RaveThe Nationhe attempts to capture, through memoir, sociology, and a kind of club ethnography, the many meanings and embodied states of a night out, while also situating them in an evolving subculture ... Making clubbing the subject of literary journalism is no easy task: It can be fraught and self-indulgent, a cool-kid version of the journalist who writes a memoir about an erstwhile hobby ... Not just a memoir of clubbing, but a critical and cultural history of a time and place worthy of its own periodization ... Witt’s descriptions are compelling. Her enthusiasm for capturing the experience is also grounded in her sociological and historical observations on dance music ... Even the most personal passages here can end up being the most arresting.
Dan Sinykin
PositiveThe New YorkerHe wants to demonstrate...how the process of authoring a book has become subsumed by a larger and larger network of interests, changing what it meant to be an author. Critics and scholars, Sinykin contends, are uncomfortable displacing the author when studying literature. His book is an earnest attempt to focus attention on the non-authorial figures involved in a book’s creation ... Daring attempts to map the larger structures that shape how books are written and published, but their attention to the big picture can obscure how novels operate on a visceral, textual level. Still, Sinykin’s study is valuable.
Ben Lerner
RaveThe Washington PostIn Lerner’s works, we see how producing speech, an act we take for granted, has shaped the conditions of modern life, engendering precarity and wonder, paranoia and disbelief. These concerns are alive throughout his new collection of poetry ... The Lights might be the best showcase for Lerner’s set of themes: Here we find a book caught between the puzzle of prose and poetry, public and private speech, past and present. Lerner is not merely cerebral; he is the rare writer who is hilarious no matter what form he is working in ... Like his earlier work, The Lights leaves me wondering how anyone could come away from Lerner and end up thinking he’s so miserable and mean. It’s clear he is having fun and laughing at himself.
Hari Kunzru
PositiveThe NationThere are spies, intrigue, Peeping Toms, conspiracy, and violence haunting the many corners of his novel, and yet the sensibility of the book is much more digressive, cerebral, and torturously self-conscious. That’s because at its core, Red Pill is a novel of ideas, probing seemingly disparate poles of thought: the conception of the self, the creation of whiteness in European Romanticism, and the threat of the Internet—the way it has destroyed our sense of privacy, circulated fringe ideas, and popularized the alt-right ... On its face, this premise and the style in which it is packaged are transparently ridiculous. But ridiculousness is also the motor for much of our world, especially the banter among self-serious people like our narrator. If there is a lasting value to Red Pill, it is in its clever and thoughtful critique of the urge of many creative and purportedly progressive people to make themselves heroes—or at the very least historical subjects—at a moment in which they clearly have so little agency or role to play. To Kunzru’s credit, he recognizes how far this kind of fatalist comedy can take us and makes the most of it. Red Pill, after all, is a bleak novel about how writers aren’t going to save anyone—including themselves ... perhaps Kunzru’s most overtly political novel. It not only engages the world of electoral politics but also offers an unsparing study of the flaccid state of 21st century liberalism and the intellectuals and creative types who hold on to its false promise of order and reason ... By focusing much of the book on the mental and moral contortions of those liberal but often apolitical writers who prefer to see themselves as above the risks and commitments of action, Kunzru offers us a cunning and damning portrait of many of his peers. But by throwing this character into a world of intrigue and political activity, he also shows the limited role these writers and intellectuals can play.
Anna Wiener
PositiveThe Nation... remarkable ... Wiener provides an achingly relatable and sharply focused firsthand account of how a set of \'ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs,\' backed by vast capital investments and armed with data analytics technology, helped to refashion not just our economy but also our culture, aesthetics, and politics with the new digital tools they produced ... Wiener’s book, while not explicitly political, gives us a road map to the ways we can turn our growing dissatisfaction with what tech has wrought into the backbone of an ideology ... The big-picture takeaways of Uncanny Valley are compelling, though they are not Wiener’s alone ... But the literary texture of Wiener’s narrative makes it particularly valuable as a primary document of this moment. Her voice, alternating between cool and detached and impassioned and earnest, boasts an observational precision that is devastating. It is whip smart and searingly funny, too. The book contains a six-page tour de force on Internet addiction, algorithms, and all of the attendant feelings of dread that is one of the best summations of an average day online I’ve ever read ... There is also a powerful and often surprising combination of joy and ambivalence running through Wiener’s story ... That Wiener squeezes all of this into some 275 pages is quite a feat ... Still, it’s impossible to leave this book not feeling drained spiritually and politically, even as its wealth of knowledge helps orient the reader in a world so closely tied to the ups and downs of Bay Area billionaires. Throughout Uncanny Valley, there is a sense of crushing defeat ... like a lot of recent books on the hellscape that is the Internet, her personal story gives us little room to imagine how we all might escape this new, malignant, corporate-controlled space, where data collection, advertising, and surveillance are the status quo ... The clarifying anger that infuses her book also points to the larger politics that we will need if we are to make the Internet a more humane gathering place ... may tell the story, from one woman’s perspective, of how the tech industry has come close to ruining the world. But Wiener’s book is also proof that it hasn’t succeeded yet.
Jenny Odell
PositiveThe NationWhile the reporting in the piece is breathtaking, the experience of scrolling through \'A Business With No End\'...has its own power, mimicking the hallucinatory feeling of Odell discovering and yet not fully pinning down all of these connections ... How to Do Nothing marks an important turn in Odell’s work: the attempt to find some peace and quiet in the midst of the Internet’s chaos by imagining a new mind-set and new ways of living ... This is not to say that she doesn’t devote plenty of space to withering criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, tech libertarianism, or Silicon Valley’s design fetish; she does, and all of it is sharply composed ... While Odell’s work has always been interested in how technology rewires our conception of the built environment, the belief in the natural world she espouses in How to Do Nothing illustrates a shift in her interests ... As a result, her book is less concerned with confronting these structures head-on ... How to Do Nothing accomplishes something that neither the recent wave of Internet histories (Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants) nor the popular self-help books on digital detox have achieved. Odell helps readers discover ways of living outside the Web that are still richly alive ... Odell’s wide-ranging intelligence and curiosity make reading this book an escape of its own.
John Darnielle
MixedBookforumUniversal Harvester taps into [a] potent mix of apprehension and nostalgia ... The book relies on movie tropes as often as novelistic ones—you can picture even the smallest moment as an unfolding montage, like when Darnielle compares the sight of cornfields through a speeding car's window to 'stock footage.' The midwestern town he's crafted, and its panoramic pastoral landscape, seems wooden and slightly overlit, like an old-fashioned film set ... Like Don DeLillo, Darnielle is able to precisely describe the character of an object in the world ... One of the novel's disappointments is that Darnielle never manages to convincingly conjure the giddy excitement of this era's VHS B movies, a lapse that is particularly galling when he describes the mystery footage at the heart of the novel. In the end, the book's driving evil is annoyingly vague.
