PositiveBookPageQuatro’s characters are beguiling, and Two-Step Devil is often tender ... Quatro is a pioneering writer for a new South, our patron saint of Southern discomfort.
Nathan Newman
PositiveBookPageFiction as friction, designed for discomfort. This is a novel of dichotomies that beg to be challenged, with psychological spaces that desperately need transparency but are inherently, tragically closed off to each other.
Akwaeke Emezi
MixedBookPageHurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on ... Tumbles into shadow. For every arousal, there is violence; for every moment of love, there is ruin.
Miranda July
RaveBookPageThere have been few works of contemporary fiction about menopause, and even fewer that are as erotic and funny as All Fours ... Undeniably victorious.
Jennifer Croft
RaveBookPage\"Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.\
Kaveh Akbar
RaveBookPageHas a certain loudness ... Language is a saving grace, if imperfectly so ... Although a novel cannot capture what life is, its truths and inventions can powerfully gesture toward what life is like: full of both pain and pleasure, with death inevitable, and love a choice.
Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
RaveBookPageAgile ... Bone-dry funny ... When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.
Benjamin Labatut
PositiveBookPageA measured descent into years of research and invention, with little sense of what’s to come beyond a pervasive, unnameable dread ... For readers who come with curiosity and skepticism—the very mindset that has brought about our most disruptive evolutions in tech—Labatut’s book will provoke and inform, leaving us no more sure-footed in our nascent age of AI but certainly more aware.
Tess Gunty
RaveBookPageAs Gunty introduces each new voice, she makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have. She draws us along with rapturous glee while layering her symbolism so thick that the story should, by all rights, drown in it. But The Rabbit Hutch never loses focus thanks to Blandine, who has a kind of literary superpower: She\'s aware of her place in the story, points out Gunty\'s metaphors, arches a brow at the symbols and has something to say about all of it.
Sarah Blake
RaveBookPage\"Revelatory, ethereal and transfixing, Naamah cracks open the ancient tale of Noah to reveal a danger that exists in supposedly safe places, the force of a woman charged with maintaining the world’s tremulous balance and the depth of our mind’s eye ... [Blake\'s] language and storytelling style are as playful as they are sensual, as fluid and surreal as they are crisp and hyper-realistic ... Naamah plucks a female character from myth and imbues her with sexuality, personality and intimacy, making her an altogether more modern hero—the kind of woman capable of giving a stern talking-to to a vengeful god.\
Ling Ma
PositiveBookpage OnlineThe fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days; they clear the plates and do it again. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore ... The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population and after ... Ma’s...debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned.
Uzodinma Iweala
RaveBookpageWith his second novel, Speak No Evil, Iweala once again allows a young voice to ring clearly, shattering assumptions and demanding attention for unavoidable truths—this time about being black, queer and the child of successful immigrants in the United States ... This graceful, consuming tale of differences, imbalances and prejudices is necessary reading.
