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Recent Reviews
Olga Tokarczuk
Rave The Atlantic Pulling from folktales, mythology, art, and literature, Tokarczuk’s novel spins a story that feels eerily familiar and yet totally new ... For Tokarczuk, telling odd and sometimes incredible stories seems to be a political choice, a way of challenging the official histories that get passed down ... A masterful novel.
Yasmin Zaher
Positive The Atlantic Zaher seems to be saying that in a society as unjust as this one, even acts of morality are tarnished with grime. As with the coin lodged in the narrator’s back—a smart metaphor for inherited trauma and the currency of power—no matter how hard you scrub, you can never get clean.
Hari Kunzru
Positive The Atlantic Kunzru turns his attention to visual and performance art, examining its intersections with issues of labor and consumerism. Through Jay, who has lived both as an artist and as an undocumented gig worker, Kunzru shows that these two lifestyles are perhaps not as different as they might seem, deflating the idea of art as a noble pursuit: Being an artist is just another job, and art is just another commodity ... Kunzru ends by imagining the artist’s ultimate power: refusal.
Joanne McNeil
Positive The Atlantic The majority of the novel is made up of Teresa’s recollections, which are occasionally heavy-handed, reflective of McNeil’s straightforward and thorough style ... Teresa’s almost obsessive reminiscing about her previous jobs is an expression of her desire to impose a storyline on her life ... Technological development has a human cost. Reading McNeil’s novel, one might wonder if it’s too late to imagine the future otherwise.
Nicole Flattery
Positive The Washington Post Gets a bit heavy-handed ... Mae’s central drama is the incessant questioning of any girl: How should I be? How should I look? What is everyone else doing? ... It is here that Flattery is at her most interesting, demonstrating that the creative genius of Warhol overlaps with the regular dramas of girlhood ... Gives us a lens through which we see girlhood as a narrative of process, of artistic choice ... In this way, Mae’s story is just like a Warhol print — the same process, repeated over and over, giving mostly the same result in the end. She’s still just a girl. It’s a work of art to grow up, and some people never do.
Catherine Lacey
Mixed Cleveland Review of Books The form itself is immersive, but what is so truly feverish about Biography of X is its slightly slanted world that imagines what the United States would look like if history played out in some alternative fashion ... The book feels like a translation of a dreadful feeling, the second-guesses of the narrative toying with its reader like X does with Lucca. It’s a book, ultimately, that was written to be read quickly and swiftly forgotten.
Jenny Odell
Mixed The Washington Post She attempts to give us tools to leave these conceptions of time behind. It’s an ambitious project that takes on time-management self-help, climate nihilism, our fear of dying and the grind of corporate life, ultimately asking us to see time itself through different lenses ... Neither a self-help guide to time management nor a robust cultural history of productivity. It ends up falling somewhere in between ... Form and content come together: If Odell wants us to see time anew, she’s doing her best to show us what that might look like, how one moment is intimately connected to many others. The book becomes more collage than polemic, bringing many fragments together to see what emerges ... Not to say that Saving Time is under-researched — in fact, it may have the opposite problem. Odell is a wide-ranging reader, and her writing bounces from citation to citation, sometimes in the service of questions that, while generative, can feel tangential ... Her writing relies on so many overlapping frameworks of thinking that it lacks the focus we need to understand what exactly we might do differently ... Odell has woven a wide-ranging tapestry of scholars, activists and artists, adding her own experience. But if you want to figure out what it all means for you, you’ll have to do that on your own time.
Ling Ma
Rave Ploughshares The premise of every story shimmers a bit oddly, an oil slick in a parking lot that distorts the picture, just a little bit, but beautifully. It is truly a Bliss Montage—a film term Ma credits to film historian Jeanine Basinger in the acknowledgments—a joy ride through many different worlds ... This feeling of a slippery understanding, an almost certain state, is like reading Bliss Montage. But is it just waking up, or is it a slow descent into a dream world? Ma’s stories refuse to chart any answer to this question, refuse to worry about anything but their contents, resisting narrative logic and future expectations. These stories seem to ask us to take a pause from thinking about both the future and the past, to settle down into the whirl of the montage, and maybe even enjoy it.
Emi Yagi, trans. by David Boyd and Lucy North
Positive The Baffler Yagi doesn’t exalt or condemn Shibata for her choices, nor does she suggest that her protagonist should be doing something else or that her limited act of protest makes her a paragon of resistance. She’s just one woman doing what she desires ... Diary of a Void refuses to take Shibata’s lie to its most dramatic conclusion, subverting the expectation that she will either have to reckon with her choices or pay for her deception ... The narrative of Diary of a Void doesn’t really end up filling a void—only preserving it ... The novel’s real achievement is its refusal to moralize or elevate anything popularly thought to give life meaning ... Where other anti-work novels conclude by glorifying personal connection or even a retreat from the workplace altogether, Diary of a Void once more refuses.
Morgan Talty
Rave Ploughshares ... the best collection I have read all year ... deeply interconnected, leaving the reader to constantly wonder what each moment will set into motion ... Among the bitterness and darkness, there are also moments of hope, in the collection, that burn brightly.