RaveThe Chicago Review of Books\"Set My Heart On Fire is what would happen if Joan Didion wrote a tell-all memoir about her alternative, fictional life as a groupie. But not just any groupie — the Pattie Boyd of Japanese rock in the early 70s. The new English translation of the late Izumi Suzuki recalls Didion’s best reportage. Set My Heart On Fire reminded me of Play It As It Lays, Didion’s beautifully bleak portrayal of a young woman’s futile struggle for meaning and agency in the rarified world of 1960’s Hollywood ... It felt like a guilty pleasure to read Izumi’s encounters with her celebrity boyfriends. Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like to bed a rock star? But Suzuki’s sentences are so direct, her hook-ups so frankly recounted, that I often felt I had glimpsed the pages of a diary. These sex scenes are sensual and electric, charged with the boldness of erotic fiction and the terrible awkwardness of lived experience ... Rather than writing a facile romance or even a more interesting rock odyssey, Suzuki chose to write a deeply disturbing, powerfully erotic, nihilistic confessional that unflinchingly challenges the predominant, traditional norms of post-WWII Japanese society.\
Rachel Kushner
PositiveChicago Review of BooksCerebral ... Creation Lake is a spy novel, and for the most part, Kushner sustains the brisk pacing and plot-heavy hallmarks of a good spy novel. She held my attention and kept me wanting more, at least until the overly tidy and anticlimactic climax ... The world of Creation Lake is a haven for complex and multifaceted ideas, one that carries a special appeal for Sadie and Pascal and perhaps even the author herself.
Colin Barrett
RaveChicago Review of BooksFeels uncomfortably familiar in its complexity and matter-of-fact ruthlessness ... Quite an achievement, a novel of crisp sentences and understated language that propel a gripping, cinematic narrative ... Barrett resists redemption, and in so doing, gestures towards a more complicated world, one more fitting for our present geopolitical moment, in which we all seem to perch breathlessly on the edge of change in all its frightening possibility.
