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Recent Reviews
Denis Johnson
Positive The Rumpus \"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the last work Johnson completed, makes a fitting bookend to a celebrated career, as well as a surprising counterpoint to Jesus’ Son … The resulting batch of new stories may be less stylish, less brilliant, but they deal in more profound themes. They’re the work of a writer steeped in the mysteries of the world, who sees the Grim Reaper approaching (Johnson all but explicitly invokes his own death in one story) and has nothing left to prove, but much strange insight to impart … The Largesse of the Sea Maiden seem to see, as Wallace Stevens put it, ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ Perhaps this point-of-view comes from proximity to death. Certainly with that comes self-consciousness, and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden has a reflexive dimension that Jesus’ Son lacks.\
Jeffrey Eugenides
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books By Eugenides’s own admission, [the stories] make ‘a very mixed bag’ As with his novels, the stories are not all riffs on the same theme or told in the same voice. Still, to better adumbrate Eugenides’s preoccupations, we can crudely lump them into three categories … Yet the common thread between the most successful entries in this collection is not thematic, but in the attention paid to character (We can also peg the shortcomings of a story like ‘Timeshare’ as shortcomings of character: the story only gives us a muzzy picture of who the narrator is) … If Jeffrey Eugenides’s most impressive achievement is the variety of his voices, those voices are rooted in characters, and Fresh Complaint showcases the vast breadth of humanity its author can call to life.
George Saunders
Positive Electric Literature If, to you, the notion of a book built on a little boy’s corpse sounds depressing, that’s because it’s a depressing book. It’s also very fun: dramatic, witty, and unabashedly sentimental ... Reading Lincoln in the Bardo might, at times, call to mind funeral dirges, throngs of ululating women. The book wears its mawkishness like a crown, and it works: isn’t grief, a huge emotion, best expressed hugely? ... too concerned with closing every circle, Lincoln in the Bardo rambles on for a few more chapters after it should’ve ended ... Outside of its title, Lincoln in the Bardo skews far more Christian than Buddhist. Engaging with Christianity is understandable, probably unavoidable, being that we’re dealing with a cast of dead white antebellum men...But still, paired with the quickie slavery dialectic, what we see is a thin veneer of multiculturalism, clearly well-meaning but little more than cosmetic ... The fleet-footed sentences, prodigious research, unabashed sentiment, and rollicking plot, in the end, are all glacé. Underneath is an acrid core, which makes Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders’s most complex and satisfying work to date.
Mauro Javier Cardenas
Positive Electric Literature The Revolutionaries Try Again doesn’t quite fulfill the drama that its opening seems to promise, but nor does it get mired in the doldrums of typical lit-fic plotlessness. The book succeeds because the mechanics of the mind, much like those of politics, tend to whirl in place rather than move forward. For a novel about stifled ambition, this form fits ... Wouldn’t that be fantastic, if this dense, brilliant, bilingual novel by an immigrant is what the future of American literature looks like?
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Trans. by Lee Klein
Mixed Electric Literature \"Revulsion is quite funny, actually, in a dark, droll way. In confronting tragedy, Castellanos Moya wrote toward comedy. Towing the line between horror and laughter is where he most like Thomas Bernhard ... The novel is perhaps not a perfect pastiche, then, at least in translation ... Having said that, weighing in under 90 pages, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador is too short?—?and too funny, and too weird, and too angry?—?to be a waste of time.\
Lydia Millet
Positive Electric Literature In the end, the flatness of the characters isn’t too troubling of a flaw. In fact, it’s pretty typical for novels of ideas. You read Millet for the evocative power of her sentences and the moral force of her thought, not for her Strong Male Antagonists. Millet’s an interesting writer with bold ideas, and her plot only gets more engaging with each page, and these qualities make Sweet Lamb of Heaven a worthy entry in an excellent, rapidly growing body of work, evidence that Millet’s in the midst of a significant creative outburst.
Jon Wray
Positive Electric Literature Wray clearly delights in storytelling, using subtle hints and surprises that work together with devastating force, like primed explosives in a controlled demolition. But sometimes he tosses in inconsequential little firecrackers, fake twists that amount to nothing.
Diane Williams
Positive Electric Literature This is an interesting narrative project, and when it’s paired with the unwieldy precision of her sentences you begin to apprehend the unique contours of the space in literature Diane Williams has carved out for herself.