RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)At heart a personal essayist, [Abdurraqib] prefers to approach big themes stealthily, often from an unusual angle. He has an enviable ability to move from a wider cultural phenomenon to the personal in a couple of sentences ... He also illustrates how culture can expose fault lines in everyday life ... Each of his portraits of cultural figures is carefully etched and distinct, such as that of the virtuosic Juba, a brilliant dancer whose energetic, skilful act was witnessed by Charles Dickens, and whose final performance might well have been in Dublin.
Evan Ratliff
PositiveThe Irish Times...darkly fascinating and truly gripping ... With such a crazy story, it might have been tempting for the writer to amplify [Le Roux] oddness, to play it for laughs. Instead, Ratliff reports exhaustively and writes soberly, all the while remaining conscious of the ludicrousness of the reality he’s recounting. It’s a brilliant book, one that makes Le Roux’s life and career seem a suitably wild parable for a digitally deranged age.
Mark Greif
RaveThe GuardianGreif’s collection of essays is full of surprises, not least that it is, at least in part, concerned with that old fashioned question of how to live. 'It’s a book of critique of things I do,' he writes in the preface. But instead of being the kind of self-help book that tells you 'how to do the things you are supposed to do, but better,” it “asks about those things you are supposed to do.' But this doesn’t capture everything Greif is up to in this politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny book. Over the course of the essays – which were first published in n+1, the journal he co-founded in 2004 – he covers the significance of exercise, our relationship with food, the meaning of hip-hop music, Radiohead, the figure of the hipster, society’s sexualisation of children, and war. Although he’s vexed, even depressed, by many aspects of contemporary culture he analyses, he stops short of pessimism, and the essays rarely conclude without opening at least some minute window of possibility. Greif doesn’t tell you everything is great – far from it – but rather than merely sketch the bars of the prison he seems deeply concerned with how it can be escaped.
