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Recent Reviews
Rumaan Alam
Positive The Atlantic \"Entitlement, a barbed, voluble book, is about how certain immutable traits, sex and race among them, persist as fundamental forces that shape our lives no matter how we might attempt to deny or overlook them. It’s also about what happens when status becomes a placeholder for identity ... We learn surprisingly little about Brooke’s internal life throughout the novel; Alam doesn’t reveal many of her preoccupations beyond her dedication to impressing Asher—and, as the novel progresses, her goal of purchasing an apartment despite her limited funds. She remains merely a sketch, a vector of ambition...This is a core element of the novel, but also a narrative shortcoming: We don’t get to know her, because she doesn’t really know herself ... Entitlement captures this dilemma, showing that although ambition and intelligence may open doors, the ultimate prize—true autonomy and agency—remains elusive for almost everyone. Brooke’s journey is a poignant reminder that, for most people, entitlement is not an identity but a trap.\
Henry Louis Gates
Rave The New York Times Book Review Gates adroitly demonstrates how literature served as a site of self-interrogation and a pathway to liberation ... The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.
Vinson Cunningham
Rave The Nation This is a novel that is in many ways unapologetically Black—especially in its deep and rich evocation of the Black church, of Black intimate relationships, and the vibrant internal life of a burgeoning Black artist. Great Expectations is an innovative, resolutely distinctive book.
Édouard Louis, trans. by John Lambert
Rave The Atlantic Millennials and Gen Zers (Louis himself is a Millennial) are sometimes derided for being self-obsessed. This assessment dovetails with a common criticism of autobiographical fiction, which holds that such work is inherently solipsistic. Louis’ oeuvre, and Change in particular, offers a pointed response by demonstrating the value of writing about one’s personal experiences. By the end of the book, Louis has achieved a deeper understanding of himself, entirely facilitated by his narrative reorganization of his past. In his characteristically inimitable manner, Louis seems to be asking his readers to consider the radical notion that their memories are theirs to use as they please.
Gregg Hecimovich
Rave The Washington Post Riveting ... An engrossing account of Hecimovich’s efforts to verify Crafts’s authorship of her novel and the startling details he uncovers along the way ... Hecimovich...draws readers close with often riveting passages. He introduces us to Crafts in a dramatic and breathtaking scene ... Hecimovich’s book is filled to the brim with similarly vivid scenes and anecdotes about Craft’s drive to document her story, and his tireless efforts to discover Craft’s identity and reconstruct her trajectory.
Teju Cole
Rave The Nation What is Cole trying to tell us? At first, it’s hard to say. One possible response is that this novel is simply a catalog of Tunde’s, which is to say Cole’s, obsessions ... Another theme emerges: the joys and challenges of forming a partnership with someone else ... Even as Tunde recognizes the need for narratives—especially in the face of mortality—Cole continually resists them. Tunde might desire a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but Cole is far more interested in constructing a novel that rejects such structures. Just when a story in Tremor seems to be picking up steam, Cole diverts our attention elsewhere ... This is an alluring novel, almost hypnotic in its unstable relationship to narrative.
Colson Whitehead
Mixed The Atlantic Crook Manifesto displays his singular ability to write adroitly in multiple styles, his facility with language, and his customarily sharp and expansive sentences. Yet this novel does not accomplish what he has managed in his previous works. Its characters don’t feel fully fleshed out, and its plot doesn’t capture the extreme feelings and circumstances that readers might expect from what is essentially a crime novel. Because these elements don\'t quite gel, this book is both powered and limited by its most absorbing characteristic: Whitehead\'s voice ... The trouble with the novel starts in the second section ... Whitehead’s chatty prose reliably carries the reader along, sometimes advancing the plot and sometimes appearing to be taken with its own fluency, its startling virtuosity. This is a boon for a novel in which determining why we’re taking this journey grows more and more difficult ... Linguistic delights ... However, as the novel continues, flickering among different perspectives, the language attracts attention to itself at the expense of plot. Whitehead, and not the various colorful characters in this book, emerges as the star ... I learned a great deal from reading it, but it never felt quite real.
Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell
Rave The Atlantic Mariana Enriquez’s grand, eloquent, and startling new novel... reveals how sometimes, only fiction can fully illuminate the monstrous, indescribable, and ultimately shattering aspects of our reality ... This novel operates as a kind of radio, constantly switching among stations. At moments the main narratives pipe through clearly, and at others we find ourselves attuned to staticky, liminal frequencies. This is a haunted story ... Many of the set pieces in this novel... will scan to certain readers as genre flourishes, genre having somehow become a catchall term that, among other functions, consigns unfamiliar ways of being and living to imaginary realms. Yet this novel—powered by urgent, image-drenched language rendered beautifully by the translator Megan McDowell—convincingly captures what it feels like when your life is suddenly interrupted by a series of events that are so unimaginable and devastating, they seem unreal. It turns out that a surreal event is best described in surreal terms.
Namwali Serpell
Rave The Atlantic ... knotty, prismatic ... Her response makes sense in our era of alternate realities—movies and television shows depict characters who slip from one realm to another; conservatives and liberals no longer seem to share any meaningful understanding of the truth; the metaverse will soon present us with digital worlds of our own choosing (or so we’re meant to believe) ... a more concise affair, both in its narrative scope and its page count. Yet it is a robust tale, especially in its treatment of Wayne, who dies but never really seems dead ... Serpell code-switches with ease, an ultimately crucial skill in a story that abounds with fluctuating realities. The book swerves from a realistic chronicle that bears all the markers of a grief tale to one that seems infused with magic, from standard-English dialogue to a pitch-perfect rendering of African American Vernacular English. Serpell also references and builds upon pop culture’s alternate-reality obsession, and the narrative vertigo that these stories induce in us. When I began reading the novel, I knew that Wayne had drowned in the ocean—but the power of Serpell’s storytelling was such that as the narrative progressed, I stopped being so sure.
Hanya Yanagihara
Mixed The Nation Yanagihara’s new book, To Paradise, is an übernovel, and it demonstrates all the strengths and weaknesses of the budding genre ... a broad, ambitious tale that engages with contemporary life in audacious and occasionally compelling ways. Yet it also falls prey to the very form it is trying to master. Yanagihara looms over every section of this novel, constantly reminding us of her presence through her authorial choices. We rarely have a chance to inhabit the narrative she has so carefully composed ... The only real connection between these narratives, the thread that keeps them tethered to each other despite themselves, is the various names that recur across the text: Eden and Adams and Edward and Charles and David ... Yanagihara can be a lovely writer. There are stretches of To Paradise where her sentences flow beautifully and her pacing is immaculate. She’s also a wizard of description ... Yanagihara also explores many vital themes. In the first section alone, her characters discuss colonialism, racism, and class, and she approaches these issues from new and unexpected angles because of her compellingly counterfactual world-building ... The ambition on display in To Paradise is thrilling, but it also comes with costs ... Yanagihara is certainly capable of crafting an immersive, engrossing story; whatever one thinks of her previous novels, they all operate as stories in the traditional sense by accumulating detail and density in order to transport readers from their own lives to imaginary worlds of Yanagihara’s creation. At times, To Paradise does the same. For the most part, though, this is a novel that reads as a catalog of obsessions. If you don’t share them, you are on your own.
Celia Laskey
Rave The New York Times Book Review Laskey composes elegant portraits of each character, drawing us into intimate worlds that pulse with light and sound, only to swiftly guide our attention elsewhere; if that character reappears at all, it will be in a minor role. Some voices are even more compelling than others, but over all Laskey inhabits each of their perspectives credibly, exhibiting a vocal range that grants the reader a panoramic view of the proceedings ... In Laskey’s artful hands this moral is delivered with such conviction and grace that it somehow feels fresh, and, thus, essential.