PositiveThe New Republic\"In the twelve stories in Roupenian’s debut, You Know You Want This: \'Cat Person\' and Other Stories, she establishes herself as a raucous and bloodthirsty storyteller who, even when she stumbles, never bores ... That’s not to say the stories are cookie-cutter, but that they each take a different angle on this particular model of human affairs. Actually, one of the book’s strengths is how diverse its styles and genres are, as it twists the formula of weak versus strong ... Although You Know You Want This may be timely in its occasional adjacency to #MeToo, its real canniness comes from apprehending the psychology not only of power, but of power-hunger as, itself, a form of weakness...\
Emily Witt
PositiveThe New RepublicHer critique of intimacy remains intimate, owning its own biases while rejecting the dishy humble-brag, the brave over-share, and over-generalized neuroscience. The honest depictions of her sexual experience make few concessions to dramatic tension, or even to sex ... The poorer fringes are mostly overlooked in her highly personal account...Perhaps out of a desire to report only on cultures she can directly experience, there’s a dearth of nonheterosexuality that’s glaring ... But perhaps it’s wrong to fault a book for omitting what it never tried to include. Future Sex isn’t a comprehensive history or political brief, but an intensely rational, personal search for the nuances of sexual desire ... The pleasures of Witt’s book are like the sex it envisions, unbound from the obligations of solving a problem or achieving a goal.
Don DeLillo
PanThe New RepublicDraped over this scant armature of plot are swathes of vintage DeLillo—vintage in the sense that he was doing all this stuff 30 years ago. The motifs are the same: cultic organizations, sinister media, big money, hermit artists, guerrillas, teen prodigies and holy children, strange projects in nameless locations, high-tech vehicles, systems jargon, physical sciences, sports metaphors. Likewise the style; I’ve always felt that DeLillo’s dialogue makes more sense if you pretend the characters are conversing over a bad phone line, talking past each other in non sequiturs and repeating themselves...If you’re a longtime DeLillo fan, you could call Zero K a grand summation of his career themes and prose stylings. You could also call it recycling.
