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Recent Reviews
Kevin Barry
Rave The New York Journal of Books \"The Heart in Winter could be a prequel to his futuristic debut novel, City of Bohane. Barry’s new novel has the same manic lyricism, the same rhythms of Irish speech, a similar ribald Irish diction, and the humor that cuts both to the funny bone and the solar plexus. Barry’s writing often seems like a tornado’s mix of James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Flannery O’Connor. But what comes flying out of the tornado is pure, unmitigated Barry ... Beneath Barry’s comic surfaces and surprising idioms heartbreak always lurks...Polly’s story, like Tom’s, is a dark inevitability. Broken hearts are scattered through the story. The reader’s included.\
Kevin Barry
Rave New York Journal of Books Barry is an Irish writer to the core with his wild, dark humor and his Gaelic intonations, a beautifully skewed syntax holding up a delicate balance of spluttering facetiousness and a sly acknowledgment of inevitable tragedy ... Barry’s writing often seems like a tornado’s mix of James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Flannery O’Connor. But what comes flying out of the tornado is pure, unmitigated Barry.
Benjamin Taylor
Rave The New York Journal of Books \"There have been a half dozen biographies of Willa Cather since her death in 1947, most notably substantial studies of the writer’s life and work by James Woodress and Hermione Lee. Benjamin Taylor’s trim account of Cather’s life belongs on the same shelf with those heftier narratives ... a love letter to a writer who deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as her male contemporaries—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald ... The title of Benjamin Taylor’s wonderfully uncluttered biography alludes to what Cather grappled with as a writer.\
Paul Murray
Positive New York Journal of Books The Bee Sting is always compelling, the kind of novel that is so skillful it can become an obstacle to sleep ... Some readers might reasonably wonder why the sections from Imelda’s point of view book omit all punctuation except question marks ... Other readers might feel that the propulsive drive forward in the plot, especially at the end, although invariably engaging, feels soap-opera-ish ... The Bee Sting might not be perfect, but it’s great fun to read. And perfection is overrated.
John McPhee
Rave New York Journal of Books There are simply too many compelling and witty pieces in Volume 1 for a reviewer to recount. McPhee chooses his words with the care Proust did, only McPhee is always far more informative and funnier than Proust ... McPhee is a writer with a generous heart and sharp self-deprecatory sense of humor. Tabula Rasa is no blank slate. It is a story that tells the reader much about McPhee the writer, the man, and the teacher.
Claire Dederer
Rave The New York Journal of Books \"... a provocative meditation on our complex experience of art and artists as viewers, readers, and listeners ... given the monstrous subject matter (artists who do terrible things), she is often quite funny. Dederer’s humor usually comes alongside a serious point and with a David Foster Wallace-like parenthetical wink ... Frankly, her three-page critique of Annie Hall is worth the price of the book by itself ... As she meanders through artist-monsters recent and past, Dederer stands arm in arm with keen-eyed and sharp-tongued reporters like Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion, who led the way for her, or ones, like Rachel Kushner, contemporaries who write with the same ferocity and brilliance.\
David Grann
Rave New York Journal of Books Page-turning ... Only a researcher with the diligence and skill of a David Grann could make one clear story out of so many competing narratives that the officers and crew had to tell to save themselves from the gallows ... A story that has to be read to be believed. And even after it’s read and considered, it will be up to the reader to uncoil some of the nautical knots of the narrative and find the line of truth that remains.
Fintan O'Toole
Rave New York Journal of Books In this utterly fascinating and ultimately disturbing book about modern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times journalist, is at his best as a reporter and commentator ... Tracking the story of modern Ireland by pinning important cultural moments to personal events in his life allows O’Toole to humanize and particularize complex historical realities. O’Toole’s cast of characters—priests and politicians, businessmen and revolutionaries, his father Sammy, a bus conductor and his mother Mary, a worker in a cigarette factory—is epic ... O’Toole makes this book both deeply personal and rigorously objective at the same time.
Paul Muldoon
Rave The New York Journal of Books ... an amalgamation of down-to-earth narrative, surreal images, and elliptical connections. At times, the poet makes the reader feel as if the poems are marvelous word association games being played for high stakes. Muldoon’s poetry, like old age, is not for sissies. His work is filled with riddles and riddled with puns, a verse both suggestive and erudite and strange and dreamlike in its repetitions. He seems to delight in perplexing his readers in the way his countryman James Joyce did ... [Muldoon] shows no sign of slowing down or making things easy for the faint of heart ... offers the kind of slap that great poetry from the likes of William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney can produce, the kind of poetry that can make a reader wince with delight ... has the jeweled clarity of Yeats and the playful opaqueness of Joyce, lyrical and earthbound, alternately sliding from Gaelicisms and gobshites to learned allusions and postmodern puzzles. At times, the reader feels himself slipping down a rabbit hole that is similar to territory John Barth might have tunneled in Lost in the Funhouse, burrowing deep into repeated lines and unstated connections that challenge the reader to find a way through the dark ... Some of his poems strike in the prosaic tone of a newspaper article and others with the arcane energy of a guy who is a lot smarter than you’ll ever be. Amid the fast and furious flying puns, the puzzling repetitions, and the baffling connections from one line to another, Muldoon finds a way of holding his reader with the seriousness of his frivolity, with the range of his knowledge and interests ... Muldoon’s poetry encompasses a large world: the Troubles, Viking raids, the Ogham alphabet, Ezra Pound, Florence Nightingale, and cancer cells. His verse is a skelp, a clap, a clip on the ear. It surprises, it dramatizes that each act comes with consequences, and it demands acknowledgment. And it brings us into the present tense.
Wiley Cash
Positive New York Journal of Books With his fourth novel, Wiley Cash demonstrates once again a breadth of compassion, an awareness of the intricacies of most of his character, and a willingness to end a story on an unexpected note ... [a] riveting opening leads to four days of plot twists that, although skillfully drawn, make for more plot than the 287-page narrative can support ... here’s no question who to root for, even when the heroes don’t adhere strictly to the law. And there’s no question about which characters deserve punishment ... Readers will see where the story is heading. That is, except for one moment at the end. Cash has a surprise in store, one that the reader may not like. But it’s a surprise that adds resonance to the mystery, even as it seems to sidestep some of the questions of character that fade like ghosts into the North Carolina night.
Sally Rooney
Rave New York Journal of Books Sally Rooney doesn’t repeat herself. Rather, she is a pentimento artist, building a familiar world in a way that makes it feel boldly new ... Rooney manages the tonal shifts with a dexterity that will make the reader nod appreciatively. Reading her novels is like standing onstage to watch a magician at work and still not being able to discover exactly how she manages to perform the trick ... The beautiful world, the characters find, is right in front of them. All they have to do is open their eyes to see it.
Rachel Kushner
Rave The New York Journal of Books ... takes the reader on a wild ride. [Kushner] is the kind of writer who comes straight at you in understated sentences that always add up to much more than their individual parts of speech. Her essays, like her fiction, are invariably thought provoking and moving, by turns surprising and heartbreaking ... impressionistic and tantalizing...compelling the reader to connect eclectic images and anecdotes that add up to a meditation on entropy, death, art, and memory ... A few of the essays in Kushner’s collection are esoteric, drifting from the impressionistic into the arcane, but even the murky moments usually have the quick and surprising light of a shooting star to them.
Blake Bailey
Rave The New York Journal of Books Bailey performs the task of the biographer so gracefully that it’s hard to know the dancer from the dance ... Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth is that rare sort of book, meticulous without sacrificing dramatic energy, endlessly entertaining without ever surrendering critical integrity, candid without forfeiting compassion. There’s a good reason why the subtitle of the Bailey’s book is \'The Biography\' rather than a biography ... Bailey’s much-anticipated biography puts Roth’s career into personal and historical perspective ... A lesser biographer would have made of Roth’s life a blizzard of salacious details—there are plenty of them to recount (most of the pseudonyms in the biography are reserved for Roth’s many lovers)—but, instead, with a persuasive critical insight and what can only be called a novelistic sense of empathy, Bailey gives us the picture of a memorable life, a penetrating look into the troubled genius that was Philip Roth ... With this book, Bailey deserves the definite article for himself. He is the biographer of Philip Roth.
Tana French
Rave New York Review of Books In many ways, French’s The Searcher echoes John Ford’s narrative of a moral man faced with an immoral dilemma ... French is in a class of her own, though, even with her Dublin Murder Squad series. She writes literary novels, brimming with psychological nuance and cultural undertone. Her books typically offer more subtle details about the idiosyncrasies of Irish life than they do about solving murders, and that’s what makes her mystery novels sui generis ... it is straightforward in its affectionate descriptions of the Irish countryside and unblinking in its depiction of the Irish character ... it’s always a compelling and rewarding journey.
Rob Doyle
Rave The New York Journal of Books [Doyle] is following in the footsteps of his countryman James Joyce by refusing to repeat himself and by pushing his genius beyond ordinary boundaries ... Autofiction for its own sake seems coy and depthless. Neither of those two words apply to Doyle. He is simply suis generis ... funny and scary and profoundly compelling—more so if it doesn’t hide behind the gossamer veil of autofiction ... Such a tale might seem sordid, but because Doyle writes with an unnerving candor and humor, it ends up feeling like collaboration among Kafka, Camus, and Mark Twain ... no matter how dark Doyle’s thoughts become or how perilous his behavior, he is always brutally honest, funny, and self-deprecating ... As readers we watch [Doyle] and listen to him, wide-eyed, holding our breath, with alternate looks of horror and amusement on our faces.
Paul Lynch
Rave New York Journal of Books Lynch manages to transform a news story into a universal tale of friendship and endurance and love ... Beyond the Sea is elemental. It is a story sliced to the bone. It compels the reader to look unblinkingly at matters of life and death, at the heart of what it means to be fully human. Lynch puts the reader on that small boat in the blank Pacific, implying that in a profound sense we are all there and must face the same questions that Bolivar and Hector are forced to face.
Anne Enright
Mixed New York Journal of Books Enright is a powerful storyteller with the ability to portray with a quiet grace the nuances of Irish culture ... Actress is at times compelling, but it’s not Enright’s best work—nor is it always all that compelling ... Along the way, as the reader is shuttled, sometimes exhaustingly, through the shadows of Katherine’s life by Enright, there are wonderful moments that come close to making the story come alive ... There’s poetry in the book. And honesty. One can hear the voice of the narrator center stage but too many characters—husbands and children and lovers—stay lifelessly behind the curtain.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Eds. Cathy W. Barks and Jackson R. Bryer
Mixed Bookpage It would be more apt, perhaps, to call the volume Mostly Dear Scott, for the majority of letters are from Zelda. Yet there are enough responses from her husband to give credibility to the title and, more importantly, to give a sense of the often sad symbiosis of their relationship ... The letters between Scott and Zelda trace the arc of their love its great passion, its failures and its enduring strengths.