About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel
Pan The Washington Post Returning to such a familiar setting, along with employing the plots and themes he favors, adds a greater sense of fatigue, at least for this reader ... Perhaps those less familiar with Murakami will be as enchanted by his worlds as I once was and hope to be again in the future.
Jesselyn Cook
Rave The Washington Post Assiduously researched and impeccably constructed ... Cook understandably and wisely doesn’t crowd her book with psychological asides, preferring to allow the specificity of her subjects to speak for themselves ... Cook’s book doesn’t offer solutions, but it sheds important light on the problem.
Ed Park
Rave The Los Angeles Times Park’s follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams, arrives a full decade and a half later [after Personal Days], with all the heft, complexity and ambition such a lengthy interim suggests. The author has greatly expanded his literary scope and complicated his narrative technique, though certain fundamentals remain ... Braids three plots together in a bewilderingly layered structure ... Absurdly complex ... Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make Same Bed Different Dreams succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.
Jill Lepore
Rave The Los Angeles Times I would recommend reading The Deadline front-to-back with as few breaks as possible. Taken in sequentially, Lepore’s essays constitute a dizzying, entertaining and urgent survey course on contemporary American life. Although Lepore dives deep into the waters of bygone eras, she always writes from the present — the palpable surface of history’s ever-rising tide ... Despite her historical scope, Lepore’s eye returns productively back to the present, particularly to remind us of how little our moment differs from what sounds like ancient history.
Paul Murray
Rave The Los Angeles Times \"The Bee Sting...ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful — there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.\
Tom Rachman
Positive The Los Angeles Times [Dora\'s] looming presence throughout can sometimes distract the reader from the plot, and her self-conscious artifice risks undermining these otherwise convincing characters. But the gambit ultimately contributes to a powerful finale ... A woeful tale ... The most writerly creation is Dora herself. The novel’s organizing principle, she seems less an authentic portrait of an aging writer than the projection of a younger writer’s fears about aging.
Josh Riedel
Mixed The Los Angeles Times A glitch in the novel’s tone... never quite resolves itself ... No one seems fazed by the invention of teleportation, never mind that it’s far more Jetsonian than any other of the book’s extrapolations of current technology ... This blasé reaction is made all the more confounding in light of the rest of the novel, which is firmly rooted in the real world ... It’s hard to square this familiarity, bordering on banality, with the technological magical realism.
Stephen Markley
Mixed The Los Angeles Times Markley moves methodically from 2013 to the 2040s, presenting a kaleidoscopic sampling of American citizenry, an unrelenting series of increasingly tragic events and an in-depth examination of the desperate corner into which the world has painted itself. It is, if nothing else, an astonishing feat of procedural imagination, narrative construction and scientific acumen ... The redeeming merits of The Deluge call to mind those elaborate trick shot videos on social media in which the primary objective is missed but something else exciting occurs ... A giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact. Characters disappear for as many as a hundred pages and reemerge a year later, necessitating repeated exposition dumps. As a result, the reader doesn’t feel intimately close to most of the characters ... When climate change is the subject of fiction, it becomes easy to interpret as advocacy, as a political novel of ideas rather than a tale driven by characters. Markley does little to dispel this impression ... This borrowed cloak of newsiness reduces the complexity of fiction into a single-minded polemic. Each storm, each wildfire, each avoidable death becomes a rehash of the same warning: This is what will happen if we don’t act now. Repeated finger-wagging, even the most deftly and eloquently crafted, grates after almost 900 pages ... More dispiriting than galvanizing.
Nino Strachey
Mixed The Minneapolis Star-Tribune [Strachey\'s] prose is deft and engaging ... Young Bloomsbury\'s biggest flaw is that it introduces a fascinating array of characters and a convincing thesis from an inside source but moves too swiftly to blossom into a portrait worthy of its subject.
Akil Kumarasamy
Positive Star Tribune Akil Kumarasamy\'s first book, \'Half Gods,\' was a linked story collection revolving around two Tamil brothers...But for all that book\'s prodigious skill and deft structure, readers of \'Half Gods\' will not be prepared for the uncanny brilliance of her first novel, \'Meet Us by the Roaring Sea\'...\'Meet Us by the Roaring Sea\' is a brazenly complex, labyrinthinely structured, deeply philosophical, thematically ambitious novel, and although it may not be the breeziest read, it is also a masterpiece that more than confirms the promise of \'Half Gods\'...Kumarasamy is one of more exciting young fiction writers at work right now.
Sloane Crosley
Rave Los Angeles Times Cult Classic employs the same first-person style as her essays, which results in a more intimate dynamic between reader and narrator. Lola is observant, cynical and so self-aware it makes progress difficult — a watched pot refusing to boil ... Lola’s wit and savvy make her a genial narrator, but it’s her emotional honesty that makes her a strong one. Crosley’s writing is as funny as ever, with a great line or clever observation on nearly every page ... As in her essays, her fascinating conceits — entertaining and compelling in their own right — are the engines of the narrative, but her insights into contemporary life are the fuel ... The only slight misstep occurs at the conclusion, which is presented as a happy one but manages to be bleak instead.
Barry Lopez
Rave Boston Globe [Lopez\'s] final collection of essays, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, should remind readers just how wide-ranging, artful, and deeply personal his writing could be ... Essays in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World show not only the range of Lopez’s scope but also his artistry ... What’s most striking about the collection is how personally revelatory Lopez could be as a writer ... Throughout all of Lopez’s writing is a moral clarity that is as striking as it is inspiring.
William Brewer
Positive The Los Angeles Times ... much more grounded and character-based than the Pynchonian setup might suggest ... Brewer’s evocation of the Mist is among the most accurate and insightful depictions of depression I’ve ever read. The metaphor of the fog is serviceable, though not particularly original, and the way the narrator characterizes his mental struggles is illuminating ... Brewer is also a poet, a fact reflected in some of the novel’s exquisite language, but he is often at his best when he is most novelistic, as in his sneakily long sentences, some of which stretch on for more than a page. It’s a testament to his skill, and his transfixing language, that readers may not even register their length ... The narrator’s depression runs deep and nearly leads him to suicide numerous times. His transformation into a fully cured and functioning adult stretches credulity. But as an examination of mental health, of how physics and art and consciousness all have their role to play in it — are indeed intertwined with it — and as a novel of ideas that also creates a fully fleshed narrator with a convincing inner life, The Red Arrow succeeds. It is a beguiling and ruminative synthesis of strange couplings: art and physics, psychology and psychedelics, characters and ideas.
Adrienne Celt
Positive Los Angeles Times Adrienne Celt’s new novel, End of the World House, could be elevator-pitched as Groundhog Day at the apocalypse ... In addition to the apocalyptic backdrop, Celt adds a few new wrinkles to the time-loop plot ... The novel aims to examine the nuances of Bertie’s complex friendship with Kate, spending a good number of pages on their past together. But since the narration hews close to Bertie’s point of view, the reader doesn’t get Kate’s side of the story. This functions better in some places than others ... Stories with fantastical conceits at their center must decide how much time to spend on their characters figuring out what’s happening. This decision becomes particularly important when the premise functions as a metaphor, as time-loop narratives almost inevitably do ... Celt is a smart, convincing novelist, and her ambitious tweaks of the concept are fascinating and fun to grapple with. But the novel works best when it foregrounds the dynamic between Kate and Bertie as they navigate the loss of a friendship, the kind of pain that can feel like the end of the world.
Francesco Pacifico, Tr. Elizabeth Harris
Mixed Los Angeles Times Although Pacifico’s language, fluidly and effectively translated by Elizabeth Harris, is lovely and his sense of dramatic momentum is strong, Marcello isn’t a compelling character. The Women I Love aims to satirize \'the neurotic, obsessive, childish point of view of the typical male narrator.\' We know this from its tone and also because these are Marcello’s words; he is walking us through his own pitfalls even as he insists he is avoiding them. And that’s exactly the problem. The novel duplicates the voice it ironizes, operating as if the self-aware meta-commentary makes up for its lack of depth or new insights. Those introspective monologues about men writing about women function like stage winks, trapping Marcello between being a well-drawn character and representing a certain type of character ... A good satire both engages in and pokes fun at the conventions and tropes of its target. A great one invents something new in the process. The Women I Love sets its sights on all the sad young literary men, but for all the accuracy of its scope, it only aims and never fires.
Lydia Davis
Rave The Star Tribune ... excellent essays ... Here, she\'s more verbose than in her stories, but still succinct, clear and eloquent ... This is a celebration of the beautiful and bewildering intermittences of language ... Far and away the best and most fascinating section here is the one on \'Translating Proust\' ... Davis\' work is a productive blend of authority and doubt, solution and exploration, confidence and humility ... Essays Two may not be light reading for the general interest reader, but for all its erudition it\'s always accessible, comprehensible, and even fun. Davis is a literary treasure.
Alice McDermott
Positive Boston Globe As a useful guide for novice fiction writers and even writing and literature educators, What About the Baby? isn’t comprehensive by any stretch, but it isn’t intended to be ... The conclusion she draws is a fascinating one ... Some of the essays don’t completely cohere, but even those ones at least contain insights into the writing life. McDermott is too smart, too astute, too experienced to compose anything that wholly fails to illuminate. Fans of hers, as well as writers and serious readers, will find plenty to appreciate.
Lyndsay Faye
Positive The Los Angeles Times Shakespeare novices may or may not miss the quotes; aficionados will find themselves assaulted with the slings and arrows of lyrical literalism ... What rescues The King of Infinite Space is what Faye chooses to change in the story (in the spirit of the Bard, the original master of rebooted IP). Her protagonist, the charming and mercurial Benjamin, is a compelling and complex version of Hamlet...Most believable and winning — and farthest from its source — is the romance between the two men ... It’s also very funny ... Inserting considerable jest into the novel while staying true to the spirit of the play is quite a feat ... Faye’s descriptive language evokes — and has fun with — the theatricality of Shakespeare ... There are times when a reader may wish Faye had taken more liberties with the dramatic arc, if only to make the conclusion less predictable ... both a fleet-footed delight and a true tragedy in the classical tradition of its source. It is a tragicomedy, a hybrid of past and present, a pastiche and an original yarn, a verily fun and achingly melancholy novel. All this, Faye can truly deliver.
Andrés Barba, Trans. by Lisa Dillman
Positive Chicago Review of Books A Luminous Republic employs a narrative device often used by Kurt Vonnegut, which presents the primary event of the story as a real event, references it as if the reader has surely heard about it, discusses it at length in discursive, obfuscating ways, before finally arriving at it in the final pages of an almost inevitable anti-climax. The technique is supposed to amplify the suspense, but instead ends up deflating it ... Barba is deftly capable of insights ... And that’s the thing about A Luminous Republic: its melancholic mood and contemplative tone are interesting, engaging, and lovely to read. Barba is clearly a gifted writer with a generous sensibility. So although the characters aren’t as well developed as its premise, it remains a novel that thoughtfully and compassionately considers people and as a result feels utterly human as a whole.
Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes
Rave On the Seawall ... focuses its brutally exacting eye on a single case ... Melchor’s style is remarkably sure-footed and maximalist in a mostly managed way ... controlled cascades of syntactical bravado ... unceasing cascades of mixed dictions and shifting POVs ... Melchor’s prose, a masterfully controlled outpouring, both demands and earns our careful attention ... Melchor constructs a complex and fully realized world — the community and its denizens, by the end, teem with individuality and life ... As the novel progresses, so does the violence. Physical, psychological, sexual, and mental violence permeate the work, and it’s sometimes difficult to stomach ... Melchor’s narrative moves all over the place temporally, winding in circles back on itself, mirroring the cycle of violence enacted by her characters. Her penetrating eye displays deep empathy for these people, even the most outwardly reprehensible of them; she doesn’t forgive their actions, but she seeks to understand them with the desperation of someone who truly appreciates the magnitude and scope of the horror, and the importance of trying, of ceaselessly trying to stop the femicides ... Hughes has thoroughly met the challenges presented by Melchor’s spiraling, vigorous prose ... decidedly political but only in its moral implications — Melchor’s advocacy isn’t the big-picture sort of Bolaño’s 2666. Rather, it is the kind that grabs you by the wrist, yanks you toward a darkened spot of the world, shines a light on it, points at it and says: Look at what this light shows you. Look how trapped these people are in their circumstances. Look how many factors contribute to the murder of one woman. Look how these things are so intricately embedded into this culture that it may seem impossible to unravel. Look how this woman suffers because of the unrestrained toxicity of men. Look at this horror. Now imagine it happening everywhere.
Hala Alyan
Positive Vulture \"With scathing wit, fierce self-examination, and challenging syntax, Alyan’s fourth collection uses the threshold age of the title to investigate the poet’s struggles ... Alyan takes great risks, drips her full, naked self onto the page, and inspires her readers to embrace and examine our gravest mistakes, for every part of ourselves is a piece of a complicated puzzle that we can’t — mustn’t — stop trying to solve.\
Pamela Hart
Positive Vulture Though the canon abounds with war poets...fewer describe the complexities of the home front. Pamela Hart works to correct this by telling the stories, including her own, of the parents, spouses, and children of those who serve ... Hart writes...with unwavering humanity. Though some of the poems on their own might read as slight, when taken together they form a necessary counter-narrative to the war story we’re often told, dismantling what Wilfred Owen called \'the old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori\': It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.
Sally Wen Mao
Rave Vulture \"By giving voice to, composing odes for, or revising [Chinese] figures, Mao creates a poignant, albeit cautious, optimism ... Oculus is a deftly structured volume of hauntingly perceptive poems, peering backward through the 20th century while penetrating our contemporary moment. It’s an homage to pioneering Chinese Americans and an indictment of Asian representation in American culture, which never for a moment shies away from the difficult tasks of taking on race and history and technology all at once, but confidently looks them right in the eye, unblinking.\
Dorianne Laux
Rave Vulture \"Laux writes with startling directness of the physical and sexual abuse she and her sister suffered at the hands of her father ... But there are other poems, just as frank and openhearted, that celebrate the wondrousness of sex (so skillfully that fiction writers should take note) ... Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise — and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom ... Laux’s new poems arrive at the end of the collection as a perfect finale, which benefits from what we now know of her life ... [Laux\'s poems allow us to] understand the bewildering complexity of this act of posthumous forgiveness, as well as the staggering generosity of the poet who committed it.\
Daniel Mendelsohn
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Mendelsohn examines the text of The Odyssey with depth and classical acumen; he explores the historical importance of Homer’s ancient poem with the comfortable clarity of someone who has spent decades immersed in Greek literature; he details his own relationship with Odysseus’ tale, from childhood to college to teaching the work himself; and, finally, he culls from the narrative many insights into his own familial bonds, specifically with his father ... The trouble with Mendelsohn’s multifaceted style is that deep scrutiny, personal narrative, literary history and classics-derived life lessons don’t all possess wide appeal. Readers may find they have more interest in one of the five braided techniques (most likely the narrative with Mendelsohn and Jay), which will mean they’ll have to plod through the other parts in order to get to the stuff they like. But for those with broad curiosity and a tolerance for intellectual hopscotching, An Odyssey is a journey worth taking.
Haruki Murakami
Rave The Rumpus ...Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is brief, light on its feet and spare with descriptions. Where 1Q84 focused on many lives full of strange mysteries, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki focuses on the strange mysteries of a single life ...the division exists within a single character: on one side, Tsukuru’s investigation into his past; on the other, his dream life and his haunted feeling that those very dreams may have more dire consequences than he imagined ... He was more interested in leading Tsukuru to his own gentle epiphany—that he isn’t, after all, colorless. The novel ends ambiguously, but things are looking okay for Tsukuru ... The world of this novel, it turns out, does reflect reality— inadvertently or not, it is patriarchy in distilled form. A mostly bland male lives a mostly bland life.
Ali Smith
Rave The Rumpus Here is a key to Smith’s spellbinding novel. Like the frescoes described here, George’s story functions like an 'underdrawing' to del Cossa’s story. By the end of del Cossa’s section, after he quits his work at the palace and flees to another city, he discovers that his fresco has mesmerized visitors...In George’s eyes, though, del Cossa’s fresco is loaded with meaning and beauty and personal significance. It was, after all, her mother’s final obsession, the last thing that seemed to fill her with life. Just as important is the connection del Cossa helps create between George and Helena … [Smith’s] inimitable writing sneaks into you with its deceptive readability, but it’s her radiating intelligence that stays with you. Her mind works wonders on a theme, able to find lovely and profound connections in seemingly anything.
Teju Cole
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ...an eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form ... Cole’s often brief commentaries function less like little helping-hand guides and more like an expertly executed and insightful narrative. These bite-size prose pieces are intricately structured, hauntingly written and add up to much more than the sum of their parts ... Cole has crafted a beautifully wrought and finely blended mixture of visual and narrative art. It is a chimera of thought and craft, of intellect and emotion, of the political and the personal, the historical and the contemporary.
Gabe Habash
Positive The New York Times Book Review Habash has created a fascinating protagonist in Stephen, a hard-driven athlete with a convincingly thoughtful mind — though an erratic one, too. Just when you think you’ve got Stephen pegged, he surprises you ... But most important, I think, is the way Habash understands the limits of his subject matter. He does not try to extrapolate Stephen’s narrative into some all-encompassing portrayal of ambition and hubris, but remains firmly in the realm of this particular boy in this particular moment.
James Gleick
Rave The Millions Gleick’s hybrid of history, literary criticism, theoretical physics, and philosophical meditation is itself a time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey, and it works so well. Even though Gleick can elucidate complex ideas into accessible language, he’s even better at explicating notions that remain perplexing. That is, he’s good at explaining paradoxes ... Though Gleick runs the gambit of physicists and philosophers and theorists (from St. Augustine to Stephen Hawking), he’s most fruitful and fun and alive as a writer when he dissects novels and films and television.
Roy Peter Clark
Mixed The New Republic Clark’s intent is admirable, his skills as a critic considerable, and the book he’s produced is not without its merits. Although Clark believes, in narrative terms, in the importance of 'showing,' he fails to see how young writers—about to step into a vast landscape with centuries of history—would be enormously grateful to simply be told.