RaveFanzine...a devastating book regarding pain and loss and satiety and desperately trying to be away from your own head. The central way the book presents and works through these things is through waitressing. Marie, our lead, is a raw daggery incessancy, her rhythm a clipped, curt beauty of sentences ... As easy as it is to freak for subject-matter or thematic stuff in Love Me Back, know that the thing’s all lighterfluid language, shocking for the rapidity with which it goes up ... it’s the best book I know of to cast real light on the sinister enginery of restaurant workers ... there’s an endlessness to everyone and everything in Love Me Back, an endlessness of want and speed and work and money and hunger and drugs ... It’s worth noting that one of the things that makes Love Me Back such a devastatingly good read is how ‘unapologetic’ and ‘unflinching’ and ‘raw’ this book is ... While those qualifiers are true, and are breathtaking, it doesn’t feel fair to merely name them, to point lights square at what feels like the monumental daring Tierce must have to pull such work off ... what Tierce—what Marie—is rawly offering is a monumentally conflicted...take on the ways in which our hungers ride us like unbroken horses ... when the book end...you may, as I did, feel so acutely seen you’ll slam the book shut, hard, saying damn it the way you do when you know someone’s got your number.
Kevin Barry
RaveThe Brooklyn RailKevin Barry is the only author I know of (currently working) whose work equally inspires and inundates any aspirant with dread. His latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier...is undoubtedly his best novel yet, and, I\'d argue, his strongest fiction, period—which is saying something, given that Kevin Barry\'s one of the best short story writers alive ... Barry is that good; and with Night Boat to Tangier, it\'s clear he\'s not only very very good, but he’s getting better ... Charlie\'s and Maurice\'s criminality makes this story somehow (I can\'t believe I\'m saying this) more human, more relatable, than it would otherwise be with some PG-level old folks ... And so part of the delicious joy of Night Boat to Tangier is trying to suss out and bear witness to Charlie and Maurice as they attempt to decipher what their own moral code is ... Because here’s the thing: Charlie and Maurice are extraordinarily compelling characters; they’re flawed and fucked and terrible, and I’d be deeply nervous if someone like either of them knew my name or address. Yet, the slow-burning love story of their friendship—and love story feels a stretch, but I can’t think of what else it is—is devastating by the end ... Barry is blowing up language left, right, and center in his books, and the wild excellence of his masterful control is enough to leave you, if not gasping, then at least grasping for some tool to continually underline things ... His non-dialogue writing is just as sharp; this is a guy who can nail details like he’s throwing knives ... I’m not sure what else to tell you: Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier should be essential reading for anyone with a heart, or anyone with a desire to know what a heart beating desperately, if uncertainly, reads or feels like. It’s a profoundly good book.
Lewis Hyde
RaveStar TribuneYou should buy it and read it as soon as you’ve got a chance. Hyde’s one of the few authors I know of whose work, even if you disagree with it, leaves your mind almost thrummingly alive. Split into four sections — Myth, Self, Nation, Creation — A Primer for Forgetting is a welcome tonic and corrective to the current age of overwhelming data, constant news and infinite tips to keep your brain sharp ... Hyde will shake how you think of things, but of course there’s a price. He is one of the best writers we’ve got going, if only for how seriously he takes his readers’ intelligence, how little he’s trying to pander. There’s no clear answer to how to get past the past, what details or abstractions to remember or let go of, and Hyde is not claiming there is. But if we ever — as individuals or a society — are going to find a way forward, I’m betting that Hyde’ll have something to do with it.
Chris Bachelder
RaveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneThe Throwback Special is 2016’s first Great Book, and, despite being about football and being set in a dingy hotel, it is almost transcendentally tender ... a hilariously sorrowful rendering of American masculinity and a wise, patient examination of American culture.
