so much as integral to the characters’ lived experiences and seamlessly woven through their emotional arcs ... a deeply queer, sensitive and vividly written novel about a woman’s right to want and a child’s right to carve her own path.

Chia-Chia Lin

Rave The Washington Post The novel is full of parallel moments ... The looming possibility—and eventual reality—of teetering over the edge is increased with the lawsuit against Gavin’s father, creating a sense of slow dread that permeates the book ... Lin’s attention to detail is startling, and though she keeps close to Gavin’s childhood experience, she also allows us to read between the lines and intuit the depth of the family’s grief ... Anyone who has ever grieved—be it the loss of a person, home, country or security—will feel a sense of recognition. The Unpassing is a remarkable, unflinching debut.

Casey Cep

Rave NPR \"...what I didn\'t see coming was the emotional response I would have as I blazed through the last 20 pages of the book—yet there I was, weeping ... Each section of the book could stand on its own, making it feel, in a way, like three books in one. But, ultimately, Furious Hours delivers a gripping, incredibly well-written portrait of not only Harper Lee, but also of mid-20th century Alabama—and a still-unanswered set of crimes to rival the serial killers made infamous in the same time period.\

Ed. by Michele Filgate

Rave Los Angeles Times This generous, mature recognition of the ways in which so many of us overestimate the capacities of mothers — who were people with lives and loves and wants and hurts and complexities before they ever gave birth — colors many of the stunning essays in this anthology ... Though no two essays feel even remotely alike, there are recurring themes ... While each essay is its own beast, containing its own wild, wonderful, woeful, willful or warring mother figure, the collection as a whole holds together precisely because there is something recognizable in each and every piece ... each and every one comes to recognize this fact: that every mother is human first, mother second.

Jennifer Acker

Positive The Portland Press-Herald Suffice to say that no relationship in this novel is easy, and each narrator is deeply flawed yet clearly shaped by their upbringing and the pressures their surroundings placed upon them ... Acker’s novel is deeply empathetic and, with one exception—the character of Amy—presents wonderfully complicated humanity. Amy is a blond, secular Jew who likely has enjoyed a white woman’s privileges throughout her life, giving her the kind of safety that her husband doesn’t have and that she herself never acknowledges. Despite her presence for much of the unfolding family drama, she’s seemingly near perfect, barely cracking under the pressure of in-laws who find her unsuitable. Acker draws the foibles, joys and prejudices of the other characters so carefully, it’s especially unfortunate that Amy lacks nuance and complexity. On the whole, however, The Limits of the World is a successful exploration of love, family, migration and the emotional distances we can and cannot cross.

Christina Thompson

Mixed NPR Thompson is certainly an engaging writer, deftly weaving her fascinating narrative of European travels and the newcomers\' attempts to understand and \'crack\' the Polynesian puzzle... But issues of European colonization are often glossed over ... Such eliding is perhaps a matter of length and focus, as well as a decision to move chronologically from the European perspective, but it\'s a shame that it isn\'t until the third part of the book (titled somewhat glibly \'Why Not Just Ask Them?\') that Thompson begins to deeply explore the various Polynesian oral traditions that relate (often in tandem) genealogies, histories, myths, navigational lessons and practical skills and which have, in most recent scientific discovers, proved to be quite accurate in terms of timeline and historical voyaging.

Samantha Allen

Rave The Los Angeles Times Allen, in this book, pushes back against the singular narrative of suffering in these states, choosing instead to showcase the resistance, the community-building and the culture of LGBTQ folks who live in Utah, Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia ... Allen shares her path to transition in short anecdotes that unfold over the chapters, cleverly keeping readers enthralled with both her careful reporting and personal narrative ... far more than one trans woman’s coming out story ... The bulk of the book is spent doing what Allen has been doing for years, and doing well: reporting ... doesn’t try to sell middle America as a fuzzy, warm place that is unilaterally safe for or welcoming of queer folk. Real Queer America is a book necessary for anyone in — or allied with — the queer community, especially those of us who see the bad news day after day. But she’s sharing the beauty of the spaces that LGBTQ+ people have carved out for themselves, and she’s giving credit where credit is very much overdue, because it’s the queer folk who live and stay in red states — whether by choice or due to a lack of options — who have to survive there and work to make them better.

T. Kira Madden

Positive NPR \"Readers searching for this kind of redemptive story may not like T Kira Madden\'s memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. But the other readers? The ones who value seeing the mess that is childhood, the volatility of desire, the madness of girlhood and what is expected of it? They may well wear out the book\'s covers with fervid rereading ... The honesty and vividness with which Madden writes and the tightly controlled structure she utilizes only emphasize the fact that Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a deeply compassionate book, though not an apologetic one. In baring the bad and ugly alongside the good, Madden has succeeded in creating a mirror of larger concerns, even as her own story is achingly specific and personal.\

Devi S Laskar

Rave The Washington Post \"The Atlas of Reds and Blues is a quick read, in part, because of these short sections, some only two sentences long. But it’s a page-turner, too, because of the urgency of each small story, each revelatory memory ... In her acknowledgments, Laskar thanks her publisher for \'embracing this experiment.\' If The Atlas of Reds and Blues and the lyric, thematic and structural care the author has lent it are an experiment, then it is certainly a successful one.\

Mike Chen

Rave NPR Even more than these delightfully surprising turns, the novel\'s strength lies in Kin\'s actions as he tries to save Miranda, both from a miserable life in which she believes her father abandoned her entirely — and from his own bosses ... Ultimately, Mike Chen\'s time travel narrative feels like an extended metaphor, and it\'s no surprise to see that Here and Now and Then is dedicated to his own daughter, Amelia.

Cara Robertson

Positive NPR \"... [the book] is heavily researched and uses as much contemporary information as it can gather ... Robertson has clearly done her research, and while the actual trial material is absolutely fascinating with its statements and witnesses and arguments by the prosecution and the defense, it was the journalists\' takes that kept me most riveted ... For true-crime enthusiasts, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a deeply satisfying read that will give us plenty of fodder to disagree over who-really-dunit.\

Esme Weijun Wang

Rave NPR \"In 13 tightly organized essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, winner of the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, reveals different aspects of Wang\'s diagnoses... through simply-conveyed research, powerful metaphor, and personal experiences ... The Collected Schizophrenias is riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like — and we are lucky to have it in the world.\

Soniah Kamal

Positive NPR \"Soniah Kamal\'s new novel, Unmarriageable, is billed as \'Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan\' and it is that, certainly ... In general, the plot of the novel is pretty much the same as Austen\'s, with the addition of Pakistani traditions and the bells and whistles of the new millennium, so you know what\'s going to happen. In this way, Unmarriagable seems at first glance like a par-for-the-course retelling, and for readers simply looking for a fun twist on the classic English novel ... But if you\'re tempted to look further, as I was, you\'ll find a cheeky undercurrent that echoes Austen\'s novels\' ability to work on two levels... Kamal\'s Unmarriageable succeeds in being both a deliciously readable romantic comedy and a commentary on class in post-colonial, post-partition Pakistan, where the effects of the British Empire still reverberate ... While at times the dialogue is heavy-handed, ultimately Unmarriageable manages to be both a fun, page-turning romp and a thought-provoking look at the class-obsessed strata of Pakistani society.\

Laura Thompson

Rave NPR A Tale of Two Murders: Guilt, Innocence, and the Execution of Edith Thompson by Laura Thompson is, remarkably, a blend of all these: escapism, a search for justice, and an attempt at realizing, as fully as possible, the essence of a real person — and that very person\'s search for herself through words.

Mikita Brottman

Positive NPR \"Brottman meticulously follows any and all threads she can, including a long and fascinating detour into the world of Agora, a somewhat sinister and extremely wealthy company Rivera worked for shortly before his death ... But Brottman\'s book is, sneakily, more than just a true crime narrative. It is also a history of the Belvedere and its long association with death ... [The book\'s] colorful stories often seem to have little to do with Rivera\'s death, and yet Brottman\'s confidence in dropping them in, seemingly at random, belies that they are not random at all ... The extremely human anxiety Brottman seems to be grappling with is one many of us may consider at one time or another: If we went missing, would anyone look for us?\

Hiro Arikawa, Trans. by Philip Gabriel

Rave NPR The Travelling Cat Chronicles is no less valuable for facing issues of friendship, family, loss, and grief with an optimistic and loving outlook. In fact, the book\'s greatest strength is that it allows its readers to experience vicarious happiness even as a sense of impending loss begins to creep through the pages ... I found myself sobbing through the last 40 pages or so, unable, unwilling, to let this joyful little book go. I doubt many readers — as cynical and hardened as they may be — will get through it dry-eyed themselves. And you know what? Sometimes a good happy-sad cry is just what the doctor ordered.

Laura Adamczyk

Positive NPR \"... [The stories in the book are] eerie, often spare, and contain uncomfortable examinations of childhood, adulthood, gender, and whiteness ... The collection as a whole is restless — and this is a good thing. The characters are almost always physically moving, but listlessly, commuters in their own lives. It\'s the kind of collection you want to read on a subway or in a moving vehicle or out in a café, as if to remind yourself that humans really are so often this way — inexplicable, urgent, slow to change, and unfathomable.\

Idra Novey

Rave The Washington Post Coming out the day of the midterm elections and soon after our newest Supreme Court justice was accused of assaulting several women — and then got confirmed anyway — the novel’s obsession with silence, its damnation of false liberalism, and the fine line it draws between complicity and trauma feel eerily prescient ... Somehow, though the book is slim, we know these characters and their desires intimately by the end ... Novey — a poet and translator as well as a novelist — is a skillful wordsmith with descriptions that are poetic yet never overwrought ... Those Who Knew is not only an important book about silence and its consequences, but also a sheer pleasure to read.

Anita Felicelli

Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Love Songs for a Lost Continent...is a marvel of nuance, each and every story complicating the narrative it sets out to explore. It provides no easy answers—and thank goodness for that. Love Songs for a Lost Continent explores many kinds of stories—about love, escape, independence—but at its core, it tackles the difficulty of living in the in-between, in the interstices of identities, and the often deeply flawed way human beings deal with this liminality and confusion ... Felicelli has that rare and wonderful quality as a writer: she doesn’t require each story to end neatly, letting the lingering frustration and injustice remain in a reader’s mind, just as they would outside the bounds of fiction ... Felicelli’s ability to try to empathize with the villains of one story by making them the protagonists of another is another testament to her nuanced writing. By attempting to get at the heart of painful spaces, by exploring the complex realities of her characters, and by refusing to let any of them emerge from a history-less vacuum, Felicelli seems to be asking us to pause, to consider, to try to understand those around us. Her stories ask us to recognize that marginalization and privilege are so often dependent on space and context, and that no one is easily categorizable as good or evil. Instead, we are all human, flawed in different ways, dependent on others to understand ourselves.

Jill Lepore

Positive The Paris Review \"A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, [These Truths] is a full history of the United States ... Lepore’s book—which over its first half or so mentions slavery and free black people on almost every page—is full of people like [Benjamin] Lay, who didn’t sit idly by as human beings were treated like property. It is full of statements by men like Jefferson, who saw the horror of the institution and yet refused to end it for his own comfort and monetary gain ... as I read These Truths, I realized again how important it is to search for the truth ... Lepore doesn’t give us any answers [to questions about how to fix the country\'s relationships with marginalized groups], though she does appear to be unfortunately impatient with millennials’ insistence that language—how people are spoken about, joked about, belittled—matters.\

Iain Reid

Rave wildness Reid is back with another harrowing, strange story in Foe ... unlike many a futuristic novel, Foe doesn’t try to tell us that this future is good or bad, safe or unsafe, progress or collapse ... As with Reid’s previous novel, the plot here—the actual storyline—is far less important than the mood and discomfort it conveys and the glaring question marks it brings up ... Reid’s spare writing somehow manages to convey urgency, discomfort, an uncanniness, while leaving large swaths of the character’s personalities and the setting to readers’ imagination. But he gives us enough, just enough, to keep us hungry up to the marvelous turn of an ending.

Anne Boyd Rioux

Rave NPR \"Rioux\'s claim here is substantiated. She has found dozens of allusions by a variety of authors (and not only women, by the way) to the ways in which Jo, the headstrong and ambitious sister in Little Women, has influenced them and allowed them to express their own desire to write and be recognized ... But Rioux goes beyond the personal experience of the book, that holy space between reader and book that is ultimately so individual. She points out that Little Women is remarkable for its look at how gender is not inherent but rather learned and performed, a fact recognized in gender studies scholarship to an extent ... Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy isn\'t a stuffy scholarly work — it\'s a love letter written not by a smitten youngster naïve to her beloved\'s drawbacks but by a mature adult who can recognize complexity and nuance.\

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave NPR \"[Unsheltered] is incredibly relevant, painfully familiar, gorgeously written ... This dual storyline has the potential to be gimmicky, but Kingsolver makes certain that it isn\'t, especially as the parallels between the time periods and families are not overt, and it\'s only over time that we connect them ... Kingsolver doesn\'t give us solutions, but she reminds us to take comfort in one another when we can, and that hope is necessary even when all seems lost.\

Lisa Locascio

Rave NPR Young women occupy a perilous space in the world: Their bodies are desired, their youth fetishized, and they\'re simultaneously placed on a pedestal and reviled as maddeningly seductive ... It is against the grim backdrop of this reality that Lisa Locascio\'s debut novel, Open Me, shines so brightly ... Locascio manages in this novel to critique white supremacy and false tolerance while also celebrating a young woman\'s sexuality and her right to it — a difficult, and often joyous feat that marks her as a remarkable author to keep your eyes on.

Lexi Freiman

Mixed The New York Times Satire is a difficult genre to neatly define, but if we call it the use of humor, irony and exaggeration to expose the stupidity of certain parts of contemporary culture, then Inappropriation, Lexi Freiman’s debut, is certainly a satirical novel ... Ziggy Klein, the protagonist, has a fitting name. She zigs and zags through opinions and ways of seeing the world over the course of the book, always in search of understanding. We meet this curious Australian teenager just after she leaves her Jewish school and begins attending the upper-crust Kandara, a private school for girls in Sydney ... Inappropriation is certainly intelligent and has its finger on the zeitgeist of the Instagram and Tumblr generation, but it also paints the worst possible picture of teenagers trying to understand themselves. Who is the book’s intended audience, really? Those of us who understand our own complexities and nuances, and can laugh at the book’s exaggerations of them? Or those who think that all identity politics is nonsense? Surely both groups will enjoy it, but for very different, and in the latter case perhaps troubling, reasons. In satire as in life, there’s a difference between laughing with people and laughing at them.

R O Kwon

Rave The Los Angeles Times ...this slim, intense novel is the rare book that lives up to its pre-publication hype ... The narrative jumps around, like memory does ... The Incendiaries isn’t an easy novel to parse. Who here is the perpetrator, who is the victim and is it possible to know? Some sins may be worse than others—and certainly, both John Leal and Will fall on the worse side of the spectrum—but ultimately, as much as they yearn for it, none of the novel’s central characters really deserve easy absolution. And yet the beautiful writing and nuanced storytelling invites compassion; such is the power of Kwon’s narrative.

Megan Abbott

Positive wildness \"Give Me Your Hand, Abbott’s newest novel, places reproductive systems at its center, but not in the way we’re used to seeing them addressed. Instead of the womb’s power to create life, the novel examines its more painful aspects in the form of scientific research into premenstrual dysphoric disorder or PMDD ... The novel is, as all of Abbott’s books are, thoroughly emotional and full of intellectual fodder to parse out while also remaining an intensely readable page-turner.\

Alice Blanchard

Mixed Portland Press Herald In A Breath After Drowning, the protagonist is a psychiatrist, but the field is misrepresented ... unfortunately, we get little substance to Kate ... Everything is entangled in the novel early on, which makes Blanchard’s misdirections work well ... The plot is engaging, and throws enough misdirection at the reader to ensure that even if you thought you knew whodunit at first, you will doubt yourself again and again. But the book’s inconsistencies are disappointing: it includes a host of wild inaccuracies, several bizarre dialogues that don’t track, and it manages in equal measure to malign and idealize severe mental illnesses ... Despite its inaccurate representations of the psychiatric field, the novel is a fast-paced read written in the style of many easy-to-digest psychological thrillers.

Elizabeth Tan

Rave NPR \"It\'s the kind of book that reminds you of nights—and they are somehow always nights—when you discussed Big Concepts like Life and the Universe and Reality with your friends, and fell asleep with your mind gently buzzing ... But the novel isn\'t all wordplay and clever conceit—it has a true heart, and many of the characters are achingly full of pathos ... Whatever your jam is—mind-bending logic, beautiful, lyrical writing, or a deep dive into contemporary life—there is something brilliant here for everyone.\

Jamel Brinkley

Rave NPR \"... the collection is intent on recognizing what masculinity looks like, questioning our expectations of it, and criticizing its toxicity — and somehow managing to do all of that with love ... There\'s a fine line between outright, blatant, or malicious sexism and this more comfortable, seemingly less offensive place where men are merely ignorant of the ways they take possession of women — their looks, their labor, their humanity. And this is the line Brinkley knows how to straddle, creating fully formed characters who wrestle with what they think they have a right to ... And while it\'s clearly a topic that concerns him, Brinkley\'s book isn\'t only about masculinity. It also deals in family relationships, love, aging, loss, and disappointment — the universal themes that keep us coming back to literature — while also conveying versions of black male experience. In fact, the collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world.\

Ramona Ausubel

Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Anxious, whimsical, and deeply felt, Ausubel’s stories weave a remarkable and beautiful tapestry of emotion ... they deemphasize the presumed centrality and greatness of the United States in favor of a more global view of the world ... Over and over again, characters underestimate and misunderstand lands not their own, and always they are humbled by those spaces, by the un-Americanness of it all. Throughout, Ausubel’s irony-tinged third-person narration conveys the limitations of her characters’ simplistic beliefs ... Ausubel’s signature ability to create atmosphere is in full force throughout Awayland ... By also touching upon social and political issues, she adds a new layer to her work that invites readers to move away from their comfort zones as well.

Anne Raeff

Rave The Los Angeles Times This kind of drama is quiet and subtle, but Raeff knows how to wield her words in this space, and makes small pronouncements devastating ... Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the novel is how quiet it is, and how much respectful space Raeff allows her characters. While their inner thoughts and feelings are sometimes conveyed in a sentence or two, as above, Raeff largely documents these without dwelling there. This isn't a book obsessed with its people's thoughts, and there are no long paragraphs of internal monologues. Instead, these characters are in the thick of their lives, and Raeff shows us their fullness in quick sketches, the way a skilled artist may convey movement and attitude with only a few penciled lines.

Morgan Jerkins

Rave The Los Angeles Times \"...a beautiful example of possibility, nuance and passion coexisting, even in our heightened political moment ... The focus of these points of tension is the way our society treats black women as inhuman, their bodies consumable or publicly available. Jerkins allows her lens to go deep into contemporary culture, with her essays almost free-associating at times ... there is a brutal honesty Jerkins brings to the experiences of black girls and women that is vital for us to understand as we strive toward equality, toward believing women\'s voices and experiences, and toward repairing the broken systems that have long defined our country.\

László Krasznahorkai, Trans. by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet & John Batki

Rave NPR \"The World Goes On, while it features an array of disheartening narratives, feels more like a celebration of tiny moments of odd, inexplicable joy ... There is a lot of wandering in The World Goes On. Men — and they do seem to always be men — get drunk and lost, get obsessed with conspiracy theories, paint women like valleys in an attempt to return to their own homes and mothers, and almost always monologue for pages and pages in endless run-on sentences. But there are moments of light and joy within the ramblings of these apparent madmen ... Reading The World Goes On is like accidentally getting on the wrong train — the writing style pulls you inexorably on, and you never quite know where you\'ll end up. Whether you want to stay on or get off remains your choice.\

Nathan Englander

Mixed Electric Literature Here, in my estimation, is what the book is about, at its core: it is about terrible, terrible love … In between the extremes of aggression and surrender lies the muddy space of compromise, which Englander seems like he wants to explore through a romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian. But though their existence is interesting?—?intelligence operatives but for opposing sides, both admits in conversation to their own side’s failings and wonders how they’ll be able to bridge the gap between them?—?the characters themselves aren’t really fully developed. They’re placeholders for ideology more than they are people. The implication, whether intended or not, is that compromise is indeed the least understood space in this conflict, the most romanticized yet least practiced.

Paul Yoon

Rave The Los Angeles Times The Mountain, is not what you’d call delightful — the stories are sober and the prose is quiet, yet in that is the howling of the human condition that makes the best short fiction stand out ... This is where much of the drama in these stories occurs: rippling, under the surface, in that quiet desperation for safety. While the stories are seemingly quiet, they are all set against the backdrop of violence, from World War II to present-day fights for independence and confusing acts of terrorism ... The stories in The Mountain are linked through key themes as well as a somewhat overemphasized use of shared images. The moon, a bicycle, a horse that is taken for a ghost or a living statue, company names with the word ;Sunshine' in them: For close readers, these shared images and character backgrounds may be a little on the nose, a little forced. This is a small grievance, though, in what is ultimately a fantastic collection.

Monica Hesse

Positive NPR Hesse doesn't provide a satisfying simple answer. Instead, she gives us a truth according to Charlie, Accomack county firefighters, transcripts of 911 calls — in other words, a truth that is messy and nuanced, complex, and sometimes contradictory ... thankfully Hesse doesn't spend too much time using the fires as a metaphor for the larger Rust Belt. While she does allow herself to generalize occasionally, she mostly focuses on this particular place, its people, and its story. What emerges is a vivid depiction of a community that is struggling economically in present-day America, but is rich in its human connections.

Jessie Chaffee

Rave The Portland Press Herald [I became] engrossed in its haunting pages ... the way Chaffee writes Hannah’s eating disorder cuts to the core of the psychology that is rarely the focus of eating disorder narratives, even though it is at the center of so many eating disorders themselves ... Society’s fixation on unrealistic bodies does not help, but eating disorders are broader, wider and deeper, and Jessie Chaffee succeeds admirably in mining them as she depicts a woman’s journey away from her earthly self – and then back again.

Hala Alyan

Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books \"...this is not a novel of refugees, of tent cities or starvation. Instead, it is a novel that examines the middle class and the very real pain that the loss of home has even on the privileged ... In many ways, then, this is a novel about privilege. Alyan takes groups we often see as disadvantaged, demonstrates their advantages, but shows us that privilege is still relative, and that trauma can still be experienced within such constructs ... Alyan is doing important work through this novel, even without the discussion of these deeper meanings. Thus, Salt Houses can be read very simply as a family drama, proving Alyan’s talent as a master of both the family drama genre as well as the depths and complexities of the Palestinian displacement.\

Patty Yumi Cottrell

Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, is a strange and lovely thing ... Cottrell fills every page with an impossible-to-ignore voice, characterized by its idiosyncrasies and intelligence ... her brother’s ultimately plain, simple life eludes her grasp, as he slipped away rather quietly and neatly from her and their adoptive parents. Instead of the distress of the suicidal, we see that of the surviving.

Deepak Unnikrishnan

Positive The Washington Post Deepak Unnikrishnan’s new novel is made even more moving by the author’s statement about writing it: 'Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave' ... There is nothing comfortable about Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, but it is challenging, thought-provoking and timely.

Alexandra Kleeman

Rave Electric Literature The stories in Alexandra Kleeman’s new collection, Intimations, both distressingly and beautifully convey a different message: there is no escape ... [Kleeman] manages to both draw us entirely into her fiction and keep us at a distance, as spectators glancing through a window or walking through the stories like ghosts able to walk through walls.

Annie DeWitt

Positive Electric Literature What Annie DeWitt does best in this book is center you in each moment ... More than a novel of plot, this is an atmospheric book, one that reads somehow like a Southern novel though it is set in New England ... there is a search for adolescence here from a woman who is both a teenager and a grown-up at the same time, and it is a marvelous, beautiful, and painful journey.

Iain Reid

Positive Electric Literature I’m Thinking of Ending Things is being marketed as 'The Psychological Thriller of the Summer'?—?this is wonderful in terms of getting the book a wider readership than it may have gotten if it were marketed some other way, but the fact is that the book’s thriller aspects are almost a kind of gloss to the deeper, far more uncomfortable positions to which it places the reader...It has thriller elements for certain, but they don’t mask the questions the novel poses. On the contrary, they serve as enhancements ... he mind of the narrator is not a safe place. It is incredibly intelligent, and incredibly lonely. Read with capital-C-worthy Caution ... While the ending of the novel was somewhat disappointing, the journey was ultimately more than worth it.

Hanya Yanagihara

Rave Bustle A Little Life explores just what the title implies — the little bits of the little lives, so big when looked at close up, of four characters who live together in college and keep alive their friendship for decades after … Because they are so alive on the page, it is a joy to live alongside them. But because they are also so self-aware, so often confused and self-loathing and anxious, it can also be a torment … The level of abuse Jude has undergone and the amount of success his friends attain over the course of the novel\'s three decades is almost too amazing to be entirely believable, but it doesn’t matter.

Helen Oyeyemi

Rave Electric Literature ...a beautiful, brilliant, evocative collection of (somewhat) linked short stories...We need more books like Oyeyemi’s; to challenge us, to make us think, and to remind us that it is all right, sometimes, not to know all the answers to the riddles that plague us.

Jung Yun

Rave Electric Literature A masterful work of literature that is also a page-turning dramatic family saga, Yun’s first book had better be as successful as it reads.

Alexander Chee

Rave Electric Literature The urgency with which Chee has Liliet telling her tales, while continually creating a bait and switch narrative in which she yanks away knowledge at crucial moments only to come back to them later, keeps the reader off balance, racing through the pages without any possibility of stopping for fear of falling flat. It is that kind of novel, the kind one devours in a weekend or stays up too late reading.

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

December 16 – 20, 2024