RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere are some novels so searingly precise in their ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat. Halle Butler’s latest, Banal Nightmare, is one such book ... Will have many millennials intently nodding along to Butler’s clever insights. While not necessarily the first in the category of the millennial midlife novel, Banal Nightmare may be one of the most essential.
Ainslie Hogarth
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe building terror in Normal Women is erratically paced and ultimately leads to a flat conclusion ... The otherwise meandering plot focuses into a more precise and searing portrayal of Dani’s descent into this desire, revealing a powerful perspective on the unseen labor of care. Unfortunately, the so-called horror that propels the latter half of the book is no match for those of actual postpartum self-awareness, of the lengths mothers will go to to eke out a sense of identity when theirs has been so swiftly and permanently blown apart.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat do we owe to the people closest to us? To the family, friends and community that hold our secrets, desires and shared history hostage? This is one of the central, burning questions in the poet and professor Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s debut collection of short stories, When Trying to Return Home ... McCauley manages to create a grim, slow-building tension, not from violence but from broken promises ... A painful and powerful opening ... Throughout the book McCauley finds inventive ways of bringing characters back in new contexts, although the collection’s cohesiveness can at times border on repetitiveness, some of the stories and themes bleeding into one another ... In both her poetry and fiction McCauley writes with a lovely lyricism and musicality, an adroitness of construction that brings a lightness to her heavier subjects. Within a crowded field of collections that explore family, motherhood and identity, this debut makes the case for one more.
Morgan Talty
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewSet in Maine, the book’s 12 stories illuminate life and death on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation, where Talty was raised, in all its heaving, visceral glory. Stories explore everything from runaway daughters to infant loss and cancer, from beer runs to porcupine hunts, all of which take on vivid contours thanks to Talty’s fresh, irreverent prose. At the center of the collection is David, a Penobscot boy living on the rez, and it’s his voice, youthful, brash, angry and loving, that links all of the stories ... Talty has an incredible ability to take the seemingly disparate events of David’s life and reveal how interconnected they are, how each tiny decision becomes something bigger, how the small moments click together in ways that are both heartbreaking and revelatory ... The collection is also teeming with the undeniable physicality of the natural world ... Though this is Talty’s first book, it’s a remarkable collection that calls to mind the stories of Anthony Veasna So, whose debut, Afterparties, so captured Cambodian American life in California. Both Talty and Veasna So have electric, captivating voices that manage to channel grief, trauma, boyhood and brutality in their totality ... With Night of the Living Rez, Talty has assured himself a spot in the canon of great Native American literature. This is a collection where a simple quest for weed can turn into rescuing a friend whose hair has been frozen to the ground, where everything small is connected to something bigger, something powerful. And in revealing those connections, Talty forms a rich and vast picture of what it is to be alive, with stunning clarity, empathy and unwavering honesty.
Anthony Veasna So
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a deeply personal, frankly funny, illuminating portrait of furtive, meddling aunties, sweaty, bored adolescents and the plaintive search for survival that connects them. Its nine stories sketch a world of hidden histories, of longings past and present, and of a culture carving its way out of historical trauma. It is a testament to the burgeoning talent of So ... The collection lives on as an ode to the Stockton of So’s youth, to the greasy doughnut stores and boisterous auto shops where pointed questions about identity, tragedy and belonging come to life ... many second-generation readers will easily recognize their own stories in his words. But while the past colors the characters’ experiences, So’s vibrant writing is unmistakably rooted in the present. Electric, alive and transportive, Afterparties is a glimpse of a world rarely seen in literature, and of a talent gone too soon.
K-Ming Chang
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe poet K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter — and all the things in between.
