PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWry, mercurial ... At times I sensed a messier, grittier narrative lurking in the background, yearning to emerge. Profound, unanswerable questions—about the academy’s relentless mistreatment of its workers, the mortifications of compulsory heterosexuality and the emotional inheritances we receive from our parents—glitter at the edges of certain passages like shards of glass, but Liquid hugs tight, in the end, to the walls of the romantic comedy, working to avoid cutting up its feet on the sharp, jagged subjects it skirts.
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewKemp’s Dada picaresque Paradise Logic dissolves form at the molecular level and builds an extraordinary story out of the residual goop ... Unbearable tragedy lurks in these pages...all chopped to pieces and stuffed between winningly insane layers of syntactical bizzaria and presentational devices galore ... This book swings big.
Lexi Freiman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAngular, careening ... Freiman’s singularly funny 2018 debut, Inappropriation, dealt in similar ideas: our humorless century, the allure of cult logic, the quest for a credo. Fans of that book will miss its strange, particular tenderness — here instead is a furious, jagged and radiant reckoning with the dangers of the manifesto, the mortifications of aging, the mercies and limitations of the comic posture, the job of the novelist and the indiscriminate desecration it demands.
Jamie Marina Lau
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewLau’s spare prose hovers frustratingly and exquisitely above the action as she patiently floats us past each tiny misery Leen faces in the fight for Lotus Fusion. Her gift for writing accumulative insanities creates the same dizzying effect as a good cleaning.
