About Book Marks
Becca Rothfeld Becca Rothfeld is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard, where she thinks about ethics, aesthetics, and the relationship between them (among other things). She writes book reviews, essays, and the occasional art review for The Nation, The TLS, Bookforum, Art in America, The Hedgehog Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is a two-time finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Recent Reviews
Regan Penaluna
Pan The New York Times Book Review Penaluna sometimes seems to agree that there is no such thing as the female mind. She chafes at the suggestion that women are intrinsically caring and rejects the idea that they are naturally ill-suited to rational pursuits. It is suspicious, then, that the main point of connection among the four thinkers she has chosen to write about, or at least the one that she stresses, is simply that each is female ... Of course, How to Think Like a Woman is more than a resuscitation of early modern philosophers who have been unjustly excised from the canon because of their sex ... The weakest sections of the book follow Penaluna’s rocky path through graduate school at an unnamed institution ... If the personal reflections in How to Think Like a Woman are often mushy and maudlin, its portrait of philosophy’s misogyny is more firmly wrought ... These women have strikingly similar stories, but what, if anything, unites their thought? We learn a great deal about the oppression they faced, which was of course considerable, and very little about the content of their philosophies. What Penaluna does have to say about their actual commitments is often shallow and cursory ... In general, How to Think Like a Woman contains a lot of agonizing about philosophy but little philosophy itself ... Reduc[es] four rich philosophers to mere avatars of their demographic ... Not as a woman, but as a person, I think this is not how to think.
Franz Kafka, trans. by Ross Benjamin
Rave The New Yorker Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation... is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness ... As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a \'laboratory for Kafka’s literary production\' and thereby catch the author \'in the act of writing.\' He has succeeded.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Pan The Guardian (UK) Moshfegh’s latest effort reveals the limitations of an approach that trades less in human drama than in seething shocks, quick to titillate and quick to expire ... These characters enact a plot that sounds more exciting than it feels ... Lapvona is written in the flat, schematic tones of an allegory – but if it is a fable, it has neither moral nor message, a void on which Moshfegh apparently prides herself. Right before she kills off almost all of the book’s characters, she writes tauntingly, \'right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by. So find some reason here\' ... But why should the reader care about characters who care so little for each other, or for anything at all? ... Perhaps Lapvona could be read as a parody or at least a deflation of the breathless gothic mode – and indeed Moshfegh’s refusal of sentimentality, along with her many visceral descriptions of mutilations and other abominations, is one of her strongest suits ... it does not take long for the unmodulated peevishness of Moshfegh’s creations to become tiresome, if only because the stakes of their vexations are so low. The inhabitants of Lapvona are so uninvested in their own lives that even their deaths are inconsequential. They are not just unlikable but doggedly, one-dimensionally so. In Lapvona, life is stupid, people are stupid, love is stupid, embodiment is stupid and piety is stupid ... Being a sensible person, I agree that most things are stupid, but their stupidity is of interest only because there are at least a few things that ought to be exempt from otherwise universal contempt. Stupidity matters because it threatens those treasures that aren’t stupid, or at least the few things that we manage to care about despite their stupidity. Making a fetish of unlikability is more novel than making a fetish of affirmation, but ultimately, it represents no more than the same gimmick in reverse.
Lillian Fishman
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... extraordinary ... a work of ferocious moral and sensual intelligence and a masterly defence of sex for its own sake ... Fishman’s elegant novel ventures an alternative sexual ethic, one unconstrained by conventions but nonetheless fiercely attentive to what we owe one another ... In an age of resurgent puritanism, Acts of Service is a rare and much-needed sex masterpiece.
Cathy O'Neil
Mixed The New Yorker ... although it contains its fair share of pseudoscience-debunking, including an admirably lucid explanation of how diet programs massage statistics to artificially bolster their success rates, it is largely a work of social criticism ... Perhaps the most powerful shame machines of all are social-media companies, to which O’Neil devotes the middle (and best) section of the book... The Shame Machine contains no attempt to define shame, much less to distinguish it from neighboring sentiments, and the book’s conclusions can be muddled as a result. Few of O’Neil’s general pronouncements about the emotion of the hour advance beyond truisms ... Despite her book’s premise, there’s no reason to think that companies capitalize more on shame than on the other negative feelings on offer ... And, worse, O’Neil ricochets between characterizing shame as a social state and as a feeling.
Rebecca Mead
Pan New York Times Book Review A book is justified by its quality, not its subject. Home/Land...does not falter by virtue of belonging to the reviled species of memoir; rather, it flails because it is insufficiently interested in the external world. Despite its many arresting images and diverting anecdotes, it reads like a very smart person’s very well-written diary ... Home/Land has no...through-line, and it can be maddeningly discursive as a result ... Nominally, Home/Land chronicles her move from New York to London, but in reality, it is as hard to say where the book is set as it is to say what, exactly, it is about. The text ricochets from reporting to recollection and from past to present ... Though Home/Land advertises its interest in its author’s alienation from the country of her birth, it is so densely peppered with interludes that it seems to be composed almost entirely of asides ... In fairness, Mead’s prose is so dexterous that it can be difficult to summon the will to fault her. She has an exacting eye and a gift for trenchant phrasing ... But for all of her careful attention to the subjects she sketches with such exquisite detail, Mead is often ham-handedly insensitive to political context ... If Home/Land is often pleasant to read, it is because Mead’s writing is locally absorbing. And if we sometimes have the impression that the book is outward-looking, it is because so many of Mead’s digressions amount to piquant micro-articles about the history of London or New York. In the end, however, the memoir’s connective tissue is ineluctably personal: The random assortment of places and persons it treats can be unified only in terms of their meaning for Mead ... Reading a book driven by the sort of personal fortuity that propels Home/Land is like listening to someone recount a dream whose urgency is available only to the dreamer. Home/Land is a casualty not of its genre but of its impregnable inwardness.
Heather Havrilesky
Positive The New Yorker ...wise and mordant ... Unlike the many memoirs that double as thinly veiled advertisements for their authors, Foreverland ventures occasionally unflattering honesty, not just about Bill but also about its author. Havrilesky is unafraid to admit to nursing unseemly sentiments that most of us would go to great lengths to conceal ... What Havrilesky’s bevy of detractors overlook is the rather manifest fact that she is joking. Readers familiar with her exuberant \'Ask Polly\' advice column know that she tends toward playful, wordy relentlessness, and in Foreverland she relies on the same sort of hyperbole to deflate widespread idealization of the romantic dyad ... Occasionally, Havrilesky’s maximalist prose can be grating, too. She favors long, unwieldy sentences and cavalcades of metaphors that can be mixed to the point of confusion ... But, for the most part, Foreverland displays a formidable emotional intelligence despite its chatty tone—and because, in part, of its extravagant rhetoric ... a tender book, full of touching descriptions of falling and staying in love, even in the face of the profound frustrations that inevitably spring from prolonged interpersonal contact ... not a book that will appeal to everyone, largely because Havrilesky, or at least her narratorial avatar, is not especially likable ... Reading Foreverland is good practice in learning to love a person who can be difficult and demanding.
Hanya Yanagihara
Pan The Times Literary Supplement (UK) To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution. It is too juvenile to attract serious adult readers and too obtuse to aspire to popular appeal ... it is hard to summon the will to enumerate To Paradise’s thematic or even stylistic shortcomings, for its basic construction is so irretrievably botched as to eclipse the rest of its defects. The fundamental problem is simple and devastating: the book does not make any sense ... Aside from its sheer incoherence, its most notable feature is only its punishing length. On and on it goes, sprouting new subplots, amassing new contrivances. Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.
Emily Ratajkowski
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... thoughtful and accessible ... what is striking about My Body is not how different a renowned supermodel’s experiences are from those of an everywoman, but rather how continuous. At first, I suspected this made the book boring. My Body is more of a non-linear memoir than a compendium of essays – though Ratajkowski’s musings are nominally organised into discrete sections, they seem to bleed into a more general autobiographical jumble ... As I rifled through accounts of inappropriate advances and catcalls, I wondered why Ratajkowski chose to devote so much space to relatively common degradations, rather than focusing on the more exotic indignities that she endured as she became famous...But as I read on, I realised that the depressing familiarity of the abuses that Ratajkowski chronicles is precisely the point. The anecdotes in My Body dramatise what is always true, if often implicit: that women can neither fully escape nor fully inhabit bodies that men are bent on appropriating ... Still, for all her self-awareness, Ratajkowski stops short of exploring the full implications of her alienation ... What My Body neglects to explore is Ratajkowski’s elaborate stylisation and its social foundations ... in a book about female desirability and injustice, it is worth emphasising that beauty requires time, skill, money and effort.
Amia Srinivasan
Mixed Boston Review [An] exhilarating title essay ... The thesis of The Right to Sex is both persuasive and daring, and Srinivasan does not shy away from the difficult tensions that it throws into relief ... Dwelling in this [ambivalent] place for the span of one essay, or even two or three, might have been productively provocative—especially when the place is as astutely imagined and as beautifully described as it is by Srinivasan. But an approach that initially titillates begins to madden when it is extended over the course of an entire collection. Though the book’s version of its title essay carries a new coda, the fresh material represents more of a scattershot response to Srinivasan’s critics than an attempt to resolve the dilemmas fleshed out in the original essay. It paves no paths toward less ambivalent places ... Ultimately, The Right to Sex provides little guidance as to how we should actually respond to the moral quandaries that it so perceptively sketches ... This statement does little to clarify what concrete alternatives to carceral feminism we should seek in the immediate future, given that we live, regrettably, under conditions of grave inequality.
Jonathan Franzen
Rave The Atlantic ... for Franzen, if not for his characters, an inward focus is the ticket out. It is by way of smallness that he at last achieves monumentality, by way of entrapment that he at last promises escape ... surprising to Franzen’s detractors, who often accuse him of writing flat female characters, will be the extent to which Marion crackles with humanity. She is the most memorable Hildebrandt, if not the most vividly living of all Franzen’s creations ... Some of the finest passages in Crossroads, which brims with agile writing, evoke Perry’s intensifying quest for oblivion ... a testament not to the singularity of the ’70s but to the decade’s continuity with our own. The novel’s emotional dishevelments—and its aura of apprehensive urgency—feel viscerally contemporary. If not for the resounding absence of the internet, we could almost forget that the year is supposed to be 1971 ... Whether this insight and others like it are evidence of maturity or resignation, I am not sure, but I know that it is one of many tiny treats that add up in the end to a marvelous novel—and sometimes even offer the thinnest glint of grace.
Meghan O'Gieblyn
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... nimble ... O’Gieblyn’s loosely linked and rigorously thoughtful meditations on technology, humanity and religion mount a convincing and occasionally moving apologia for that ineliminable wrench in the system, the element that not only browses and buys but feels: the embattled, anachronistic and indispensable self ... a hybrid beast, a remarkably erudite work of history, criticism and philosophy, but it is also, crucially, a memoir. O’Gieblyn knows that personal writing is \'often dismissed as unserious or egotistical,\' but her \'I\' is not the indulgent \'I\' of the confessional foray, nor the strident \'I\' of liberalism: It is the humble \'I\' of human scale and perspective.
Diane Johnson
Pan The Nation ... the parts never cohere into an elegant whole. Instead, Lorna Mott Comes Home feels cluttered with events, like a TV series with so many subplots that we scarcely have time to take stock of one arc before we are catapulted into the next. Of course, a disjointed novel could suit our agonized and atomized moment, when it is so difficult for individuals to discern their place in a broader community. Indeed, much of Lorna’s disaffection stems from her suspicion that she no longer fits into American society, which in any case appears to be unraveling. But Lorna Mott Comes Home is less a self-consciously fragmented commentary on America’s fragmentation than a confused compendium of scattered characters and dramas. Johnson has often managed to enlarge even the smallest lives, but in her latest, the lives at stake are so hastily sketched that they remain diminutive and difficult to believe in ... the erotic energies directed at married Frenchmen in the rest of Johnson’s corpus are redirected toward the pursuit of desirable real estate.
Patricia Lockwood
Positive The Baffler ... does not read like a glorified timeline or a series of blogposts strung together into a chatty necklace, but like a work of a full-fledged literature. It gets the right things wrong, for which reason it may be one of the first works of contemporary internet fiction to get the important things right ... The plot inches, but the writing whirls ... On the whole, and much to her credit, [Lockwood] avoids the stale snideness that often characterizes online interaction, opting instead for absurdist elation. Many of her funniest and most exuberant meditations are gleeful ... Writing so evocative could not be more unlike the usual online slurry, for which reason No One Is Talking About This seems to go some ways towards extricating Lockwood from the hivemind and restoring her authorial agency ... Lockwood is not hostile to the sapphires of the instant, but she is not hostage to them either—and as a result, her novel is not hostage to the world in its current incarnation ... No One Is Talking About This is a good novel because it is more essentially about the brief life of a baby than about time spent browsing a website. It does not really answer the question of how a book about the internet should be, except to suggest that the best books about the internet will be about the people who resist it. I hope we will read them on paper.
Joan Didion
Mixed The Times Literary Supplement (UK) Not much unifies the twelve pieces in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, which treat everything from underground newspapers to a reunion for Second World War veterans, except their glossy style – and the fact that they have all gone previously uncollected ... a somewhat self-important cluster about the art of writing; a cluster of canny essays in reportage, clawing at the smooth façades of power, and including a quietly scathing profile of Nancy Reagan and an unexpectedly sympathetic homage to Martha Stewart; and a miscellany, including a moving reminiscence about a dead friend and an excellent meditation on Ernest Hemingway ... By far the most successful essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are, in effect, captions that serve to invoke their attendant pictures. Didion is not an analytic but a visual writer, trading in image and insinuation more than argument ... Didion’s studious aloofness is less suited to moral instruction, and she flounders when she attempts to dispense advice or muster sympathy for those who lack poise or composure ... whether Didion is at her sharp best or her haughty worst, her touch is light – not superficial so much as glassy, free of density and effusion.
Franz Kafka, tr. Michael Hoffman
Rave Bookforum Translated with characteristic verve by Michael Hofmann ... Like the hallways forever unfurling (and unfurling forever) in his stories, Kafka’s sentences grow longer and more unwieldy, sprouting clauses and asides. Some pieces in The Lost Writings consist of single sentences as overgrown as vines ... wreathed in elongations, but they are also dense with contractions and confinements ... many of the slivers and shards in The Lost Writings are unfinished in a less satisfyingly dissatisfying way. They are not like The Castle, which was developed to incompletable maturity and broken off in what strikes me as apt desperation. Nor are they as self-contained as Kafka’s endless yet economical parables. Instead, they often seem like musings that someone abandoned in a fit of disinterest or distraction ... Deflating endings nonwithstanding, Kafka excels at beginnings. His openings burst through our expectations like bombs...there are many first lines so good that no ending could really match them ... Kafka himself stays well enough afloat. Even when he fumbles, he never falls wholly flat: at his worst, he is provocative yet provisional. But at his best, he is hilarious and mordant, mired in the impossibilities that he could neither live with nor without.
Susan Taubes
Positive The New Republic The text streaks from Sophie’s memories of her childhood in Hungary to her drab days in drizzly Paris. At one point, the prose fragments into a play ... We know to doubt the whirl of pictures and fantasies that flit through Divorcing in part because we know that it is a fiction, and a dizzyingly hallucinatory fiction at that ... defiantly ambitious ... Divorcing was ahead of its time not only because it dares to suggest that marriage blinds and blinkers, but also because it is an early exercise in something as anhedonic as autofiction ... Kenner is right that Divorcing is a little too frenetic and a little too abstract. For all her meditations on epistemology, Sophie reveals little about her day-to-day life. We learn next to nothing about what she is reading or working on, and we never actually catch her in the act of writing or theorizing ... Though Divorcing is lamentably sketchy on so many of the workaday details, Kenner fails to appreciate that it is also sublimely scathing in its indictment of the male blowhards so endemic to academic philosophy ... Divorcing shines when it retires its feverish reveries and simply records things as they were. At its most vividly summoned moments, it reconstructs Ezra’s tyrannical outbursts or recalls Sophie’s childhood in scenes that seem excerpted from a quieter and better book.
Namwali Serpell
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... sharp ... Perhaps despite itself, [Serpell] collection performs an ethical gesture in treating such faces as objects of attention and pleasure. The essays that follow are wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging...Her clear prose unknots a dense tangle of academic concepts along the way ... But Serpell may be at her most thrilling when she interrogates the very humanity of the Ideal Face ... Stranger faces refuse to signify or symbolize, which may be exactly why we try so hard to read them — and why it is so fun to read about them, at least when Serpell is doing the writing.
Heinrich Von Kleist, trans. by Michael Hoffman
Positive The Baffler Perhaps the most inscrutable of all his works ... His sentences, hypnotic and exquisitely controlled, span entire pages, rippling into ever wider and ever dreamier rings ... oxymorons abound in Michael Kohlhaas. Even Kleist can’t seem to make up his mind about his \'righteous and appalling\' protagonist ... Kohlhaas resembles many of Kleist’s most memorable characters, who are riven by an irreconcilable doubleness.
James Wood
Rave Bookforum James Wood, haters claim, is a hater ... In fact Wood’s talent for appreciation far outstrips his gift for denigration. Of the twenty-eight essays collected in Serious Noticing...only two are negative. And even when he is hating, Wood remains eager to discover something to admire ... Even in his hit pieces, Wood is a designated (and frequently endearing) enthusiast. He frowns over the fiction he censures like a disappointed father. His disapproval is only a correlate of his abiding love ... Serious Noticing is two parts pan and twenty-six parts panegyric ... What makes Wood such a formidable opponent? The most obvious answer is the crackling sensuousness of his prose. He writes unusually tactile criticism, thick with images you can almost reach out and grasp ... Even when Wood’s points are theoretical, his writing is novelistic ... Wood’s writing is lush, but a wire of rigor runs through it, and the exactitude of its argumentation stings. The results are as agile as they are inspired ... And there is more to admire. When Wood is vicious, he is funny. Little can compete with the exhilaration of his hatchet jobs or even his throwaway jabs ... Wood’s style is distinctive, but it is hard to generalize about his taste, and perhaps the best thing about him is that he reinvents his approach to accommodate the exigencies of each book he reviews. Though his judgments are always meticulously justified, they are also consistently unpredictable, for Wood is willing to meet each work on its own terms ... He has stained my vision indelibly, and I can pay him no greater tribute than to read him (and to ask you to read him) as generously, justly, and gorgeously as he taught me to read.
Magda Szabo trans. by Len Rix
Rave The New York Times Book Review The English edition of Abigail is as welcome as it is overdue. Len Rix’s translation is deft, but Szabo’s frank, conversational prose takes a back seat to her sinuous plotting: The novel unspools its secrets over many pages, and the resulting tour de force is taut with suspense ... at once harrowing and mesmerizing, all the more so because we glimpse its dramas through the uncomprehending lens of Gina’s youthful simplicity. Nothing could ruin a book so humane — but to resolve the novel’s central mysteries, especially the enigma of Abigail’s identity, would be to diminish some of its breathless urgency. To learn the truth, you must consult Abigail herself.
Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
Pan The Times Literary Supplement In The the ageing narrator writes himself...out of reality ... The moves, from here, are familiar and formulaic. First comes the fraying of the boundary between truth and fiction ... Next comes the obligatory hint that the book we are reading may be the very book the narrator wrote ... But he is confirmed by his unreality: if he is a fiction, then his book exists after all ... This is a neat and unsatisfying trick. Stamm’s characters, like his narrators, can only exist because they do not exist.
Ben Lerner
Positive The Wall Street Journal [Lerner\'s] least embarrassed and most ambitious ... For the first time, he narrates from perspectives other than his own ... Mr. Lerner too was a high-school debate champion, and he sometimes writes as if he still wants to score political points. At times, he spoils the vivid picture of masculinity he has constructed by theorizing it for us: I lost track of the number of times the word \'masculinity\' appears directly in the text. Mr. Lerner’s other novels are pristine, but The Topeka School is looser and messier, in large part because it is so frantic to project its social virtues ... Still, Mr. Lerner’s prose is too rich to stoop to sanctimony for long. Sometimes, when Adam is debating, his words accelerate until they seem to speak themselves. Embarrassment becomes irrelevant: Every phrase acquires the weight of necessity ... Mr. Lerner can get away with writing so many books that are autofictional because a spirit speaks through him—because his language takes on a life of its own. He manages to shed himself when he marshals enough empathy and eloquence to imagine the worlds of others.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Pan Jewish Currents Plotlines fray and fail to cohere. Characters make a single appearance before dropping out of the book altogether. Worst of all, where [Grossman\'s] Life and Fate is vitally personal, Stalingrad borders on propaganda ... it does not smack of freedom ... it is largely the state-sanctioned \'truth\' that Grossman defends ... Much of Stalingrad’s dialogue could have been lifted from the script of a blockbuster action movie ... Often, Stalingrad’s paeans to the quiet heroism of the workers are transparent glorifications of uncompensated labor ... It is a testament to the chilling strength of the Soviet regime that the author of Life and Fate signed his name to Stalingrad, too.
Gregor Von Rezzori, Trans. by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel and Marshall Yarbrough
Mixed Bookforum ... too discursive to summarize, and I’m sure that Rezzori, or at least his narratorial ambassador, would accept the charge of plotlessness with pride ... fat with cliché-curdled reflections on the violence implicit in fiction ... There is no doubt that Rezzori is an important writer, maybe even a great one. He is well worth reading for the pleasure of his tangled language alone. Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, his best-known book, merits its reputation as a tour de force. But Subicz is a mean-spirited mouthpiece ... The book is salvaged, insofar as it is salvaged, by its occasional outbursts of love—and by the feats of observation that love can sometimes occasion ... a nine-hundred-page book can vindicate its self-importance only if it succeeds as an aesthetic exercise. As Rezzori noted with despairing jealousy, Musil’s tomes pass the test. But Abel and Cain cannot justify the demands that it makes on its readers. It is often beautiful, but it is frequently as kitschy as a cuckoo clock. Subicz shamelessly mythologizes \'a Europe that might still be European\'—but I doubt if this European Europe was really so golden for everyone. Better rain than the brutal—and banal—luminescence of Hitler weather.
Uwe Johnson, Trans. by Damion Searls
Positive Bookforum Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated ... But Johnson’s rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly meticulous ... Anniversaries...is something between a diary, an autobiography, and an exercise in free association. Many of Gesine’s entries amount to love letters to her adoptive city ... Her meditations are dense with diatribes—so dense with diatribes that they begin to try a reader’s patience—against the Vietnam War, which she likens with great sanctimony and little subtlety to the Holocaust. But Johnson’s heroine is alive to the dangers of hollow outrage and dry documentation ... Unlike her borrowed reportage about the atrocities in Vietnam, her direct accounts of Nazi and Soviet brutality are relentless and rending ... Johnson is at his best when he personalizes an aching, anonymous history. Anniversaries’ engagements with the past can be palpable and piercing ... Anniversaries is less a work of plot than a map of human relationships ... Anniversaries is often difficult to follow: It demands an involved knowledge of German, Soviet, and American politics and a careful attention to what seem like marginal characters, who are apt to disappear for several hundred pages only to crop up again. Its content, in contrast, can be ethically easy. All of its protagonists are implausibly brave ... But ... How does Johnson know...about everything? How does he absorb so much so hungrily? His writing is inhuman, godlike in its immensity.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Positive The New Republic \"The 76 pieces amassed in the newly (and deftly) translated Collected Stories are, for the most part, portraits of consummate comfort ... The milieu of the Collected Stories is dazzling, but their author remains unimpressed. His high-society chronicles adopt the formal yet familiar tones of an indulgent father toasting a spoiled child. And despite his occasional surges of lyricism... his voice is dusty with Latin locutions and dense with allusions to Schiller, Montaigne, and Augustine. A reader could be forgiven for assuming that Machado is a native of the ballrooms he describes with such facility ... some of the Collected Stories, masterful works of shrewd sadism, rival even the Brazilian giant’s best-known novels ... Despite the refinement of its setting, Machado’s fiction inflicts unlikely tortures on its characters and cruel suspense on its readers ... It’s only apt that the Collected Stories are so repetitive: The book is organized just like an obsession, with manic motifs that nag and gnaw ... As [Machado] picks not only his characters but also his readers apart, dangling us over the open flames, he can already see into our suspicious hearts: He already knows that we will spasm, not just with fear but with a rhapsodic rush of misery. The crowning cruelty is that we will enjoy it.\
Helen DeWitt
Positive The Nation Some Trick is understandably despondent and often crisply acerbic, but it rarely tips over into bitterness. DeWitt is a hot-blooded intellectual, and her contagious passion for the life of the mind can redeem even the bleakest lamentations ... In the world of Some Trick, the best words are so acute they lacerate.
Ben Lerner
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books One of the problems with the essay is that Lerner does not explain why poetry’s failure is any more spectacular than our broader failure, endemic to all art and perhaps all interpersonal interactions, to communicate with absolute clarity ... [what] Lerner intuits beautifully and compellingly in The Hatred of Poetry, is that art’s failures matter precisely because its task is so vital.