About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Michelle Tea
Positive The Millions Reading Tea’s work, you get the sense that she is painting a large and beautiful but terrifying mural on the wall—all pinks and purples, fairytale turrets and monsters—and when the thing inevitably becomes enchanted, she will walk into it and decide to live there instead. As she writes in this new collection of essays, though, that might not be the healthiest impulse ... Though this book shows how Tea’s work has developed from straightforward memoir to a more nuanced form of self-reflexive cultural critique, memoir makes up about a third of it ... When Tea seems less sure of herself, she can lean too heavily on a tossed-off charm to gloss over her discomfort ... But on the whole, this book, like all of her best writing, bristles with life and a fierce intellect. Her voice is as distinct as ever.
Elizabeth Greenwood
Positive The Philadelphia Inquirer For those familiar with gonzo journalist Jon Ronson, this is a Ronsonesque stunt, and though Greenwood is an entertaining writer, she doesn't quite have his genius for dry understatement. She knows how to tell a good story - and there are lots of them here - but when she writes about herself, her prose is a bit overcooked ... This largeness of imagination makes Greenwood's book a success. Whether death fraudsters strike you as clever schemers or fascinating in a fringe-weirdo sort of way, Greenwood makes them human, a lovely way of showing how expansive life is - even in death.
Mark Haddon
Positive The Philadelphia Inquirer Compared to that masterpiece [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time], The Pier Falls - along with a few of the other stories - is disappointing. Rather than examining the idea of emotional detachment, the writing itself feels oddly detached, setting the reader up to expect a resolution that never comes. But when he is good, Haddon is very, very good ... It makes for claustrophobic reading, to say the least. But by framing death as the central fact of life, Haddon interrogates it in an attempt to understand our human nature.
Moby
Positive The Philadelphia Inquirer The book is easy fun, due in large part to his memory for detail, which makes it read like a novel ... Evocative and funny, his language swings between chipper and mordant. He calls those oversize raver pants 'billowing jeans like cotillion dresses' and describes a bathroom in a dive bar, with its 'alphabet of hepatitis in the toilets.' Occasionally, his prose is infected by the same precocious doofiness that characterized the ecstasy-fueled dance scene he describes ... But it feels uncharitable to begrudge him this moment of self-indulgence. His writing is too clear-eyed for him really to go astray, and he's so gentle himself, even when describing the drug addict with a knife who tried to rob him - and the music industry professionals who actually did.