RaveThe New RepublicThe book gives us glimpses into the fraught production of these shows, their divided receptions, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who have appeared on these shows ... Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. Attentive not just to the cultural footprint of the reality show but to its ticky-tacky specificity, Cue the Sun! provides a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life ... Nussbaum sees these human moments as screen moments and describes them with the same care she might otherwise apply to a prestige drama series.
Jaime Green
RaveThe New RepublicThe Possibility of Life is not a book about aliens; it’s about human beings and the possibilities of our lives, together and alone ... Green is adept at stripping away the layers of anthropomorphism and cliché that render our often strange Earth familiar to us ... Some of the most fascinating and affecting moments in Green’s book are when she examines animals and experiences readily available in our own lives that might provide a model for what extraterrestrial life might look or feel like ... Green’s most important insight in The Possibility of Life is not... that when we embark on our Quixotic search through the cosmos, we’re really searching for ourselves. What she most uniquely apprehends is why.
Keith Gessen
PositiveThe New Republic... a book by and for dads somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: well-meaning, serious, flawed parents who know well enough the stereotype of the bumbling, arrogant paterfamilias they’re trying to avoid but also resist the sanctimony and even Sisyphean impossibility of the kind of father they might aspire to be. All the Confused Middle-Aged Literary Dads ... Every word dedicated to a self-conscious dadhood is also, by definition, a self-indulgent one. Gessen gets that ... That self-indulgence is both a constraint of Raising Raffi and its shadow subject. This is, in other words, not just a book about fatherhood but a book about the idea of writing about fatherhood ... Gessen, the thinker, sees the flaws in that ideal, but Gessen the parent can’t help but feel the power of it. That awkwardness provides both insight and comedy ... the place where the book most clearly displays dadlike innocence is in its form. Especially in comparison with the more lyrical or experimental examples of mom lit, this piece of dad lit is relatively matter-of-fact ... At worst, this tour of discovery yields frustratingly abrupt or cursory considerations of parenting topics otherwise covered at epic length elsewhere; at best, it offers a sharp sense of wonder about the quotidian details of fatherhood. Gessen’s admittedly limited knowledge—the ignorance of all fathers—is, then, the limitation of the book but also the feature that makes it illuminating.
Helen DeWitt
RaveSlateAs DeWitt describes her complex plot, with a kind of hilarious deadpan, the novel is \'the story of a single mother who uses Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to provide male role models for her fatherless boy.\' As much as the novel does in its 576 pages, this is a pretty succinct and accurate description ... Even as DeWitt’s novel fetishizes video, it provides an elegant—and newly useful—meditation on what it means to feel so intimately close to what we watch on TV ... As much as The Last Samurai is a novel about a mother’s struggle to raise a son on her own, it is also a novel about art—not making art, or inspiring it, but consuming it and engaging with it in a million informal, inappropriate, but profoundly meaningful ways.
