RaveDallas Morning NEws\"What follows is an artful chameleon of a narrative that slips easily across time and text as Magsalin begins a rival script of the same story ... In the sobering but humorous funhouse mirror of Insurrecto, the reader may forget which story they\'re following until a subtle cue appears. But the point is to unsettle and disorient. Isn\'t all of history riddled with deception? ... elegant, wry, and brilliant...\
Rachel Cusk
RaveThe Dallas Morning News\"Within this spare plot...just about everything happens, at least in a philosophical sense. Structured around a series of 10 conversations, the novel investigates the act of storytelling itself — how we use narrative to create meaning and seem meaningful, how we look to stories for a truth that often remains elusive. If it sounds heady, that’s because it is. Yet Cusk spares us from pontification or lofty theorizing, instead couching each conversation in sharp and incisive anecdote. Characters off-stage are palpable, memories unfold with care and precision, and each interlocutor brims with self-reflection … The dialogues in Outline, stripped of their fictional context, are entirely implausible, but their artifice is what makes them so engrossing. Not a word feels wasted, and small talk has been annihilated. That doesn’t matter either.\
Ann Beattie
PositiveThe Dallas Morning News...even Beattie's deflated endings are saved by her substantive, fraught middles. She follows her characters through the mundane and routine moments, tracking their thoughts with a degree of intimacy that's deceptively matter-of-fact. In each story, Beattie builds a psychological case that echoes beyond its final sentence, as if the outcome matters less than the events preceding it. Beattie is widely celebrated for good reason — she's a phenomenal writer. Her Achilles' heel, however, may be the same focus that helped her rise to prominence. Her stories possess a white, upper-class traditionalism that is, these days, less easy to embrace ... With this collection, Beattie reminds us, again, there's no clever way to evade experience. Or loneliness. Or death. And it's foolish to expect answers when life is mostly about fumbling around in vain to find them.
Mauro Javier Cardenas
RaveThe Dallas Morning News[Cardenas' fiction] speaks like a wise but fevered man -- exalting in digression, pining for something lost, planting profundity amid little clouds of chaos ... Cardenas artfully renders these ironies with rhetorical and textual acrobatics of his own ... If the varied style sounds wildly disorienting, it usually isn't. The novel's use of various forms and voices brings together a multitude of stories that echo and reframe one another.
Rae Meadows
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsWhat happens to the landscape is disturbing, and Meadows creates a haunting portrait of the unimaginable ... I Will Send Rain is both historical and cautionary, a reminder that our failures of imagination undermine our best intentions, while that same human capacity for invention and possibility help us weather the unthinkable.
Emma Cline
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsOnce digested, Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, will trail you like the heat of summer — snuggling its eerie plot under your cramped waistband, nestling its sentences in the sticky back of your neck.
Rachel Cantor
RaveThe Dallas Morning News... [an] elaborately spun novel, which thrives on wordplay and intertextual echoes. There are no fewer than four stories running and merging through the novel, each nudging and pulling at the others, a feat that makes Good on Paper an engrossing read and an invigorating subject of study.
Lauren Groff
RaveThe Dallas Morning News\"Lauren Groff’s latest novel, Fates and Furies, is the beautiful but anguished autopsy of a marriage rendered in a ballet of sentences...Groff’s opus will leave you smarting and aggrieved, reaching for the body beside you.\
