RaveWorld Literature TodayMacfarlane combines poetic fluency with rigorous research, writing about the age-old, nearly mythic question of how human beings disrupted their relationship with these life-giving streams ... Is a River Alive? is a powerful book about what human intervention has done to nature.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveFriezeIn the otherwise understated and graceful prose of this new book, there is remorse, even traces of dejection ... Lahiri is at her best when she writes about the Italian words that she found particularly difficult to translate – words with overlapping or multiple meanings, the kind that lead to the struggles over choice that are all-too known to every writer ... this latest set of essays proves her skill lies in the craft of experimenting with what language can do, both in Italian and English, and both as a writer and as a translator.
Naheed Phiroze Patel
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMirror Made of Rain, Naheed Phiroze Patel’s astonishing debut novel, has at its center a blistering narrative fueled by alcohol and toxic family ties. Despite its disturbing theme of abusive relationships, the writing positively shines, offering a poised multigenerational story about growing up, loss, escapism, and migration ... An MFA graduate from Columbia University, Patel has a style that is highly polished while also displaying the lived-in comfort of a writer who knows her territory. The prose wanders in places but quickly finds its way again. The writing is, perhaps, a bit too beautiful at times, almost as if Patel wanted to perfect her prose more than her characters. The first-person format heightens the novel’s claustrophobia, yet there is also a poetic, winsome understanding of human nature at the heart of Patel’s writing. In the hands of a lesser writer, characters like Noomi, Veer, and Asha could easily become intolerable. Yet Patel brings empathy to their depiction, making them much more than mere caricatures.
Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins
RaveHarvard ReviewElisa Shuan Dusapin’s spare novel Winter in Sokcho made waves with its subtle language and atmospheric setting ... It helps, too, that the book is written to be read in a single sitting. It’s a short novel, full of visually evocative and poetic considerations of love, language, and connection. Winter in Sokcho begins and ends like dew drops in winter, collecting each night and evaporating the next morning ... Winter in Sochko delivers an unassuming but potent story that lingers. What is most riveting is the constant push and pull of language in the novel ... Dusapin is able to hold the attention of her readers because of the novel’s suggestiveness. With its serene energy, terse conversations, and unexpected viscerality, Winter in Sokcho conjures up a season I already wanted to revisit after laying the book down.
Percival Everett
RavePloughsharesUnraveling across over a hundred crisp chapters, the novel moves quickly. There are bloodied hands, a detective narrative, deadpan and slapstick satire, profanities, and obscenity ... The novel’s tension is pervasive and the gore of the crimes permeates the readers’ minds, creating an intimacy that forces readers to look closely at what could otherwise be just another case they’d read about in the news ... Everett also uses symbolism to convey deeper meaning—namely the titular trees. The trees play an important role in the book, referring both to trees from which lynched victims were hung and to family trees that point to the perpetrators of past crimes ... A darkly amusing read, The Trees directly addresses racism, police brutality, and a culture of violence in a way that’s as urgent as it is uproarious.
