PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe irreconcilable pieces of the whole and the wish to commit to a single self plague the characters until their own monstrous natures threaten to drive them mad. Curiously, the women in Starnone’s books appear much less conflicted...His women are wrathful shades, speaking on the literal margins of the books, like the chorus pronouncing judgment. Starnone gives them the last word, but it’s a wail into the abyss. With a few deft strokes of his concentrated prose, he tears down the curtains, blinding his audience with daylight ... incisive.
Nana Nkweti
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe pure energy of the words strikes first, the thrumming, soaring, frenetic pace of Nana Nkweti’s expression ... None of these stories end with a miraculous healing. Even where revelations occur, they never erase scars. Nkweti uses genre tropes to subvert our expectations. She employs the zombie story, the fairy tale, and the confessional in order to invert conventions ... The levity of Nkweti’s writing can make even passing descriptions a delight ... Occasionally the writing veers into the overwrought ... But the sheer speed of Nkweti’s expression allows for correction in midair, and her keen descriptive eye provides more pleasures than missteps ... Her inventiveness dazzles.
Raven Leilani
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksLeilani has an absurdist streak; the exchanges between Edie and her lovers often make art seem twee or tired, instead of something often used against Edie by men who know how to get what they want ... Leilani captures the desperation and precariousness of her life, and the sickening drop of stepping off a high wire without a net ... Leilani has written a book of surfaces, beheld as a painter approaches a subject. Long stretches of smoldering silence fraught with hidden meaning characterize the novel ... Luster evokes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, not necessarily for Ellison’s political meanings, but for the state of going unobserved, unknown in a society ... Leilani captures the consumerist nihilism of Edie’s world by combining the sacred and profane on the same plane, a cubist flattening ... The lack of communication and conversation between characters can make some sections of the book feel as inert as the corpses upon Rebecca’s slab, awaiting excavation. But perhaps that’s the point ... In Luster, Leilani does what Edie cannot. She captures the force of desire in a portrait from which you cannot look away.
Lidia Yuknavitch
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books...it is her realism that shocks the senses ... Her stories startle and repulse even as they provoke the reader’s gaze ... Yuknavitch writes with realism’s gimlet eye and horror’s racing heart ... Yuknavitch grounds her existential questions in the flesh. Her attention to the physical — in particular the human body — defines her aesthetic ... Yuknavitch revels in subtext and shows just how much of the world exists in the imagination, the grinding of those powerful, terrible wheels ... A writer must invent a new language to throw her reader off-balance; you can see Yuknavitch trying fresh approaches as she goes along ... Verge reminds the reader constantly of the fact that even while reading we cannot escape the self, not fully. Yuknavitch expects collaboration. What type of book does this anxious age require? Verge offers an opening gambit, first, see ... Verge contains a succession of mirrors, stories that reflect one way, then another. It’s a kind of antidote to the binary of the present moment, when anxiety drives a hunger for either/or. Yuknavitch delivers no answers, but a series of portraits, moments rendered in vivid detail.
Aravind Adiga
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe White Tiger echoes masterpieces of resistance and oppression (both The Jungle and Native Son come to mind). But Adiga depicts the modern Indian dilemma as unique. Intense family loyalties and a culture of servitude clash with the unfulfilled promises of democracy … The White Tiger contains passages of startling beauty – from reflections on the exquisite luxury of a chandelier in every room, to descriptions of skinny drivers huddled around fires fueled by plastic bags. Adiga never lets the precision of his language overshadow the realities at hand: No matter how potent his language one never loses sight of the men and women fighting impossible odds to survive.
