About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Anne Raeff
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Book Raeff’s latest speaks to the present. There’s nothing dated or quaint about the three individuals around which she centers her story, and the lack of period embroidery — no archaic brand names, beauty rituals, or descriptions of old-timey radios — keeps it streamlined. The characters don’t spend 304 pages pontificating about the nature of good and evil, but like anyone living through history they try to make sense of the world, one failure and one victory at a time ... In this author’s nimble hands, the struggle for love, safety, and meaning feels palpable as the reader watches each character scour various routes toward those ends, only some of which prove fruitful. Raeff’s great achievement is having assembled a cast so recognizably flawed that it’s easy to root empathetically for their contentment, even as she calls the potential for contentment into question by suggesting that inherent morality — human goodness — may be a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.
Belle Boggs
Rave The Millions The Art of Waiting delves directly into the process of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in all its pre- and mis-conceptions, its prose like a sledgehammer cracking through drywall ... In a book that could easily become insular, instead the reader finds Boggs’s considered, holistic approach, wherein she covers families of numerous formations and facets — different races, socioeconomic categories, and world views pepper this intelligent and insightful treatise on fertility, medicine, and motherhood.
Claire-Louise Bennett
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books \"Bennett contorts language into new configurations, twisted such that each piece in the collection brings the reader to face a literary frontier and a singular character. Fractured, voice-driven, and prone to modernistic meanderings, Pond is the sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order ... The tilt of Bennett’s pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to anything it touches ... Bennett’s stateside debut refuses to stoop, to explain, to tempt its reader with superficial ploys. This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos, a cathedral of strange sentences and unfocused meditations built upon the singular experience of being a human being. It contains only sharp observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay, moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass ... Let us hope there are some lights that flicker but never go out, and that Americans — like the British and the Irish — are willing to grope through the darkness and oddity of this gorgeous book.\
Patti Smith
Rave The Rumpus It takes a practiced hand to write interstitial moments that cohere, and Smith’s memories—accessed via dark roast and old fishing flies, novels and syndicated detective shows—manage just that.