About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Tom McCarthy
Positive The Daily Beast ...C is not nearly as arid and clinical as Remainder was, and in moments it offers conventional novelistic pleasures. It even flirts with psychological depth, and doesn’t skimp on the pretty sentences ... C is also pretty weird—and can be intermittently tedious ... With C he’s having it both ways: aiming to satisfy middlebrow readers (me!), all the while confirming his experimentalist bona fides. You can read the novel as a picaresque turn-of-the-century bildungsroman or puzzle over it, grad-student style, as a braid of recurring motifs: light and dark, surface and depth, the allure of pure geometry vs. the undertow of human muck ... The novel’s metaphors are controlled and coherent, the set pieces amusingly ribald, and the novel teems with Joycean language play. It is also, in places, unabashedly lyrical ... Serge isn’t much of a character. In the early chapters, you sense his longing for warmth and connection—but as the novel progresses Serge flattens out, becomes more of a literary construction than a human being.
Stuart Nadler
Rave The Daily Beast One thing becomes readily clear about Stuart Nadler, whose graceful, keenly perceptive debut collection offers narratives of young love, middle-class infidelity, families in mourning, and fathers connecting clumsily with sons: this guy has read his Cheever ... \'Winter on the Sawtooth\' is an especially stunning and generous piece of work—a portrait of a father struggling to overcome a betrayal by his wife and an estrangement from his son ... Nadler’s work celebrates the complexity hidden in ordinary-seeming lives
Colson Whitehead
Positive Los Angeles Times \"Whitehead\'s charm and low-key wit make a good case for logging off [the Internet] and reading his book ... Whitehead\'s stylistic talents are amply on display ... Whitehead has a David Foster Wallace-esque knack for punctuating meticulously figurative constructions with deadpan slacker wit ... Language, humor, riff, anecdote... these are what the book offers in place of a sustained storyline. You can\'t help but admire Whitehead\'s writerly gifts, but there\'s something idling and indolent about his method here ... For all its amusements and felicities of language, Sag Harbor never dives very far below the surface. Emotionally, it\'s a low-stakes affair, which is another way of saying it\'s a little too much like summer for its own good.\
Camas Davis
Rave Vogue \"You\'ll know after the first ten pages of Camas Davis\'s involving, thought-provoking gastronomic memoir, Killing It, if this is a book for you ... Davis is a vivid writer and she\'s highly persuasive on the subject of grappling with culinary truths that most of us like to ignore.\
Teju Cole
Rave The Daily Beast Teju Cole's disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It's light on plot. It's exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don't call attention to themselves. The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual ... In its patient, cumulative way, the novel paints a startlingly dim picture of our present moment, our age of permeable borders and teeming heterogeneous cities ... All of this is comes at the reader in a slow burn. The novel is never boring, but it moves deliberately, and Julius' emotional life remains just out of reach ...Julius' forgetfulness and drifty wanderings come to seem like willed acts of erasure; he has reason to blot out his past.
Ian McEwan
Positive The Los Angeles Times Nominally a hot-button story about a theoretical physicist confronting climate change, his mischievous, darkly entertaining Solar better resonates as a tale of intellectual property theft … Solar zips along and turns bracingly of the moment in its final third, set in 2009, a year of ‘sclerotic credit markets’ and insurgent skepticism about global warming. Alas, a rushed and contrived climax mars the novel's last pages. What a surprise to see plot ace McEwan struggle to integrate his several narrative strands, stage a persuasive finale and go home. The happier surprise and the reason why Solar succeeds in spite of its creaky finish is McEwan's sense of humor.
Adam Johnson
Positive The Daily Beast Part thriller, part coming-of-age novel, part romance, The Orphan Master’s Son is made sturdy by research, but what makes it so absorbing isn’t its documentary realism but the dark flight of the author’s imagination … The Orphan Master’s Son is potent with visions of oppression and generalized fear. Johnson is unflinching (even a bit enthusiastic) rendering torture, but his sensitivity to Jun Do’s resilient spirit makes his work as big-hearted as it is horrifying.