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Recent Reviews
Garth Greenwell
Rave The Boston Globe Musical ... Greenwell flouts the sumptuary laws of style, favoring run-on, comma-spliced sentences sequined with archaic words and unfashionably long paragraphs that can billow out to several pages without a line break or indentation ... Lush with literary references, the novel invites still more.
Helen Phillips
Mixed The Boston Globe Another reason that the stakes don’t feel quite as large as they could be is that the concept of being unrecognizable quickly loses its purchase ... Here’s the final turn of the superfluity screw: even in her vaunted facelessness, May has become supremely legible.
Laura Van Den Berg
Rave The Boston Globe Both a work of speculative fiction and a pandemic novel ... Weird and eerie ... Bottomlessly beguiling.
Rachel Khong
Mixed NPR Too many of these moral conundrums are expressed in the baldly straightforward manner of a scientific study. But the questions that drive May\'s academic research baldly double as animating questions for the novel. Unsubtle as they are, they\'re also queries that we will likely have to answer in the near future — a time when polygenic screenings are increasingly common, people lengthen their lives with elixirs, and beginnings become harder and harder to recall.
Téa Obreht
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books The Morningside is less digressive than Obreht’s previous novels. Even so, the author similarly indulges in fleshing out robust backstories even for minor characters ... Similarly, while any novel narrated by an older version of the protagonist necessitates a kind of double vision, here there are problems of modulation ... At its best, Obreht’s usefully estranging novel has the power to reenchant the ordinary world.
Anthony Veasna So
Mixed The Los Angeles Times Glorious as the essays are to read, those already familiar with his nonfiction may find themselves, like me, impatiently flipping ahead to the fresher quarry of So’s novel, which is unwisely chopped up and slotted in between sections of nonfiction. The choice to alternate sections of fiction and nonfiction was made, Dee notes in his introduction, so as to stage a kind of dialogue between his two kinds of writing and to reveal the permeable boundary they share. It strikes me as an unnecessary move.
Thao Thai
Positive The Washington Post The confluence of voices is both a strength and weakness of this poetic, often radiant novel. Each chapter is narrated by a different woman ... The sympathetic attunement among these women is perhaps intentional...but sustained across several chapters, it occasionally erodes their singularity ... Thai often blends the mundane and the magical, from the book’s title, derived from a Vietnamese fable, to descriptions that liken characters to witches. Yet, for all its nods to mystical realms, the book is strongest when it latches onto the visceral beauty of the everyday ... The book certainly has the heft of a story that’s been gestating for years — an intimate account of one family’s planting of roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way.
Tara Isabella Burton
Positive The Boston Globe A wide-ranging cultural genealogy of the concept of the \'self-made man\' ... Burton writes with verve about a range of novelists, artists, politicians, and socialites who had a talent for self-expression ... Burton’s book reads largely as a cautionary tale about complacently accepting the myth of being self-made. Burton has nothing to say, for instance, about drag culture or gender-affirming surgery.
Ava Chin
Mixed The Washington Post The book is prefaced with a family tree, which, at least for the first few chapters, the reader will need to repeatedly consult to keep the many narrative reins straight, for Chin’s book doesn’t adhere to a strictly linear telling. It bobs and weaves between the late-19th and early-20th centuries and the present day, often within the space of a single chapter ... Less successful when it awkwardly strains for a kind of grandiloquent universality ... In their abstraction...rhetorical questions cumulatively threaten to undercut the personal force of the book.
Julia Lee
Rave The Boston Globe Brimful with stories about being mocked for one’s heritage ... Confronted with such racist stereotypes, there are usually three answering moods: rage, despair, or humor. Lee channels all three: Her prose is, by turns, incendiary, scabrously funny, and melancholic, without ever stooping to self-pity.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Rave NPR Brilliant ... The book is partly a love letter to Woolf and the female poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a work of speculative biography. It\'s innovatively narrated from a perspective that might be called the first person choral, levitating among multiple consciousnesses of women writers ... After Sappho is billed as a novel, but can\'t really be said to lodge in any one category ... Puckishly allusive ... A statement of Schwartz\'s own artistic intent, here splendidly and indelibly fulfilled.
Adrian Hon
Positive The New Republic While Hon warns of the dangers of gamification, his book is not entirely a tech apostate’s account. For all his caution, he believes in ethical gaming ... Still, if gaming has a \"utopian\" horizon, Hon is skeptical of what it promises.
Édouard Louis tr. Tash Aw
Positive The Harvard Review Crisply translated ... The prose is restrained, only occasionally interrupted by lines of stabbing lyricism ... [Louis] seeks to both retroactively restore agency to his mother, offering his book as a kind of psychic bomb shelter \'in which she might take refuge.\'
Margo Jefferson
Rave The Week Every sentence of Constructing a Nervous System gives the reader a sense of a roving, highly individuated consciousness in conversation with itself ... The book also serves as an excellent guide for how to write sublime criticism ... Jefferson doesn\'t live down to this idea of a cartoon critic. She suffers no fools, flatters no one\'s tastes, and delivers gusts of uncompromising prose. Her remit is extremely broad ... There are also more sobering sections on the long reach of anti-Black racism ... One of the strongest sections (and they are all strong) braids together a story of this \'unsheltered I\' with a tour-de-force critique of the expectations heaped on Black female athletes ... Nervous System, at its best, resembles dance: a spine-tingling pas de deux for memory and culture, with not a movement wasted. When we reach the last page, we are ready for an encore.
Yuko Tsushima, trans. by Geraldine Harcourt
Positive The Star Tribune Certain forms of criticism that mothers seem automatically to accept in Western literature glide off this work like Teflon. Which is not to say that the novel paints a rosy portrait of motherhood. There is a surface placidity to the prose that belies its heavy themes of domestic violence, alcoholism, and economic and social precarity ... The narrative, in a fine translation by Geraldine Harcourt, alternates between an omniscient narrator and close third person. Events, including annunciations, are stated with the matter-of-fact plainness of stage directions ... The book\'s quotient of plainspoken to sensuous lines is remarkably even. Other passages offer atmospheric, lovely descriptions ... What gives the narrative its propulsive quality are its dreamlike, almost mystical sequences ... The novel begins with a dream of someone hailing Takiko from afar, and reveries laden with symbolism follow Takiko about from one location to another.
Jay Caspian Kang
Rave The Brooklyn Rail If the past 18 pandemic months have offered an intravenous drip of hate crimes against Asians, Kang’s book titrates those events into a potent mix of memoir, cultural criticism, and deep reporting. The ingredients are volatile, the book, hot to the touch ... It’s a book whose lacerating observations about the discontents of the Asian American experience are offset by cauterizing ironies ... Kang...delivers an incendiary message about Asian Americans that curls in on itself, flames licking at the middle-class vessel in which it arrives ... Ultimately, what he’s after is the start of a new dialogue that shakes off hand-me-down homilies. His book is an invitation to think harder and move beyond the existing racial taxonomies that have become distended to the point of futility and that can feel specifically designed to exclude as much as include.
Sarah Ruhl
Positive Chicago Review of Books ...intimate ... With Smile, Ruhl attaches new wings to some of these planes and we see them test different literary altitudes, come in and out of focus, and make looping detours into the philosophical, dramaturgical, and pop cultural. For all their weightlessness, they convey a tonnage of emotion. Taking such an approach comes with a few risks, most notably that of experiencing deja vu. Some of the material gets recycled, almost verbatim, from that earlier work ... The familiarity lends these moments a foggy dullness as we watch laments eddy around the same ontological current. Yet, while reading, I was unable to make up my mind whether this repetition was a deliberate aesthetic strategy ... Smile gives the lie to such a dichotomy, binds up these binaries. It achieves a delicate balance, if not quite symmetry, in all these things and reminds us that between lightness and heaviness, we don’t always have to choose.
Leigh Cowart
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books Cowart’s persistent reliance on [certain] descriptors and turns of phrase gives the impression that many of these pieces were originally written as articles for different outlets, yet for the most part they hang together. Even as the language used to describe masochistic activities becomes familiar, sometimes calcifying into cliché, the activities themselves surprise by their variety ... the book scrupulously avoids talking about people’s racial identities so it’s hard to tell for certain how many racial minorities are discussed. This is the book’s biggest weakness: for race to go entirely unmentioned is to give the impression that racial differences are incidental to the experience of pain. This is far from the case ... it’s all well and good to remember that a host of cultural, environmental, and genetic factors play into why some people willingly participate in painful activities. Yet the past two years of the pandemic have also made abundantly clear that the experience of pain is thoroughly inflected by race and further entrenches extant hierarchies. There is a long history of subjugated individuals whose pain has never even been validated as such.