RaveChicago Review of Books... a novel of notes, scenes, scents, fleeting feelings, emotions, fears—of small waves coming into shore, again and again ... It is thrilling to see Zambreno at such a creative peak, and to now apply the tools she has perfected since her debut to the novel form. What is rendered, like her previous fiction and nonfiction, is a work that is hypnotic and contemplative, a magnetic novel that both surprises and puts us in a trance ... Drifts is at its most interesting when the narrator cuts open her desires for her writing, allowing the novel to become a body to be autopsied, writely desires located and excised ... Zambreno at her most vulnerable ... Drifts is both of the moment, and perhaps timeless: a fitting novel to read in our current quarantine, and in those to come.
Anna Kavan
RaveFull StopAnna Kavan is a singular presence in a group that includes the likes of Eve Babitz, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ann Quin, writers whose work has been recently reissued to both acclaim and newfound followings. But Kavan’s writing feels both of the present and uniquely unparalleled ... Her stories feel prescient today; they capture the madness and degradation of isolation and living in a ravaged world, sentiments I can’t help but feel have also been evoked during our self-quarantined present ... Her short stories, the best of which are included in this volume, showcase the vastness of both her style and subject matter ... Comparing Kavan to both Rhys and Lovecraft is not meant to be contradictory. Rather, this comparison evinces Kavan’s incredible talent and verisimilitude: she could do it all. And do it well, at that ... She was fearless and unafraid of calling out the cruelties of this world, many of which were a result of the misogynist trappings of her government and society at large, which all her stories tackle to some degree ... The stories included in this collection are brief, nightmarish, and condensed with paranoia and unavoidable doom. Kavan’s work is disorienting. Her writing gets under your skin. Her characters are both delusional and easy to root for ... Cuddle with Machines In The Head and watch as the apocalypse continues to unfold.
Lidia Yuknavitch
RaveThe RumpusIt’s easy to compare Verge to other recent collections with mostly female protagonists that dive into the seedier sides of human behavior, sometimes with a slight fantastical twist ... But a good portion of Yuknavitch’s stories decenter the middle-class American experience; these are stories that focus poverty-stricken Eastern Europeans, on those enslaved to the organ black market, on the sex trafficked, on the incarcerated, on the addicted. Yuknavitch does not just focus on the marginalized, but often centers those that live along the margins of the margins ... Yuknavitch pushes the story into unconventional ground ... there’s a sensitivity in Yuknavitch’s writing, in her character-building, whose absence would otherwise make them a dour read. Her prose is tight, her descriptions spare—the result is a precision that feels insightful, and truthful. Yuknavitch’s stories do not wander but are quick, fevered; she knows where each is going, and wastes no time getting there ... The result is a space for readers to sympathize and connect with the protagonists.
Jenny Offill
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... for a novel of such heady themes — existential malaise and climate guilt, anxiety, and panic — the end result is a treat ... composed of small lyrical truffles, some of which work as standalone pieces, but all of which provoke a sense of deep emotion, of fleeting humor but lasting melancholy ... It is easy to feel like Weather doesn’t hit as hard as Dept. of Speculation, which catapulted Offill into the literary limelight. But that has less to do with any type of slippage in Weather and more to do with the influx of new books that read a lot like Dept. of Speculation — novels composed of short paragraphs that similarly rely on literary quotes, and also theory, seem ubiquitous nowadays ... But there continues to be something special and fresh in reading Offill. Weather feels narratively exciting, despite relying on now-ordinary tools. Part of this can be attributed to how Offill pushes the formal conventions she created in Dept. of Speculation even further. Instead of simply utilizing literary references and aphorisms, Weather relies on more: it is a kaleidoscopic mix of how-to disaster prep guide, reference book, and also — somehow — joke book ... insightful, a lullaby that soothes the panic that it also invariably stirs.
Garth Greenwell
RaveFull StopGreenwell’s connection to beauty, as an abstraction that is essential and inescapable, bears highlighting. His novel is about beautiful men and, more importantly, the ready-to-erupt violence that bubbles under their surface ... Greenwell’s prose is lyrically brutal and filled with anger, regret, disappointment, and, mostly importantly, eros. Greenwell is a master at writing about longing, but is also expert at navigating emotionally fraught sex scenes that can quickly descend into scenes of detachment, alienation, and violence; Cleanness is devastating ... Greenwell leaves the decision to his reader. He avoids being preachy, and the result is that his characters feel lived-in, and less like caricatures. Having complex, perhaps ambivalent characters whose likability may be questioned, ultimately, is a more powerful tool for proffering pathos than, say, producing more classically constructed, unambiguous, clearly motivated characters ... This is a remarkable novel whose prose is both original and insightful. Though there are moments that recall the classics, Greenwell proves to be such a master of the form that it’s almost as if he invented it. He takes the trope of revisiting a past love on the heels of possible new romances and spins it on top of itself; this is more than a romance. This is a novel about human suffering, and the complexities of making connections amongst ourselves.
Fiona Alison Duncan
PositiveFull Stop...by turns bildungsroman, stream of consciousness, cultural polemic, L.A. novel (think Eve Babitz meets Kate Braverman), and a tender love letter to her friends ... Duncan’s novel cannot be squarely categorized. Its first bites taste like mainstream contemporary fiction; they go down easy, like candy, or like a Sally Rooney novel. But as you continue to chew — because this novel is chewy — you encounter something quite different. By the end, this novel has spun in all directions, like a piece of thread from your favorite Vetements shirt coming undone ... Ultimately, Duncan proves to be a writer’s writer. There is something to respect in writing the novel that you want — an editor at a major publishing house would probably have had Duncan rework much of the latter part of the novel, and would have pushed her to have the one major plot device — the reality TV show deal — become a more dramatic arc, stripping Exquisite Mariposa of its more renegade traits. But instead, we have a bulldozer of a novel that is unafraid of tossing a wide, niche net, then letting the net self-immolate.
Natasha Stagg
RaveFull Stop... works best as a vehicle that explores the fashion world, and New York media more broadly, pre- and post-2016 ... Stagg’s writing inhabits a space of contradictions. But the resulting work is incisive — only someone lucky enough to live in the center of a Venn diagram consisting of such multitudes could connect, say, Russian collusion in the 2016 election to the popularity of communist-red boots on the runway the next season. And Sleeveless is chock full of these sharp associations ... The release of this collection is timely, then, as if this book was made specifically for 2019, a time where beyond self-image nothing matters — yet everything is dialed up, put on full-volume, to be broadcast to the masses regardless ... It is refreshing to read complex observations of overwhelming doubt and confusion, rather than have to fake feeling heard by the sometimes-inflexible and sometimes-staunch opinions over-published everywhere else ... Despite the tough subject and prickly opinions, Stagg provides room for the preposterous, for small pockets of chuckles, if not outright laughter. The humor in the essays lies in Stagg’s deadpan delivery and clear cynicism, and also in these moments of surprising absurdity. It is all incredibly relatable, too. But underneath the absurdity is a sense of alarm, and panic ... it’s clear Stagg is honest. And it’s writing like hers that we need nowadays, not something that beats around the bush, but something that takes a good hard look at the ugliness of the twenty-tens ... There are a few weak(er) pieces in Sleeveless, though Stagg is a sharp critic so these moments are still worthy of your time. For a collection, however, I wish Sleeveless would have been a slightly slimmer volume with only Stagg’s strongest pieces ... it is Stagg’s cynical and honest observations, and her distinctive and advantageous viewpoint (how many other texts do you know that confront the Trump era do it through a — mostly — fashion lens?) that make Sleeveless so unlike anything else out there.
