RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI often wished I could find a brief, clear introduction to Cather’s life and work — a book that would intrigue and illuminate, without bogging down in scholarly disagreements. Benjamin Taylor...offers just that with Chasing Bright Medusas, his crisp sketch of Cather’s life — a portrait, as she described her vision for one of her own novels, \'like a thin miniature painted on ivory\' ... Portraying Cather with the sort of swift, opinionated strokes she herself used to create her characters, Taylor offers an elegant literary essay rather than new facts or startling interpretations ... Big chunks of life occur offstage; details vanish; time is elided. But Taylor knows when to bear down. He deftly conveys the pathos of Cather’s long struggle to establish herself as a fiction writer, and the personal and professional troubles that pushed her toward a new aesthetic ... The beating heart of this book isn’t Taylor’s use of the letters, though, but his sure-handed sense of how to shape a propulsive narrative, which aligns with Cather’s own methods.
Louisa Hall
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"... brilliant ... Rather than resorting to the familiar tricks of biography-lite — dramatizing tired anecdotes, larding the narrative with undigested research about particle physics and Oppenheimer’s persecution during the McCarthy era — Hall has shaped a richly imagined, tremendously moving fictional work. Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer’s life ... The resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar.\
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewOn its own, this volume of nine linked stories offers pleasures akin to those of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, to which it pays clear homage, and to Strout’s own collection of linked stories, Olive Kitteridge — but you’d be missing a lot to read it that way ... A web of allusions, partial memories and teasingly Cubist fragments weaves through the stories and into the earlier novel, fortified by recurring images and memories ... Strout’s brilliant achievement is to create in one book a character who can give a clear but deeply reserved account of what it’s like to be isolated, poor and abused, even as she makes us see the dignity in refusing to dwell on the details. And then, in Anything Is Possible, Strout creates a messier, more richly human version of that character’s world, thick with details and even more profound in its rendering of the ways we save, or fail to save, one another.
Carrie Brown
PositiveThe Washington PostIn her impressionistic portrait, Brown moves some events in time, combines others and scants certain family members. Those compressions and alterations help smooth what might have been an unwieldy mass of material into a strong arc.
