About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lisa Taddeo
Positive Newsday Three Women does supply a frank exuberance in unpacking lust ... Taddeo brings a well-written poignancy in the telling of the sexual adventures, misadventures and travesties of her protagonists ... Taddeo is unwavering in her molecular attention to her protagonist’s viewpoint ... Three Women raises the complex question of how representative Taddeo’s subjects are. None completed college. All experienced teenage traumas ... Taddeo writes wistfully of subjects who dropped out. But one might ask if the damaged women she did corral were the ones best positioned to give consent ... Three Women offers some beautiful sentences, some insights and some sordidness. But nobody hoping for context will find footnotes at the end of this book.
Jennifer Egan
Rave The Cleveland Plain Dealer Expect to inhale Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then expect it to lodge in your cranium and your breastbone a good long while. I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know -- we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But A Visit From the Goon Squad is emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Positive The Los Angeles Times Wistfulness threads through The Refugees like an anthem of displacement. The text is barbed with subtle humor that is wry and painful. The resulting stories are beautiful in their astringency and shifting points of view, but no reader will set them down feeling jolly. Nguyen’s writing travels along a spine of moral reckoning ... A few stories — such as 'The Americans' and 'I’d Love You to Want Me' — seem at a loss for an ending, but overall, the collection casts a formidable spell, especially at this political moment when refugees are both a lightning rod and an abstraction.
Zadie Smith
Rave The Los Angeles Times ...a multilayered tour-de-force ... The work is so absorbing that a reader might flip it open randomly and be immediately caught up. Its precision is thrilling even as it grows into a book-length meditation on cultural appropriation, played out on a celebrity-besotted global stage.
Jill Lepore
Positive The Los Angeles Times Lepore is shrewd about the sticky ethics here, carefully documenting how little research Mitchell did, how much he preferred just listening to Gould. When Mitchell returned posthumously to his subject, matters became even murkier. 'Joe Gould’s Secret' reveals that Gould’s legendary masterwork, The Oral History of Our Time was a chimera...Lepore ends her own book in a reverie, not a revelation, vexing our stubborn narrative expectation.
Sarah Bakewell
Positive The Los Angeles Times ...[a] vivid and warmly engaging intellectual history. It is an exemplar of the notion that 'books come from books.' This is a text that sings the writing life — of the existentialists, of their critics and of their biographers.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Rave The Los Angeles Times Reading In Other Words is deeply pleasurable. It puts one in the company of a beautiful mind engaged in a sustained and bracing discipline. Lahiri's sensibility exists in exquisite counterpoint to a culture besotted with selfies.