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Nicolás Medina Mora
Positive The New York Times Book Review While I often found Sebastián’s emotional life on the callow side, I was never bored by his company ... Its portrait of Sebastián’s peer group in Mexico City, for one thing, is lively and complex. Another strength is the surprisingly moving depiction of Sebastián’s encounter as a journalist with a teenage refugee from Guatemala who has been through an ordeal that Medina Mora renders vividly.
Tom Bissell
Positive The New York Times The best stories here may be rooted in mockery or satire, but as they grow up and out they unfurl what had been latent inside them. Not all of them get to this level ... But on every page of this book Bissell sees life with mordant clarity and finds words not only to describe it but to reanimate it ... Vigilantes, bullies, expats: To tell you the \'subjects\' of these stories is to tell you almost nothing about the experience of reading them, their stylistic flair, the unpredictability of their movement. They reminded me of how fiction can be not just a form of escape but a way to get lost in the actual strangeness of this world, those crooked roads that lead us through flashes of horror, delight and sudden recognition.
Lynne Tillman
Positive The New York Times Book Review Tillman’s novel is a patient, insistent exploration of what it means to live inside such a mind ... The book starts with ideas, then moves, in brief fragments, to ramifications of those ideas. Plot is not the point. You won’t hear or taste the world much in this novel — there is little \'lyrical\' writing, little sensory writing, but the tracking of Zeke’s consciousness, fragment by fragment, is often thrilling ... The achievement of this new book is that it never disparages Zeke, who in other hands might come across simply as a mansplainer. His vision is hindered by a blind spot, but in this, Tillman seems to say, he is like us all.
Joshua Cohen
Pan The New York Times Book Review David Foster Wallace, one of Cohen’s conspicuous influences, lived and wrote in terror of solipsism, though no matter how hard he strove to imagine characters unlike himself (and he had huge range), you always saw Wallace, almost his actual face, through the unmistakable style. This struggle gave him pathos. By contrast, Cohen’s stance seems to be deliberately against any idea of 'likability.' Almost everyone in his book is loathsome, though in a facile way that says as much about the portrayer as the portrayed ... it’s a relief when we finally get to the story of the Israelis, Yoav and Uri, wherein the novel leaves off with its reflexive contempt and shows an almost human heart ... Jews evicting blacks, Israeli Jews evicting African-American Muslims, veterans evicting veterans: I see this schematic, but Cohen’s book has no capacity for real outrage, sorrow or grief. In this way, like its antihero David, it’s a victim of its own safe distance.
Marlon James
Positive The New York Times Sunday Book Review James...is a virtuoso at depicting violence, particularly at the beginning of this book, where we witness scene after scene of astonishing sadism, as young men and boys are impelled by savagery toward savagery of their own. This, again, is how history feels to those on the wrong side of it, and the novel’s great strength is the way it conveys the degradation of Kingston’s slums … This novel fundamentally is an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America’s participation in that history. In the end, the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it’s more than that … Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, A Brief History of Seven Killings eventually takes on a mesmerizing power.
Paul Goldberg
Mixed The New York Times Book Review It’s a lack of nuance that might explain why the characters in The Yid and their triumphant story are less compelling than the book’s historical background. The ragtag bunch goes on its mission and certain plot moves need to occur along the way. But we want to understand why the individual characters are going to all this trouble in the first place, not just out of abstract principle but out of felt need. Too often, The Yid adheres to schematics.