About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lauren Elkin
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books The result is a reading experience not unlike getting lost inside some many-chambered house: just when you think you’ve reached a dead end, there’s another door to open ... These characters verge, at times, on types. Yet Elkin writes them with a light touch.
Aysegül Savas
Rave The Atlantic Savaş has written a book that reads like a fictional ethnography. It has the qualities of an empirical study, the only difference being that the subjects of this study are made-up characters ... Savaş approaches her novel with a keen awareness of the reality through which it crafts and filters its make-believe.
Gabriel Smith
Pan The Baffler The novel brings a Generation Z spin to modern ennui—and it reads surprisingly similar to the old millennial one ... Frustrating ... Too many moments in the novel come off as a self-aware thumbing of the nose ... If there is nothing else that characterizes a certain strain of the contemporary novel, it is a feigned sophistication that shirks the convictions required for a book to endure ... Though we have here a book that is conscious of itself as a book, it is often without linguistic precision or pleasure.
Jennifer Croft
Rave The Atlantic On its surface, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a literary whodunit, with whiffs of...semiotic absurdity ... Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation.
Nicole Flattery
Rave The Atlantic Flattery takes an inspired approach to showing how the stuff of our daily existence can, when mediated through technology, be made into a fiction ... Visceral.
Claire Dederer
Pan The Baffler A needless expansion: one that retreads some familiar ground...and introduces some newer, though somehow still stale, lines of inquiry ... I liked Dederer’s original essay when it was first published in those early days of the Trump administration ... Dederer’s book feels very much of this time—2017, that is ... A chapter on motherhood and artmaking is interesting but feels similarly limited to what the conversation was within the early Trump years ... By the book’s end, Dederer having backed herself into a corner, throws up her hands and turns to that familiar canard: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism ... This may be true, but it’s an unsatisfying conclusion, one that feels irresponsible in a book that raises what it views as provocative questions ... By focusing so much on biography when discussing certain artists and their works, at the expense of engagement with the work itself, Dederer ends up smudging her own critical lens ... I think that, while well-intentioned, Dederer’s conclusion flattens various types of \'monstrous\' behaviors and viewpoints in such a way as to create a kind of malaise in the reader, an ultimately depoliticized approach to art that, as it claims to be political, robs both the audience and the artist of any kind of ability to protest.
Barbara Molinard, tr. Emma Ramadan
Positive Bomb Nothing is quite right in these tales either, their plots tumbling into strange, surrealistic moments of violence or time dilation as though borrowed from dreams ... The effect, seen throughout the collection, is one of extreme tension, brusque absurdism tempered by nervous laughter, leaving the reader as much on edge as Molinard’s wandering characters ... Dispensing with the ordinary rules of time, space, and motivation that govern our everyday, she calls into question just what it means to be human.
Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft
Positive BOMB ... undoubtedly the author’s magnum opus: a near 1000-page, deeply researched novel that aims to destroy any notions of linearity ... Charts, book pages, and paintings from the time period crop up frequently as illustrations, and this fluidity in form is echoed in the book’s approach toward identity. Names change repeatedly, especially once Jacob and his followers convert to Catholicism and adopt Polish names. Languages twist and brush up against one another as characters learn and communicate in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, and more—translation being a common theme ... But Tokarczuk is also careful to show the dark side of this freedom, what is lost and what is gained. Anti- Semitism hounds the book’s Jewish characters, and it is sobering how vastly the Frankists’ economic situation improves upon their conversion to Catholicism ... Like the smoke from a cigarette, there is something more diffuse to history as it’s portrayed in Tokarczuk’s novels, compared to the rote linearity of a biography or textbook. And even when it’s done, it lingers.
Claire-Louise Bennett
Rave The Baffler ... as much a rallying cry, a treatise on the validity of a working-class avant-garde, as it is a portrayal of the artist as a young woman ... Frequently, Bennett declines to use commas to demarcate clauses, lending a breathless quality to her paragraphs—a far cry from the staccato beep-beep-beep of a supermarket’s scanner. When juxtaposed alongside her character’s life at the supermarket checkout counter, there is a sense of escapism—a flight into fiction in its truest sense.
Meena Kandasamy
Rave The Paris Review Barely a page went by in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife without my wanting to underline at least a sentence ... Kandasamy’s prose is electric, at once brave and poetic and satirical as she pokes holes in the mythoi of marriage, gender, intellectualism, and art ... Kandasamy is unflinching in her portrayal of both domestic violence and how art can grapple with abuse.
Vigdis Hjorth
Positive The Paris Review Hjorth’s exploration of how trauma imprints itself on memory, shaping and confining the history of one’s life, brings to mind the work of Elfriede Jelinek and Marina Abramović, two artists the main character engages with in her own work. Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.