RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewRalph Ellison said that \'some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.\' I returned to this idea again and again while reading Nicole Krauss’s superb new collection, To Be a Man. In each of these moving stories, we feel the weight not only of family, but of history and faith and leaving a legacy, pressing down on every one of her characters. Birth and death, joy and mourning, love and heartbreak — these too animate the collection. But as a writer Krauss is less interested in describing life’s grand explosions than she is in showing how people make sense of the rubble ... Despite the common threads, Krauss still somehow seems to have invented a new form for each novel, each story — their characters so fully realized that Krauss’s deft authorial hand is rarely evident. Her characters seem to dictate how their own stories ought to be told ... Krauss’s refusal to adhere to formal conventions, in time frame or plot resolution, for example, gives her stories a certain energy, consistently conjuring an aura of both intimacy and vastness ... Krauss’s stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they’re hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers.
Karen Russell
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleVampires in the Lemon Grove stands out as Russell's best book. Its stories range from fable-like to gothic to experimental to almost traditional, with prose so alive it practically backflips off the page … While a few stories tread on familiar terrain, Russell is equally committed to mapping out completely new territory. We find stories narrated by silkworms, deceased American presidents reincarnated as grumpy, nostalgic horses and — most thrillingly — adults, who existed fuzzily in the background of Russell's earlier books … Russell's stories themselves seem imbued with such cathartic magic.
Louise Erdrich
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleErdrich's plotting is masterfully paced: the novel, particularly the second half, brims with so many action-packed scenes that the pages fly by. And yet the author also knows just when to slow down, reminding us that despite everything upending Joe's life, he's still just a teenager … One of the most pleasurable aspects of Erdrich's writing is that while her narratives are loose and sprawling, the language is always tight and poetically compressed … There's nothing, not the arresting plot or the shocking ending of The Round House, that resonates as much as the characters. It's impossible to stop thinking about the devastating impact the desire for revenge can have on a young boy.
