PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA mind-bending take on time travel ... A slow-boiling philosophical thriller when Odile reaches adulthood ... The novel’s lasting impression is not its ideas, but the rich landscape. Howard has a naturalist’s gift for the pastoral.
Scott Guild
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe novel’s sustained W.T.F. brazenness deserves applause. While its debt to David Foster Wallace is apparent — and perhaps too much for some — Plastic also earns comparisons to works by Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro and even Bertolt Brecht. Its rigorously superficial world manages to raise urgent questions about climate change, political violence and spirituality with high intelligence.
Lexi Freiman
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesPutting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least — in a hyper-polarized time — a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both ... Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality ... Rife with dissatisfactions — to its credit — and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes ... Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.
Rob Doyle
PositiveInside Hook... the great drug novel of our time ... crucially, his book is generous and honest as few contemporary fictions are these days ... Threshold innovatively merges the first-person intimacy of memoir, journalistic research, and the deathless hedonism of untethered youth—with a light touch ... Humor, psychic struggle, the world, and all those drugs. In our new reality of high indoors, we look to books to take us somewhere. Threshold takes us everywhere.
Karen Green
RaveThe BelieverIn her book Frail Sister Karen Green gives...a searing portrait of one woman’s destruction by men and their institutions in 20th century America. It’s also an ambitious collage attempting to place the reader within an imagined consciousness—typically the provenance of prose literature. Green achieves this: her book is transcendently and uniquely beautiful ... Frail Sister looks squarely at men’s casual violence upon those without agency, and at the terrors of unwanted pregnancies before Roe v. Wade ... Green is asking us to look, and to do so with urgency ... images—as authentic as the Marlboro-filled ashtrays on the set of Mad Men—deepen our engagement. We don’t \'read\' it as a novel, nor as an art book. We simply read it, without friction, as itself ... If we step back from the narrative, the scope of Green’s achievement comes into view. She’s managed to integrate a nuanced literary voice, a rigorous visual aesthetic, and an entire life story into a masterwork. Imagine a book which produces the feeling of mourning within your body, the actual emotion in your chest and stomach, which you carry around with you, every day, just a little bit. That is Frail Sister. It isn’t a story. It’s a memorial.
Adam Nemett
MixedBookforum\"Adam Nemett\'s debut novel We Can Save Us All deserves points for ambition. In just under four hundred pages he\'s folded in the campus novel, socialist activism, toxic masculinity, psychopharmacology, communalism, American mythology, the anthropocene, and the apocalypse ... So Nemett\'s focus is on plot, not character. His charming and conversational prose creates a headlong momentum, ideal for the USV\'s elaborate pranks as they evolve into cinematic, off-the-rails spectacles ... Nemett nods to the off-campus world through the reports of increasingly frequent and destructive natural disasters. These stakes feel somewhat removed from the characters’ actions and reality ... The book maddens in other ways. A date rape occurs two-thirds through the book and is never addressed. \'Faggot\' is used twice in dialogue without justification or excuse. The light personal consequences of the USV\'s pranks scream class privilege ... A judicious edit would have solved many (but not all) of these problems. They don\'t sink the novel. It retains its energy and wit. The flaws highlight the circa-now challenges in using the campus novel as an armature for global themes.\
Martin Amis
RaveBOMB\"The Rub of Time is as surprisingly great as his other collections of criticism and magazine work ... As one would expect, the pieces on literature are the most successful. Amis has one of the greatest ears for contemporary letters ... Though Amis is a brilliant critic, capable of le mot juste—and often whole paragraphs justes—the political pieces are hit or miss. A few originated as commentary for British papers and carry a whiff of dated blog posts ... When Amis writes, \'We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains,\' something of that belief rubs off on the reader. This new collection is not only praiseworthy, then. It should be celebrated as an old-fashioned panacea for our anti-intellectual times.\
