MixedForeword ReviewsThere’s a starkness to the writing that’s hard to get used to at first, but once enveloped in Jones’s world, sentences flow more smoothly. An irritating trend of introducing each new character by what they’re wearing slows the story, though. John Woman excels as a novel of ideas. Professor Woman engages with some truly unorthodox ways of thinking about history, and it’s clear that the book’s primary interest is sharing these ideas with the world. The text’s verbatim lectures can be tedious, but they also often pique interest. The latter half of the book contains enough mystery and thriller elements to remain engaging. Walter Mosley’s latest book is literary fiction of a different kind—partly a thriller about a man with a checkered past, and partly an allegorical tale about the role that history plays in our lives.
Edited by Roxane Gay
RaveThe Brooklyn RailThe pieces she’s chosen for this collection are extremely well constructed. They vary widely in tone, structure, and voice, yet all underscore the same themes: sexual violence can happen to anyone, and when it does, no one can ever forget what happened ... The vast majority of the essays are first-person accounts of harassment, assault, and rape at the hands of friends, strangers, boyfriends, girlfriends, and family members ... This is a book for the #MeToo and #TimesUp era, an era in which the scales are slowly tipping against rape culture ... everyone should read it, because admitting there’s a problem is always the first step toward recovery. No one is untouched by the attitudes and norms of rape culture.
Alexander Chee
RaveThe Brooklyn Rail\"...as the book goes on, readers grow along with Chee. We watch his transformation from a quiet, self-doubting young man into a more confident, self-assured writer. Chee leaves himself remarkably exposed in these pieces, and his prose is illustrative and disciplined ... His essays are full of wisdom and insight, as if he’s always teaching how to write, even when not saying this expressly. While he never becomes pedantic, his one deficiency is that, at times, he tends to leave behind the practical and cross into the mystical, especially when discussing the novel ... a formative collection, sure to cement Chee as not only a preeminent novelist but a powerful essayist as well.\
