RaveAstra MagNot technically a horror novel in the strictest sense, although it contains numerous scenes of degradation and assault and, as such, it is a uniquely horrifying novel, a bracingly mordant document of a very specific brand of online fame ... One of Aesthetica’s best, most genuinely thrilling qualities is its depiction of the intellectual and ethical whiplash that results from the collision of competing schools of feminism and ever-evolving bodily trends ... Anna’s attitude to the objectification and the modification of her body is complex and conflicted, making her an admirably realistic image of a gorgeous Gen-Z feminist living through the tail-end of the 2010s ... Rowbottom leaves ample room for ambivalence, and while Aesthetica is pitch-black and occasionally distressing, it is never didactic ... To paint Aesthetica as uniformly furious or vicious would be, in spite of these numerous references to violence, incorrect. Certainly, it has its incandescent moments, but a righteous, sharp-edged satire about plastic surgery and Instagram would, I think, be one of the easiest kinds of novel to produce about the subject, and the tone here is a different thing entirely. If pressed, I would say that it was elegiac ... Rowbottom’s prose, in lieu of the cool and clinical style one might expect from writing on a subject that is internet-adjacent, is at times poetic, and quite often sweetly melancholic.
Stephanie Lacava
RaveThe New RepublicA cool, cutthroat razor of a novel ... In places, an acerbic comedy so pitch-black barely any light escapes ... We are left with something more ambiguous, an act of violation and then a concluding line that I interpreted entirely differently each time I read the novel, neither option feeling like a happy ending ... In a curious way, the book, in spite of its absence of pain, is a paean to sensation, its usefulness and its vividness.
Marlowe Granados
PositiveThe New RepublicHappy Hour is a pleasurable book about repeated, small-scale scamming of the rich. It can be consumed at a voracious pace, and one could certainly enjoy it by the pool of a five-star hotel one has not paid a single cent to stay in. While reading it, though, I could not shake the feeling that its author had a further goal in mind...powered by a sly acknowledgement of the inconvenient way real life eventually punctures fantasy, impeding the pursuit of dreams ... despite being located in the present day, stylistically, [Happy Hour\'s] invocation of an earlier era is precise enough to suggest a knowing pastiche ... Happy Hour\'s meticulous building, then puncturing, of a retro-tinted fantasy turns out to be the thing that lends it its fresh, interesting taste: It is the unfamiliar ingredient whose lack of sweetness complicates the novel’s flavor ... \'My mother told me that to be a girl,\' Isa thinks in the first line of the book, as she is flying into New York, \'one must always be especially clever.\' In light of the novel’s final chapters, what was once a gently witty observation becomes extraordinarily poignant, making it especially clever, too.
Alexandra Kleeman
PositiveThe New RepublicThis novel, a Hollywood satire that is also a profoundly unsettling work of sci-fi eco-horror, certainly has Lynchian moments, a familiar air of Los Angeles menace ... the instances in which Alison thinks about the future [are] some of the most frightening passages in Something New Under the Sun. She shows what happens when a person does not, as the patron saint of doomy stories about L.A. once famously put it, tell themselves stories in order to live—the truth about our planet and its future is so bleak that to acknowledge it can make a person sound insane, like a conspiracy theorist rather than a realist ... if Something New Under the Sun resembles anything aside from Kleeman’s own previous work, it is a movie novelization of Cronenberg’s 2014 Maps to the Stars as written by Alissa Nutting.
Megan Nolan
RaveThe New RepublicIt is frightening and feverish, compulsive and distressing, and as true-seeming a document of toxic and manipulative love as any published within memory ... Acts of Desperation is, in other words, that squirmy argument between the sexes from Midsommar spread over 250 elegantly written pages—a psychosexual thriller about the ecstasy and embarrassment of being a woman who has sex with, and who falls in love with, men ... Nolan’s book is nakedly emotional, passionate rather than dispassionate, and sometimes maximalist to the point of feeling reassuringly unfashionable ... tonally and thematically bodily and alive ... Certainly, a frightening passion animates the novel, so that whether or not any of its ugliest or most degrading scenes are based in fact, what remains is a sensation of uncanny voyeurism, as if reading it were tantamount to having experienced something nearly catastrophic.
Christine Smallwood
PositiveThe New Republic... coolly plotless ... savage ... powered by a sly acknowledgement of the inconvenient way real life eventually punctures fantasy, impeding the pursuit of dreams ... Smallwood’s novel suggests it is impossible to lead a life entirely devoted to the mind without both human nature and biology, in their infinite messiness, encroaching on it ... Smallwood’s novel revels in [dirt] to the point of ugliness, the body not just present but rebellious.
Anna Kavan
MixedThe BafflerWritten between the early forties and her death in 1968, the collected texts in NYRB’s new volume do not suggest an author with a \'normal\' interior life. They do not necessarily suggest that abnormality is a preferable option, either ... awash in paranoia, baldly Kafkaesque in their obsession with bureaucracy ... Always, there is inclement weather: inescapable, dramatic, and blue as a blue mood ... When nature is not dark and blue, it often manifests as supernature, amplified until its brilliance is perverse ... There may be no better way to describe the impression left by Kavan’s writing than that of a brightness that is too intense to induce pleasure ... When she writes about a woman who sleeps nightly with a leopard, as she does in 1970’s \'A Visit,\' she might feasibly be talking about the reality of sharing one’s bed with a man: a gorgeous predator, seductive but impossible to talk to. She might be referring to the experience of addiction. She might just as well be talking about her own brain, its treacherousness, its terrible power.
Natasha Stagg
PositiveThe RumpusSpanning the majority of the 2010s, Sleeveless suggests a decade that is anxious, self-immolatory, and more interested in surfaces than in significance. Stagg is particularly insightful on such subjects as the Kardashian family, influencers, and the sociopolitical importance of tall, cherry-red Balenciaga boots ... Prose has no temperature; assuming that it did, Sleeveless would bite like January in New York. Its best lines are chill as ice water: pellucid, unembellished, rich with subtext ... What is most alarming about Sleeveless is also its most radical quality: its candor, sometimes offered at the expense of the author’s dignity or liberal credibility, becomes its own sign of resilience ... Hip and jaded, within fashion and without it, an active participant in the industry at work and dispassionately removed from it in her perspective and her politics, it is her continuing willingness to contradict herself that makes her one of the best and most interesting documentarians of our modern millennial media .. Sleeveless does not offer answers, per se; what is valuable in it is its rare acknowledgement of the impossibility of modern life, the horror of having to maintain a twenty four hours a day, seven days a week lie.
