Rave4ColumnsRunning like a crosscurrent beneath Macfarlane’s passionate, activist storytelling is a bracingly new approach to nature writing. It swirls together a Mike Davis–level mastery of earth science, a Philip Larkin–esque ear for the music of sentences, a spooky phenomenology ... A Joycean riverrun of a book, giddy with eddies, twisting and turning from miniaturist masterpieces of close observation to real-life characters who’ve stepped out of a magical-realist novel to wordplay worthy of Lewis Carroll to Whitmanesque lists of plant and animal names recited for their sheer deliciousness, so musical they make a kind of birdsong in the head.
RaveThe Washington PostThis travelogue through the German unconscious will look chillingly familiar to anyone living in Trump’s America ... Beradt’s study casts an eerie, mesmeric spell ... Though neither a psychoanalyst nor a sociologist, Beradt provided sharply insightful commentary on her subjects’ dreams.
Daniel Clowes
Rave4ColumnsPensive, philosophical ... Monica reveals his Gen-X cynicism as the zeitgeist-y side of a deeper disquiet ... Clowes being Clowes, we’re nagged by the suspicion that we’re meant to read the story at an ironic remove, as creepy yet campy—a suspicion reinforced by his visual rhetoric. Densely referential, polyvalent ... He walks the line between homage and parody, appropriating—and interrogating—the comic books and Sunday funnies he grew up with.
Jeff Sharlet
Positive4ColumnsThe Undertow feels at once urgently important and inconclusive. Perhaps we’ve realized, at long last, that sermons and parables, from Edwards to Trump, won’t save us. In fact, they just might be the death of us ... Harrowing, heartbreaking, scary, but also bleakly funny in a theater-of-the-absurd way, The Undertow is a Wisconsin Death Trip for the Trumpocene, a graveside elegy on the edge of the burn pit that used to be—if only aspirationally—a democracy.
