About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Steve Coll
Positive The Telegraph (UK) Absorbing and panoramic ... Readers hoping for a succinct accounting of the quid of American motivations for the 2003 invasion won’t find that here: rather than a hawkish conspiracy or revenge-plot, it’s the accumulation of unreliable intelligence assets, and a pervasive guilt over the failure to prevent 9/11, that gain momentum in Coll’s telling.
Alexis Wright
Rave The New York Times Book Review Hypnotic ... Audacious satire ... The most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century.
William Gaddis
Rave The Paris Review In the absence of plot, in the traditional, linear sense of the term, Gaddis’s characters are not just seeking authentic experiences, they’re looking for ways to transform and transmit them, too ... If you read The Recognitions like a Flemish triptych, à la Hieronymus Bosch or Jan van Eyck, you’ll notice that the novel’s middle section is more or less twice the length of the first and third sections, where characters and themes reappear with a slightly wicked twist. As in early Renaissance painting, hands and eyes are important to Gaddis, and there’s a kind of panoramic quality to the narration ... The Recognitions is that rare thing, a postmodern American original.
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
Rave The Sydney Review of Books ... nimbly translated ... Rather than resolving or smoothing over these encounters, Schweblin twists them, leaving the reader with a visceral feeling of unease ... A few of the stories do not conclude so much as abruptly end, leaving the reader with a greater sense of mood rather than plot, in the style of Silvina Ocampo. On the whole though, endings are important to Schweblin and many of the stories in this collection harken back to an oft-quoted boxing analogy from Julio Cortázar: if the novel wins by points, the short story wins by knockout ... In the best of these stories, Schweblin creates landscapes that are both concrete and ethereal ... a darkly inventive collection that displays the talents developed over nearly two decades by one of Argentina’s best contemporary authors.