RaveBooklistIn this galvanizing memoir, [Forché] recounts her political awakening under fire with a poet’s lyrical acuity and a storyteller’s drama ... Forché recounts her frightening and transformative encounters with scorching specificity and portrays her brilliant and courageous mentor and other resistance fighters with wonder and gratitude. This clarion work of remembrance, this indelible testimony to a horrific battle in the unending struggle for human rights, justice, and peace, stands with the dispatches of Isabel Allende, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, and Elena Poniatowska.
Nell Freudenberger
RaveBooklistThere’s a fair amount of spookiness in physics, and the language is seductively poetic. Freudenberger (The Newlyweds, 2012) is exceptionally conversant in this heady realm, and her obvious pleasure in physics...ensures that Helen is a mesmerizing narrator ... Freudenberger is spellbinding in her imaginative use of particle physics as a mirror of human entanglement and uncertainty ... As original as this deeply involving, substantial, suspenseful, and psychologically lush novel is, Freudenberger is in good company in her venture into the curious alignments among physics, memory, sorrow, and the fate of consciousness after death ... With daring, zest, insight, wit, and compassion, Lost and Wanted and its kindred novels gracefully and thrillingly bridge the divide between science and art.
Carolyn Burke
RaveBooklistThe dynamics among these four determined and visionary individuals—and, for a spell, two married couples—are deeply intriguing in terms of gender expectations, the role of muse, the battle to establish photography as a fine art, and the quest to push painting into provocative new modes of expression. Extracting gems from vast caches of letters, Burke follows the foursome’s artistically and erotically intertwined lives in detail, revealing their distinctive temperaments and the inspiration and anguish of their supportive and competitive interactions. Burke succeeds in portraying iconic Stieglitz and O’Keeffe with fresh insight and in elucidating Strand’s elusiveness, while the least-known of the quartet, the \'daredevil\' called Beck, steals the show ... Burke’s expert and enthralling true saga illuminates key intimate and historical aspects of the lives of four extraordinarily creative, intrepid, and influential artists to profound effect.
Patti Smith
RaveBooklistPatti Smith devotees know that she writes electrifying songs and spirited and spiritual poems, yet her first narrative book, a portrait of the artist as a young searcher times two, is a revelation. In a spellbinding memoir as notable for its restraint as for its lucidity, its wit as well as its grace, Smith tells the story of how she and Robert Mapplethorpe found each other ... With appearances by Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Johnny Winter, and many other intriguing and influential figures, Smith covers a remarkable swath of cultural and personal history in this beautifully crafted, vivid, and indelible look back. Readers can only hope that Smith will continue to tell her stories and share her visions
Alex Kotlowitz
RaveBooklist\"Kotlowitz writes with masterful economy and concreteness, and from his meticulous narrative springs a rich spectrum of emotions like light reflecting off high-rise window ... Kotlowitz’s hard-hitting and powerfully clarifying dispatches bring into the light people who love their families and friends and who work hard to take care of others, yet who are undermined, betrayed, and brutalized by violence, racism, poverty, and an unconscionable lack of understanding, caring, resources, and social and political will.\
Ann Beattie
RaveBooklistGimlet-eyed Beattie has created a stunningly unnerving and provocative tale spiked with keen cultural allusions and drollery. This jarring dissection of privilege and anxiety, gender expectations, lust, ludicrous predicaments, defensive selfishness, moral confusion, and numbing loneliness projects a matrix of angst somewhat countered by the solace and sustenance found in a quiet life far from the grasping, hurried, hostile world.
Siri Hustvedt
RaveBooklistIn the present, Hustvedt’s sixtysomething narrator muses over her past, reaching back to wounding childhood moments, and ponders, with stirring lucidity, time, memory, self, and the role stories play in this quicksilver triad ... Various forms of detection, anchored to Hustvedt’s deep knowledge of neuroscience and art, propel this lusciously layered and suspenseful \'portrait of the artist as a young woman\' and rapier attack on sexism electric with wit, curiosity, and storytelling magic.
Dave Eggers
RaveBooklist\"The ever-incisive, wordly-wise, compassionate, and imaginative Eggers maintains the tension of a cocked crossbow in this magnetizing, stealthily wry, and increasingly chilling tale of First World corporate mercenaries way out of their element.\
Amy Hempel
RaveBooklistHempel reaffirms her diamond reputation as a writer of gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic tales. Hempel’s forte is the inner monologue, which, in these 15 incisive stories, ranges in form from brief but reverberating prose poems to sustained tales saturated with evocative detail and evolving emotions ... Hempel is a master miniaturist, capturing in exquisitely nuanced sentences the sensuous, cerebral, and spiritual cascade of existence, homing in on pain and humor and the wisdom each can engender.
Molly Gloss
RaveBooklistIn her canny and spellbinding third novel, Gloss...combines a passion for history with a taste for fantasy and a witty assessment of sexual mores ... Not only has Gloss created an irresistible heroine, she considers our conflictful relationship with nature, misogyny, and what it really means to be alive without once compromising the heady pleasure of her suspenseful tale; and her prose is positively ambrosial.
Adina Hoffman
RaveBooklistHoffman, a superb essayist and biographer, illuminates, in this precise and lively portrait, every contradictory element of Hecht’s rogue personality, protean artistry, and impact as a whirlwind activist calling for support of Nazi-besieged European Jews and the establishment of Israel. Each phase in Hecht’s adventures is electrifying ... Hoffman’s concentrated biography is smartly entertaining and revelatory.
Leslie Jamison
RaveBooklistA tough, intrepid, scouring observer and vigilant thinker, [Jamison] generates startling and sparking extrapolations and analysis. On the prowl for truth and intimate with pain, Jamison carries forward the fierce and empathic essayistic tradition as practiced by writers she names as mentors, most resonantly James Agee and Joan Didion.
Miriam Toews
RaveBooklist...[a] sharp blade of a novel ... Toews’ eviscerating fictionalization of this incendiary reality focuses not on the violence but, rather, on the keen, subversive intelligence of the Mennonite women, their philosophical casts of mind, clashing personalities, and deep concerns about family and faith ... Toews’ knowing wit and grasp of dire subjects aligns her with Margaret Atwood, while her novel’s slicing concision and nearly Socratic dialogue has the impact of a courtroom drama or a Greek tragedy ... Toews’ clarifying novel will help further dismantle the toxic habits of sexism.
Akiko Busch
PositiveBooklistBusch writes about nature and culture with delving curiosity and fresh thinking ... Busch investigates the divide between our visible and inner selves in this zestfully perceptive \'field guide to invisibility.\' She describes wondrous strategies for concealment in the natural world, considers the role of invisibility in myths and the arts, shares personal experiences, and notes various ways in which we are rendered invisible for better or worse. Ultimately, Busch elegantly advocates for \'elective invisibility\' as a way of acquiring \'a more humanitarian view of the larger world.\' Eye-opening and inspiring.
Maria Popova
RaveBooklistExhilarating and omnivorous ... [a] passionate and erudite pursuit of truth and beauty ... Popova presents uniquely discerning and strikingly candid interpretations of her subjects’ writings, private and published, and profiles their family, lovers, and peers ... Writing with an ardor for language and musing on chance, affinity, and our fear of change, Popova constructs an intricate biographical cosmos that is intellectually scintillating, artistically wondrous, and deeply affecting.
Michael Chabon
PositiveBooklist[An] incandescently imaginative and artful author ... offers fresh and illuminating analysis of the various styles and intentions of forewords ... Chabon devotees will relish his ensnaring essays for the insights they provide into his inspirations ... Of particular tenderness and grace is the prelude to his own novel Summerland.
Devi S Laskar
RaveBooklist\"Not only does Laskar bring her honed skills as a poet and journalist to her pulse-racing first novel about otherness and prejudice, she also draws on her own experience of a shocking raid on her home. Laskar’s bravura drama of one woman pushed to the brink by racism is at once sharply relevant and tragically timeless.\
Nathan Englander
PositiveBooklistVery polished and provocative ... inevitably troublesome philosophical, moral, and spiritual complications surface and multiply. As his high-strung, stubborn protagonist undergoes surprising metamorphoses, his high-anxiety quandaries embody the practice of deep analysis and interpretation intrinsic to Judaism. Englander is mischievously hilarious, nightmarish, suspenseful, inquisitive, and deliriously tender in this concentrated tale of tradition and improvisation, faith and love.
Amanda Sthers
PositiveBooklistComedic and sorrowful ... quick-footed, perfectly choreographed, piercingly funny, and poignant ... s each articulate, conflicted, and ardent character endures life-altering experiences, Sthers incisively and provocatively questions crucial matters of religion, morality, inheritance, compassion, and love.
Barry Lopez
RaveBooklist[Lopez\'s] most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book ... Prodigiously attentive out in the world and rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez pegs this expansive narrative to places that have special resonance for him ... Sharply attuned to the wonders and decimation of the living world, the endless assaults against indigenous people, and the daunting challenges of a changing climate, Lopez tells revelatory tales, poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon.
Kathryn Davis
PositiveBooklistDavis is a master of mind-whirling, arabesque fiction. This puzzle of pieces of time past, present, and future is an alternately funny and wistful tale of excursions across forbidding, pandemic-afflicted landscapes ... Davis has created a spooky, slippery, provocative, and elegiac fable in which amusingly fractious and poignantly imperiled pilgrims press on in a blasted world, destination unknown.
Linn Ullmann Trans. by Thilo Reinhold
PositiveBooklistFlickers like film threaded through a projector, shifting between dark and light, past and present, autobiography and fiction ... gracefully exquisite, sharply funny, and richly poignant reminiscences ... Ullmann’s homage to family, art, beauty, and love is resplendently vital, and enchantingly evocative.
Ingrid Sischy
RaveBooklist...generous ... stellar ... Sischy’s essays are vigorous and delectable ... For Sischy admirers, this is a treasure; for everyone interested in art journalism at its crisp, inquisitive, and resonant best, this is gospel.
Lili Anolik
PositiveBooklistAnolik now presents the full jaw-dropping drama of Babitz’s on-the-edge life and complicated personality, paired with an account of Anolik’s pursuit of her wily subject. With the recent reissue of Babitz’s books, this radical American writer of stunning verve, candor, and insight is truly a phoenix rising.
Sharma Shields
RaveBooklistShields has created a dawn-of-the-nuclear-age Cassandra in this galvanizing variation on the ancient Greek tale of a seer doomed always to be right, yet never to be believed. Shields summons the spirit of the besieged land in a heron, coyote, and rattlesnake who reveal, in surreal and terrifying visions, the horrors of the radiation contaminating the region and the hell to come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mildred proves to be a woman of unnerving strength as she also contends with Hanford’s brutal racism, as witness, and endures sexual violence. Shields verges on overkill but offers satirically comedic scenes and satisfyingly venomous takedowns of the patriarchy, welcome flashes of light in this otherwise harrowing dive into the darkest depths of hubris and apocalyptic destruction. A uniquely audacious approach to the nuclear nightmare.
Dahr Jamail
RaveBooklistMatching awe for the majestic intricacy and beauty of nature with exacting and alarming dispatches, Jamail calls on us to respect facts, honor life, and recognize that we are facing increasingly tragic disruptions and loss. Enlightening, heartbreaking, and necessary.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
RaveBooklistEnthralling ... Jhabvala was a spellbinding short story writer of fluid empathy, exceptional cross-cultural insight, and abiding respect for unconventional love ... a richly captivating, revelatory, and important collection.
Elizabeth McCracken
PositiveBooklistMcCracken is a beloved bard of the eccentric, the misbegotten, and the unfathomable ... McCracken writes with exuberant precision, ingenious lyricism, satirical humor, and warmhearted mischief and delight. Though some otherworldly elements feel forced, McCracken is unerring in her spirited emotional and social discernment. This compassionate and rambunctious saga about love, grief, prejudice, and the courage to be one’s self chimes with novels by John Irving, Audrey Niffenegger, and Alice Hoffman.
Tom Barbash
RaveBooklistFleet-footed...brain-whirring ... Punctuated by clever dialogue and crisp social critiques, Barbash’s incisive, funny, and poignant portrait of talented people and a city in flux illuminates the risks of celebrity and the struggle to become one’s true self.
David Kipen
RaveBooklist[An] irresistible compendium of letter and diary excerpts from an array of voices .... West Coast match to New York Diaries (2012) is lushly rewarding.
Ed. by Annick Smith and Susan O'Connor
RaveBooklist... a simmering collection of 32 provocative and stunning works, along with photographs by Sebastião Salgado ... Ultimately, this profound and radiant volume reveals that hearths take many forms, including a book.
Heather Rose
PositiveBooklistDeeply involving ... offers an illuminating perspective on the proceedings, adding to the mystery and power of Abramović’s life and performance, and engendering profound questions about the divide between artist and art, artist and audience, self and creativity, love and spirit. Rose’s emotionally rich and thought-provoking homage and inquiry should prompt readers to seek out Abramović’s dramatic memoir, Walk through Walls (2016).
Joshua Rivkin
RaveBooklistRivkin brings his sensibility and prowess as a poet and essayist to this unusually reflective, stealthily dramatic inquiry into the enigmatic life and work of artist Cy Twombly ... An extraordinarily involving, gorgeously written chronicle of art, controversy, fame, and the perils of biography.
Natasha Trethewey
RaveBooklistTrethewey’s genius for dovetailing the personal and the communal, the impressionistic and the factual...kicks off this magnificent new and selected collection ... Trethewey mines documents, scrutinizes paintings and photographs, and transforms concrete objects into engines of emotion and memories as she excavates her southern home ground and illuminates the lives of African Americans, especially women. Here are breathtaking persona poems ... For all the tragic, overlooked history Trethewey reclaims with clarion lyricism, it is her own family complexities and terrible loss that reverberate most. Monument is an essential volume of piercing wit, elegiac beauty, profound insights intimate and cultural, and the sustaining power of remembrance.
Karen E. Bender
RaveBooklistClosed spaces—elevators, offices, an airplane, classrooms—amplify the inner dramas of Bender’s watchful, anxious, feverishly expressive narrators in her second short story collection, following Refund. In the title story, in which two competitive friends abruptly part ways after a school shooting, the new order refers to the seating arrangement in a student orchestra, but the phrase takes on many shades of meaning as Bender’s characters navigate an array of unnerving situations ... With literary virtuosity, psychological authenticity, and breath-catching insight, Bender dramatizes gripping personal dilemmas compounded by a new order of social tyranny.
Glory Edim
PositiveBooklist\"Tayari Jones muses on Toni Morrison, Veronica Chambers on Jamaica Kincaid, Marita Golden on Zora Neale Hurston. Other contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Stephanie Powell Watts, and N. K. Jemisin. Well-Read Black Girl Recommends reading lists covering various themes and genres add to the reach and radiance of this empowering literary resource.\
Jonathan Franzen
PositiveBooklistFranzen begins his fourth collection of personal essays with praise for how the form invites \'honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas,\' qualities he masterfully demonstrates in 16 thought-provoking narratives in which he flies against the prevailing winds of common assumptions and expectations. A birder, Franzen travels the world to add to his life list, a mission that enmeshes him in environmental conundrums as he celebrates the wondrous variety and beauty of avian species and seeks to understand the myriad threats against them.
Jean Thompson
PositiveBooklistWith low-key yet piercing humor, caustic observations balanced with compassion, and entrancing storytelling mojo, Thompson masterfully uncovers the contrary emotions surging beneath the flat, orderly landscapes and tidy homes of the Midwest ... As storms, gardens, and trees punctuate and embody the richly reverberating family drama Thompson so astutely orchestrates, she unflinchingly examines desire and resignation, death and inheritance, while tracing women’s generational struggles for genuine independence ... invites reflection and discussion.
Robin Robertson
RaveBooklist...[a] hypnotic and wrenching novel in verse ... Robertson transforms the long take into an epic taking of life, liberty, reason, and hope in this saga of a good man broken by war and a city savaged by greed, an arresting and gorgeously lyrical and disquieting tale of brutal authenticity, hard-won compassion, and stygian splendor.
Rosellen Brown
RaveBooklist OnlineAn exquisite, suspenseful, and character-driven tale ... In an astute and enrapturing variation on Edith Wharton’s foundational Gilded Age novel, The House of Mirth (1905), Brown imaginatively, compassionately, and spellbindingly dramatizes timeless questions of survival and social conscience.
Sylvia Plath
RaveBooklist\"[The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2] is a shattering chronicle of a woman’s struggle to be both a pathbreaking artist and a domestic paragon ... Together, these two volumes accentuate the wonder of all that Plath accomplished by age 30, and her poetry, fiction, journals, and letters will remain forever alive, daring, urgent, and electrifying.\
Stephen King
RaveBooklistA sharply imaginative, sweetly funny, tenderly uplifting fable. Divisive times call for unifying tales. Written in masterly King’s signature translucent style and set in one of his trademark locales, this uncharacteristically glimmering fairy tale calls unabashedly for us to rise above our differences ... Succinct, magical, timely.
Joyce Carol Oates
PositiveBooklistWhile in this clever, brain-twisting, Poe-like fable she looks to the past and the future to dramatize the vulnerability of the psyche, the fragility of freedom, and the catastrophic consequences of repressing intelligence, independence, and creativity, what Oates illuminates is the present ... Oates is always provocative, but this tensile dystopian tale will magnetize readers in a whole new mode.
Kathryn Harrison
RaveBooklistReaders familiar with novelist Harrison’s previous transfixing memoirs, from The Kiss (1997) to True Crimes (2016), may think that by now the well of stories about her Los Angeles childhood has run dry. Not so. It turns out that the lives of her maternal grandparents, who raised her as her young, profligate mother ran amok, are fairy-tale fascinating, profoundly revealing of cultural divisions, and brilliantly and wittily told as Harrison channels her young, inquisitive self.
Brian Phillips
PositiveBooklist\"When Phillips, a jazzy John McPhee, ventures out into the world in pursuit of understanding of a place, mystery, vocation, or obsession, he is attention incarnate. The resulting prismatic descriptions power his vibrant, multidimensional essays, which are built on rich veins of research and further enlivened with crisply recounted conversations and convivially self-deprecating glimpses into his state of mind.\
Wil Haygood
RaveBooklistDynamic, multidimensional, and heart-revving ... This laugh-and-cry tale of rollicking and wrenching drama set to the beat of thumping basketballs and the crack of baseball bats, fast breaks and cheerleaders’ chants, is electric with tension and conviction, and incandescent with unity and hope.
Mary Gabriel
RaveBooklistGabriel not only provides vibrantly detailed accounts of these five exceptional avant-garde artists’ friendships and rivalries, affairs and marriages, doubt and despair, conviction and resilience; she also establishes a richly dimensional context for their struggles and innovations, delving into the impact on the arts and on women’s lives of the Great Depression, WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War. Gabriel has created an incandescent, engrossing, and paradigm-altering art epic.
Sally Field
RaveBooklistIn her first book, a memoir as soulful, wryly witty, and lyrical as it is candid and courageous, Field recounts the prolonged abuse she survived by creating \'a safe place where I could toss all the feelings I didn’t understand.\' Field’s stoicism was rooted in her love for her mother, and it was her mother’s death that inspired this eye-opening and deeply affecting chronicle ... Arresting in its dark disclosures, vitality, humor, and grace, Field’s deeply felt...written memoir illuminates the experiences and emotions on which she draws as an exceptionally charismatic, empathic, and powerful artist.
Benjamin Balint
PositiveBooklist\"When Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and tireless advocate, decided not to honor the writer’s request that he burn his papers upon his death in 1924, instead overseeing the publication of Kafka’s revolutionary work, he inadvertently catalyzed decades of legal skirmishes. Balint tracks them all with pinpoint detail and narrative drive, first bringing Kafka and Brod into focus as literary, German-speaking Jews in anti-Semitic Prague.
Susan Orlean
RaveBooklist\"...[a] kaleidoscopic and riveting mix of true crime, history, biography, and immersion journalism ... While her forensic account of the conflagration is eerily mesmerizing, Orlean is equally enthralling in her awestruck detailing of the spectrum of activities that fill a typical Central Library day, and in her profiles of current staff and former head librarians ... Probing, prismatic, witty, dramatic, and deeply appreciative, Orlean’s chronicle celebrates libraries as sanctuaries, community centers, and open universities run by people of commitment, compassion, creativity, and resilience.\
Deborah Baker
RaveBooklist\"...her most creatively conceived, deeply delving, and wizardly blend of biography and history to date ... Baker’s extensive research is seamlessly subsumed within the flow of her novelistic narrative as she brings to life landscapes magnificent and terrifying; volatile love affairs; seismic political turmoil; and gripping scenes of war. With a uniquely encompassing vision, command of complex information, and profound insight, Baker dramatically chronicles the seminal scientific and artistic explorations of four courageous, ingenious brothers whose achievements enrich our understanding of the still-molten, sharply relevant past.\
Anne Boyd Rioux
RaveBooklist Online...Award-winning Rioux marks the 150th anniversary of this...influential novel by telling its story whole. Noting the power of its authenticity, Rioux illuminates the parallels between the Alcotts and the fictional March family and marks just how intent war nurse and suffragette Louisa was on challenging gender roles ... Rioux’s...informed, multifaceted, ardently argued, and mind-expanding celebration of Little Women affirms its pleasures and significance as a tale ripe for reconsideration and recommendation to YA and adult readers across the gender spectrum.
Barbara Kingsolver
RaveBooklist\"...[an] exceptionally involving and rewarding novel ... Kingsolver alternates between Willa’s droll reflections on her ever-worsening predicament, and Thatcher’s on his, subtly linking their equally compelling, alternating narratives with a repeated phrase or echoed thought, a lovely poetic device that gently punctuates the parallels between these two times of uncertainty ... There is much here to delight in and think about while reveling in Kingsolver’s vital characters, quicksilver dialogue, intimate moments, dramatic showdowns, and lushly realized milieus ... Kingsolver insightfully and valiantly celebrates life’s adaptability and resilience, which includes humankind’s capacity for learning, courage, change, and progress.\
Alice Mattison
RaveBooklist...a writer of extraordinary psychological acuity and crisp wit ... [a] riveting tale of friends who protested the Vietnam War ... Mattison’s engrossing exploration of diverse matters of conscience is dynamic, precise, many-layered, funny, ambushing, and provocative as she marvels over how contradictory we are.
Abby Geni
RaveBooklist\"In this staggering tale of loss intimate and ecological, Geni joins T. C. Boyle, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, and Hannah Tinti in portraying humankind as both the planet’s most dangerous predator and one of myriad species vulnerable to ecodisasters of our own unintended devising. Riveting, provocative, and unforgettable.\
David Quammen
RaveBooklistBest-selling science journalist Quammen...precisely and vividly explains how these [various scientific] findings have \'tangled\' the tree ... telling a dramatic, many-limbed tale of courageous theorists and assiduous experimentalists, all portrayed with zest in short, punchy chapters ... With humor, clarity, and exciting accounts of breakthroughs and feuds, Quammen traces the painstaking revelation of life’s truly spectacular complexity.
Sarah Weinman
RaveBooklist\"Weinman points out the many parallels between the novel and Sally’s life (so cruelly shortened after her rescue—she was just 15 when she died), while chronicling Nabokov’s own cross-country journeys, writing habits, and denial of the Horner connection. Weinman’s sensitive insights into Horner’s struggle play in stunning counterpoint to her illuminations of Nabokov’s dark obsession and literary daring, and Lolita’s explosive impact.\
Walter Mosley
RaveBooklist\"Mosley is at his commanding, comfort-zone-blasting best in this heady tale of a fugitive genius. His hero’s lectures are marvels of intellectual pyrotechnics and provocative inquiries; intense sex scenes raise questions about gender roles and intimacy; and John Woman’s increasingly drastic predicament and complex moral quandary precipitate arresting insights into race, freedom, power, and the stories we tell to try to make sense of the ceaseless torrent of human conflict and desire.\
Gary Shteyngart
RaveBooklist\"Shteyngart’s storytelling is otherwise electric in its suspense and mordant hilarity; his characters are intriguingly and affectingly complex, and, while the action never stops, he still digs deeply into our perceptions of self and family, lies and truth, ambition and success, greed and generosity, love and betrayal, and, most touchingly, what we deem normal and how we respond to differences. Lake Success is a big, busy, amusing, needling, and outraging novel, one to revel in and argue with ... For all his caustic critique and propulsive plotting, Shteyngart is a writer of empathic imagination, ultimately steering this bristling, provocative, sharply comedic, yet richly compassionate novel toward enlightenment and redemption.\
William T. Vollmann
RaveBooklist...Refused interviews by fuel-industry executives and U.S. Department of Energy staff, Vollmann portrays individuals who have endured intimidation to speak out against the \'callous villainies\' of fuel corporations. Unflinching, exacting, and forthright, Vollmann brings abiding respect, empathy, and tenderness to this endeavor, both documenting the fuel industry’s betrayal of hardworking people and recognizing \'the stubbornly irrational component in human affairs.\' Invaluable, enlightening, and heartrending testimony to how enmeshed we all are in the carbon-industrial complex and accelerated climate change.
Meg Wolitzer
RaveBooklist...a diabolically smart and funny assault against the literary establishment and the tacit assumption that only men can write the Great American Novel. As Joan recounts the misery she and her fellow writers’ wives endure, popular and shrewd novelist Wolitzer choreographs her ire into kung-fu precision moves to zap our every notion about gender and status, creativity and fame, individuality and marriage, deftly exposing the injustice, sorrow, and sheer absurdity of it all.
Andre Dubus
RaveBooklistThe solidly yet intricately constructed short stories and novellas of Dubus (1936–99) vibrate with a provocative intensity of place, predicament, thought, and feeling. Each is an intimate, unnerving drama of the everyday conflicts between dream and reality, spirit and desire ... In each surprising tale, Dubus, equally empathic in portraying women and men, tackles with supreme candor, precision, artistry, and valor the full emotional and moral weight of love, marriage, adultery, friendship, parenthood, ambition, selfishness, and loneliness, subtly critiquing social mores versus questions of self and faith. Dubus explores everything from a young woman’s struggle with conformity to the tough revelations of a young man’s military training, while three linked novellas about two young Massachusetts couples are magnificently explosive in their bold psychological, erotic, and moral complexity.
Andre Dubus
RaveBooklistThe solidly yet intricately constructed short stories and novellas of Dubus (1936–99) vibrate with a provocative intensity of place, predicament, thought, and feeling. Each is an intimate, unnerving drama of the everyday conflicts between dream and reality, spirit and desire ... In each surprising tale, Dubus, equally empathic in portraying women and men, tackles with supreme candor, precision, artistry, and valor the full emotional and moral weight of love, marriage, adultery, friendship, parenthood, ambition, selfishness, and loneliness, subtly critiquing social mores versus questions of self and faith. Dubus explores everything from a young woman’s struggle with conformity to the tough revelations of a young man’s military training, while three linked novellas about two young Massachusetts couples are magnificently explosive in their bold psychological, erotic, and moral complexity.
Laura Van Den Berg
PositiveBooklist Online\"...[a] brooding, often-surreal, funereally bemusing second novel ... In sync with Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (2015), van den Berg’s entrancing, gorgeously enigmatic tale dramatizes the narcosis of grief.\
Nick Dybek
PositiveBooklistDybek has created a carefully constructed, deeply inquisitive, and broodingly romantic tale of mourning resonant with judicious echoes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and spiked with piquant insights into the loss, longing, and delusion rampant in the haunting aftermath of war.
Michiko Kakutani
RaveBooklist\"While others have established a historical context for today’s political polarization, none has so meticulously excavated the conceptual strata ... Kakutani has issued an elegantly well-argued and profoundly illuminating call to protest.\
Anne Tyler
RaveBooklist...an especially lithe and enlivening tale ... Tyler’s bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community—and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
RaveBooklistA brilliant and imaginative satirist and a contemporary of Chekhov and Maupassant, he is unknown to most American readers. That will change with the release of this monumental volume. A towering achievement in translation, it presents all of Machado de Assis’ stories in English for the first time, and it is a treasury of wily, captivating, ironic, revealing, and exuberant tales of Brazilian life and human folly. These stories are vital; their social particulars striking, even shocking... Machado de Assis’ stories belong in every world-fiction collection.
William T. Vollmann
RaveBooklistVigilant in his precision, open-mindedness, and candor, Vollmann takes on global warming, elucidating the science used to measure the impact of carbon-based fuels and nuclear energy on the atmosphere and Earth, and analyzing the \'ideologies,\' or assertions, that keep the energy industries churning, no matter the consequences. Vollmann provides an extensive, richly sourced \'primer\' of mind-seizing quantifications about greenhouse gases emitted by agriculture, transportation, power plants, and manufacturing, vividly conveyed information matched by arresting enumerations of negligence and malfeasance ... His poignant conversations with nuclear refugees, unnerving visits to contaminated towns, telling photographs, and stubborn attempts to measure radiation all attest to the terror, sorrow, and eerie normalization of this ongoing disaster. Vollmann’s careful descriptions, touching humility, molten irony, and rueful wit, combined with his addressing readers in \'the hot dark future,\' make this compendium of statistics, oral history, and reportage elucidating, compelling, and profoundly disquieting.
Lydia Millet
RaveBooklist...a book of adeptly interlocked tales ... As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile.
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
PositiveBooklist…a personification of unconventionality, multimedia visionary David Lynch has combined memoir with biography to forge a strikingly multidimensional portrait of the artist. Coauthor McKenna, a journalist who has known Lynch for decades, presents the facts along with forthright recollections gleaned from extensive interviews with Lynch’s family, ex-wives, friends, and colleagues … incandescently detailed and complexly enlightening chronicle of a fervent, uncompromising life devoted to \'pure creativity\'
Penelope Lively
RaveBooklistShe visits \'painted\' gardens by Monet, Bonnard, and Van Gogh, as well as diverse fictional gardens, including those conjured by Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton. Lively also looks to gardens as indicators of social standing, tracks garden fashions, confesses her addiction to fuchsias, and zestfully critiques the writings of influential English garden designers, including Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Erudite, witty, and irreverent, Lively darts ebulliently from topic to topic like a bee among blossoms.
Fatima Farheen Mirza
RaveBooklistMirza’s debut novel, extraordinary in its depth and diligence ... adeptly revisits painful dilemmas from each narrator’s perspective, revealing jolting secrets. Each complex, surprising character struggles with faith, responsibility, racism, fear, longing, and jealousy, while Mirza conveys with graceful specificity the rhythms of Muslim life, from prayer to wearing hijab, gender etiquette, food, holidays, and values, all of which illuminate universal quandaries about family, self, culture, beliefs, and generational change.
Caryl Phillips
RaveBooklistPhillips’ hypnotic interpretation of the first half of Gwen’s life is riddled with strategic lacunae, so that the sudden mention of her writing cracks the bitter gloom like a lightning bolt. Phillips’ bravura, empathic, and unnerving performance makes the real-world achievement of his muse all the more surprising and significant.
Stuart Kells
RaveBooklistIn this free-roaming history of libraries, Kells, well read, well traveled, ebullient, and erudite, relishes tales of innovation, obsession, and criminality ... scintillating, often irreverant ... Kells’ revelatory romp through the centuries cues us to the fact that, as has so often been the case, libraries need our passionate attention and support, our advocacy, gratitude, and (given Kells’ tales of book-kissing, including Coleridge pressing his lips to his copy of Spinoza) love.
Julia Van Haaften
RaveBooklistVan Haaften...chronicles Abbott’s demanding life and extraordinary accomplishments with scrupulous detail ... Van Haaften’s expert foundational biography brings Abbott into sharp focus as a photographer able to \'express deep feeling through technical mastery.\'
Julia Fine
RaveBooklistWith convincing intensity and a charming mix of wit, gruesomeness, magic, and romance in the spellbinding mode of Alice Hoffman, Fine offers a provocative fairy tale about womanhood under siege and one young woman’s fierce resistance.
Michael Pollan
RaveBooklistPollan’s complexly elucidating and enthralling inquiry combines fascinating and significant history with daring and resonant reportage and memoir, and looks forward to a new open-mindedness toward psychedelics and the benefits of diverse forms of consciousness.
Jon Meacham
RaveBooklistBy investigating the ways presidents have faced crises, Meacham, whose shining, cogent prose carries in its swift current mind-opening quotes from myriad sources, freshly defines the \'soul of America\' ... This engrossing, edifying, many-voiced chronicle, subtly propelled by concern over the troubled Trump administration, calls on readers to defend democracy, decency, and the common good.
Michael Ondaatje
RaveBooklist\"Ondaatje’s gorgeous, spellbinding prose is precise and lustrous, witty, and tender. As the painful truth of this fractured family emerges and Rose’s riveting story takes center stage, Ondaatje balances major and minor chords, sun and shadow, with masterful grace beautifully concentrated in \'warlight,\' his term for the sparest possible illumination during the city’s defensive blackouts ... Ondaatje’s drolly charming, stealthily sorrowful tale casts subtle light on secret skirmishes and wounds sustained as war is slowly forged into peace.\
Paula McLain
RaveBooklist\"McLain has perfected her dramatic and lyrical approach to biographical fiction, lacing Marty’s ardent inner life into electrifying descriptions of place and action ... McLain brings forth the deepest, most ringing elements of both \'love and ruin,\' the two poles of Marty and Ernest’s tempestuous relationship, a ferocious contest between two brilliant, willful, and intrepid writers. McLain’s fast-moving, richly insightful, heart-wrenching, and sumptuously written tale pays exhilarating homage to its truly exceptional and significant inspiration.\
Patricia Hampl
RaveBooklist\"For all the vital, sensuous, enrapturing descriptions that engender a powerful sense of presence, this is also a contemplation of absence and solitude as Hampl tenderly contends with the sudden death of her husband. An exquisite anatomy of mind and an incandescent reflection on nature, being, and rapture.\
Andrea Barnet
PositiveBooklistWith both resonant detail and purposeful distillation, Barnet tells their dramatic stories within the context of the counterculture of 50 years ago, charts the ongoing vitality and influence of their compassionate visions, and asks if we will yet accomplish what these four 'accidental revolutionaries' call on us to do to preserve the web of life.
Kevin Young
RaveBooklist\"Thrillingly quick-footed, Young’s poems are also formally intricate and fully loaded with history, protest, and emotion as he writes of racial injustice.\
Rachel Kushner
RaveBooklist\"Romy, Kushner has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity whose only vulnerability is her young son ... Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner’s dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free.\
Tracy K Smith
RaveBooklist\"Poetry requires acts of exquisite selection and distillation that Smith, poet laureate of the United States, performs with virtuosity and passion throughout her profoundly affecting fourth collection ... The sacred and the malevolent are astutely juxtaposed in this beautifully formed, deeply delving, and caring volume.\
Sue Halpern
PositiveBooklistHalpern (A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, 2013), a master of precise, warmhearted creative nonfiction and a discerning and sensitive novelist, infuses this tale of derailments and second chances with free-ranging empathy, lithe humor, and penetrating insights into the human psyche ... The adversity-defined perspectives and piquant senses of humor possessed by Halpern’s irresistible characters shape this inclusively appealing novel’s searingly candid yet ultimately benevolent worldview. Finely choreographed and lucidly told, Halpern’s uplifting tale peers into suffering both random and inflicted with malice, then works its way with wisdom and charm to an unfazed celebration of supportive communities—epicenters of kindness and teasing, skepticism and respect, nosiness and generosity, backed by a low-key affirmation of just how essential public libraries—oases, bedrocks, incubators, launching pads—are to our lives, our democracy, and our future.
Michelle Dean
RaveBooklist\"With the word ferocity appearing with satisfying frequency, Dean presents shrewd, discerning, fresh, and crisply composed interpretations of the temperaments, experiences, and sophisticated trailblazing works of these gutsy and transformative thinkers.\
Kate Braverman
RaveBooklistBraverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight.
A.G. Lombardo
PositiveBooklistDespite some forced notes, Lombardo has created an exuberantly cartoonish, incisive, and suspenseful tale of an erupting city and an earnest 'street scholar' intent on making us 'see the writing on the walls.'
Richard Powers
RaveBooklistA virtuoso at parallel narratives, concurrent micro and macro perspectives, and the meshing of feelings, facts, and ideas, Powers draws on his signature fascination with the consequences, intended and otherwise, of science and technology as he considers the paradox of our ongoing assaults against nature in spite of all the evidence indicating impending disasters ... Powers’ sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet’s life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations. Powers elevates ecofiction ... The Overstory and its brethren seed awareness and hope.
Tatyana Tolstaya, Trans. by Anya Migdal
RaveBooklistPraised by Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) as \'the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose,\' Tolstaya, two decades on, is all that and more in this edgy, brash, slyly surreal, and mordantly funny short story collection, which begins with the sudden awakening of a woman’s literary imagination, an inherited gift ... Tolstaya’s daring, masterful stories, crisply translated, glint and whirl with extraordinary dimension and force.
Lynne Tillman
RaveBooklist\"Incantatory, maddening, brilliant, zestful, compassionate, and timely, Tillman’s portrait of a floundering academic trying to make sense of a digitized world of churning, contradictory messages reveals the perpetual interplay between past and present, the personal and the cultural, image and life.\
Leslie Jamison
RaveBooklist\"Within this relentless work of self-scrutiny, Jamison also conducts a meticulously researched, richly nuanced, and sensitive inquiry into the lives of now-legendary alcoholic writers ... Jamison’s questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission.\
David Cay Johnston
RaveBooklistJohnston’s well-sourced and knowledgeable account chronicles exactly how cabinet secretaries and their staffs are dismantling protection of everything from worker safety to fair banking policies, veteran’s benefits, and affordable education, while purging diplomats and scientists, especially those studying climate change ... This precise and fiery indictment of an unstable, unethical president concludes with a call for us to defend our democracy, a system of 'compromise, cooperation, and caring.'
Jesse Ball
RaveBooklistHis latest mysterious, mesmerizing, and insightful fairy tale is an imaginative and tender tribute to his late brother, who had Down syndrome ... Each strange, touch-and-go encounter on their poignant and demanding journey reveals the contrariness of human nature, especially as people respond to the unusual boy. Ball’s mind-bending, gorgeously well told, and profoundly moving fable celebrates a father’s love for his son, whose quintessence is to inspire people to be their better selves.
Jason Matthews
RaveBooklistMatthews spins a mighty operational web replete with exacting tradecraft and horrific violence. His descriptive precision is breathtaking; the sparring between his vividly realized characters is devilishly clever. With nail-biting suspense, scorching eroticism, dark wit, lashing contempt for politicians dismissive of intelligence work, and fury over Russia’s disinformation campaigns, this is a riveting and knowing dramatization of today’s clandestine geopolitical conflicts.
Amy Bloom
RaveBooklist\"Via Hick’s crisp delivery and fluency in telling detail, Bloom uncloaks the insidious treacheries girls and women face, poor and privileged alike ... novel of extraordinary magnetism and insight; this keen celebration of love, loyalty, and sacrifice.\
Xhenet Aliu
RaveBooklistRage and hilarity form a dynamic symbiosis in Aliu’s debut novel ... Aliu is spectacularly funny and deeply insightful. With all-the-way-live characters, vigorous observations, combative dialogue, bravado metaphors, and ninja parsing of social class, immigrant struggles, bad behavior, and stubborn hope, Aliu has created a boldly witty and astute inquiry into the nature-versus-nurture debate, the inheritance of pain, and the dream of transcendence.
Paul Goldberg
PositiveBooklist\"Goldberg follows his delirious Stalin-era satire, The Yid (2016), with an qually caustic send-up of today\'s brand of authoritarianism ...With allusions to Gogol...impishly comedic Goldberg?peer to Tom Wolfe, Leslie Epstein, and Stanley Elkin?cannily burlesques the toxicity of human folly uynder Trump and Putin.\
Maggie O'Farrell
RaveBooklistO’Farrell’s intrepidness and determination are awe-inspiring, her experiences overwhelming, and her writing impeccable. This is a memoiristic tour de force.
Martin Amis
RaveBooklist\"...[a] vital, heady, landmark compendium. Amis writes with buoyant and cutting authority. His vocabulary, cross-pollinated by his trans-Atlantic reading and life, is pinpoint and peppery; his syntax supple and ensnaring. The pleasure Amis takes in observation, cogitation, and composition is palpable, and he is acidly funny. His literary analysis...is commanding and enlightening, while he brings his novelist’s sensibility to politics, especially in his unnervingly prescient assessment of Trump’s wobbly mental health during the 2016 campaign. In considering Vegas, tennis, Jane Austen films, and personal milestones, Amis writes with agility, spirit, artistry, and a shrewd sense of the deepest implications.\
Dave Eggers
RaveBooklistReaders will never take coffee for granted or overlook the struggles of Yemen after ingesting Egger’s phenomenally well-written, juggernaut of a tale of an intrepid and irresistible entrepreneur on a complex and meaningful mission. This highly caffeinated adventure story is ready-made for the big screen.
Jamie Quatro
RaveBooklistA stunning first novel about faith and yearning in the crucible of a strained marriage and a brief affair ...The lyric cadence of Quatro’s writing gets into one’s veins as she stealthily transforms the most common of plotlines into a scorching analysis of the ‘agony of temptation,’ prayer, the relationship between Eros and the divine, and a ‘renewed sense of holiness.’ Maggie longs for a ‘return to a viable literature of faith.’ Quatro infuses that tradition with fresh, molten energy.”
Chloe Benjamin
RaveBooklist...[a] bewitching and provocative novel ... Aligned in her artistic command, imagination, and deep curiosity about the human condition with Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, and Stacey D’Erasmo, Benjamin asks what we want out of life. Duration? Success? Meaning? Who do we live for? Do our genes determine our path? How does trauma alter us? Benjamin has created mesmerizing characters and richly suspenseful predicaments in this profound and glimmering novel of death’s ever-shocking inevitability and life’s wondrously persistent whirl of chance and destiny.
T.C. Boyle
RaveBooklistA master of emotional precision and breakneck plots, Boyle also has a gift for light-touch speculative fiction, conjuring an eerie, genetically modified suburb in the hilariously caustic 'Are We Not Men?' In the title story, a divorced father fails his teenage daughter by becoming addicted to a device that turns obsessing over one’s past into a diabolical malady ... all are portrayed with empathic imagination, acid social critique, and commanding artistry. Boyle’s substantial collection is funny, disarming, and crushing, haunting and beautiful.
Sam Shepard
RaveBooklistA meshing of memoir and invention, it snares with virtuoso precision both nature’s constant vibrancy and the stop-action of illness. Told in short takes pulsing with life and rueful wit ... Gradually the spy and the man on the porch merge, and the resilient yet reconciled narrator celebrates family love beneath a full moon in the farewell beauty of twilight. A gorgeously courageous and sagacious coda to Shepard’s innovative and soulful body of work.
Daniel Ellsberg
RaveBookPage...[a] gripping and unnerving book ... Entwining affecting personal revelations with jolting governmental disclosures, declaring that Stanley Kubrick’s infamous nuclear-weapons satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), 'was, essentially, a documentary,' and citing our tense standoff with North Korea, Ellsberg concludes his dramatic elucidation of how the nuclear arsenal endangers all of life on Earth with steps for dismantling this Doomsday Machine. A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg’s profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future.
Nancy Pearl
RaveBooklistIn classic rom-com style, Pearl’s titular protagonists collide at an Ann Arbor, Michigan, bowling alley, where stoned and brokenhearted college student Lizzie manages to irredeemably sabotage dental-school freshman George’s dream date and near-perfect game. The novel spins back to reveal this fated couple’s diametrically different childhoods … Through knotty predicaments both sorrowful and hilarious, Pearl dramatizes a complicated and deeply illuminating union of opposites and conducts profound inquiries into the self, family, empathy, and love. The result is a charming, edgy, and many-faceted novel of penetrating humor and resonant insight.
Louise Erdrich
RaveBooklistIn this feverish cautionary tale, Erdrich enters the realm of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Emily Schultz’s The Blondes (2015), Edan Lepucki’s California (2014), Laura van den Berg’s Find Me (2015), and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold, Fame, Citrus (2015), infusing her masterful, full-tilt dystopian novel with stinging insights into the endless repercussions of the Native American genocide, hijacked spirituality, and the ongoing war against women’s rights. A tornadic, suspenseful, profoundly provoking novel of life’s vulnerability and insistence.
Anne Fadiman
RaveBooklistIn this crisp, scintillating, amusing, and affecting memoir, Anne incisively and lovingly portrays her brilliantand vital father and brings into fresh focus the dynamic world of twentieth-century books and America’s discovery of wine.
Isabel Allende
RaveBooklistAllende, as effervescent in her compassion, social concerns, and profound joy in storytelling as ever, brings both humor and intensity to this madcap, soulful, and transporting tale of three survivors who share their traumatic pasts while embarking on a lunatic mission of mercy ... Allende has a rare and precious gift for simultaneously challenging and entrancing readers by dramatizing with startling intimacy such dire situations as the desperation behind illegal immigration and domestic violence, then reveling, a page later, in spiritual visions or mischievous sexiness or heroic levity.
Jed Perl
RaveBooklistThe first in a foundational two-book inquiry into the unusually sunny life and exuberantly radical work of sculptor Alexander Calder … Graced with 400 photographs, Perl’s dynamic and illuminating biography, as buoyant and evocative as Calder’s sculptures, concludes with the ebullient and cosmic artist poised for ever more creative adventures and renown.
Pamela Bannos
RaveBooklist...[an] assiduously researched and riveting biography ... Bannos tacks between fully chronicling Maier’s fiercely independent and creatively intrepid life and thoroughly investigating the sale of her photographs and the questions raised about who has the right to profit from them ... aking measure of the barriers women face, Bannos portrays Maier as nothing less than a consummate, prolific, world-traveling, uncompromising, and fearless artist.
Cristina Garcia
RaveBooklistTogether their tales form a jarring and haunting choral work of remembrance and pragmatism, pride and regret ... Garcia, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances ... With echoes of W. G. Sebald and Günter Grass, Garcia has created an intricate, sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question: 'Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?'
Cristina De Stefano, Trans. by Marina Harss
RaveBooklistIn this meticulous, perceptive, and dramatic portrait, De Stefano reveals the full intensity and sensitivity of a trailblazing warrior writer.
Amy Tan
RaveBooklistIn her ambushing and revealing memoir, beloved novelist Tan chronicles with striking candor, sharp wit, and storytelling magic stranger-than-fiction traumas ... In this year of intense literary memoirs, including Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me and Richard Ford’s Between Them, Tan’s is electric with her forensic curiosity and extraordinary ability to extract from suffering startling insights into the mind-body connection, inheritance, memory, and creativity. A profound work of endless fascination, discovery, and compassion.
James Atlas
RaveBooklistAtlas relays all with wry hilarity, bighearted candor, and effervescent passion for the art of literary biography, from the toils and thrills of research to the lonely struggles of distillation, interpretation, and composition ... Atlas’ expert, provocative, and enlightening 'biographer’s tale' is a work of both depth and radiance.
Patti Smith
PositiveBooklistSmith, a contemplative writer of gratitude and reverence who names her muses in poems, memoirs, and songs, deepens her inquiry into the nature of inspiration in this slender, trenchant volume ... Gracefully improvisational, as always, Smith offers an unusually poetic, mystical, and transfixing perspective on the mystery of literary creation.
Jennifer Egan
RaveBooklistLike Dennis Lehane, Egan has combined insightful historical fiction with emotionally rich crime fiction to create a riveting and provocative investigation into the human condition. For all her keen attunement to social metamorphosis, what is most engrossing is Egan’s charting of the psychological eddies and storms that shape her irresistibly stubborn, risk-seeking characters ... Ultimately, Egan’s propulsive, surprising, ravishing, and revelatory saga, a covertly profound page-turner that will transport and transform every reader, casts us all as divers in the deep, searching for answers, hope, and ascension.
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
RaveBooklistWith the combined impact of robustly detailed writing and more than 500 staggering photographs, Ward and Burns thoroughly chronicle horrific combat and relentless bombing missions, the mass deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the suffering and death of civilians, the resiliency of North Vietnamese forces, and the powerful antiwar movement. The eye-opening stories of key public figures, from Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, are matched by those of 'ordinary' people, including American and South and North Vietnamese soldiers and their families; an American doctor POW; a woman field nurse; a young, long-separated North Vietnamese couple; antiwar activists, including war veterans; and Vietnamese refugees. With reflections by prominent journalists and writers, including Philip Caputo and Viet Thanh Nguyen, this is a vivid, affecting, definitive, and essential illustrated history.
Alice McDermott
RaveBooklistIn this enveloping, emotionally intricate, suspenseful drama, McDermott lures readers into her latest meticulously rendered Irish American enclave, returning to early twentieth-century Brooklyn ... Like Alice Munro, McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty, a sensitive and consummate illuminator of the realization of the self, the ravages of illness and loss, and the radiance of generosity. As she considers the struggles of women, faith and inheritance, sacrifice and passion, she pays vivid tribute to the skilled and sustaining sisters, a fading social force. McDermott’s extraordinary precision, compassion, and artistry are entrancing and sublime.
Joanna Scott
RaveBooklist...what begins as a clever and larky tale, all shimmers and sparks, then evolves into a suspenseful drama of profound dimensions. MacArthur Fellow Scott, a novelist of wit and daring, creates fresh and compelling characters and nimbly spans decades as she delves into the struggles of women in a blatantly sexist world ... Scott’s dynamic and provocative novel offers arresting insights into moral dilemmas at the intersection of the personal and the societal.
Diane Ackerman
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesCool-headed, with nerves of steel, Jan undertakes missions as suspenseful as the plot of any top-notch thriller. Antonina, exhibiting equal grace under pressure, and even more vulnerable after the birth of their daughter, survives more than her share of terrifying encounters with Nazis … It is no stretch to say that this is the book Ackerman was meant to write...Every rapturous hour she has spent communing with plants and animals, every insight gleaned into human nature, every moment under the spell of language is a steppingstone that led her to Poland, the home of her maternal grandparents, and to the incomparable heroes Jan and Antonina Zabinski. The result of her tenacious research, keen interpretation and her own ‘transmigration of sensibility’ is a shining book beyond category.
John McPhee
RaveBooklistEight crisply instructive and drolly self-deprecating essays [are] gathered here in this exceptionally entertaining and illuminating book . . . [Draft No. 4] is expert, charming, and invigorating.
Nicole Krauss
PositiveBooklistAs both seekers end up alone in the desert, Epstein in ecstasy, Nicole in wonder-struck peril, Krauss reflects with singing emotion and sagacity on Jewish history; war; the ancient, plundered forests of the Middle East; and the paradoxes of being. A resounding look at the enigmas of the self and the persistence of the past.
Adam Gopnik
RaveBooklistBy virtue of his exceptional observational and analytical powers, acute emotional and moral exactitude, and charmingly rueful sense of humor, he turns in a riveting and incandescent chronicle of personal evolution vividly set within the ever-morphing, cocaine-stoked crucible of ferocious ambition that was 1980s Manhattan. He tells tales of the forging of a marriage; of nightmarish apartment battles with verminous hordes; of fortuitous jobs at museums, men’s fashion magazines, and a book publisher; and of bonds developed with critic Robert Hughes, artist Jeff Koons, and, most profoundly, photographer Richard Avedon. Arabesque, captivating, self-deprecating, and affecting, Gopnik’s cultural and intimate reflections, in league with those of Alfred Kazin and Joan Didion, are rich in surprising moments and delving perceptions into chance, creativity, character, style, conviction, hard work, and love.
Donna M. Lucey
RaveBooklist...Lucey vividly reveals the hidden truths of their tumultuous lives, while also succinctly telling the artist’s own intriguing story ... Lucey’s portrait of 'mercurial' and 'brazen' Isabella Stewart Gardner, the best known of the quartet, is as fresh and revelatory as Sargent’s scandalous painting as she recounts Gardner’s zeal for art collecting and her unique home museum. Lucey’s superlative group portrait, rendered in crystal-clear prose, is spring-fed by her immersion in vast archives of letters and diaries, her pilgrimages to the extraordinary places that shaped her subjects’ lives, and her keen insights into what drove these women to break out of their gilded cages.
Salman Rushdie
RaveBooklistRushdie’s galvanizing epic of the fall of civilizations attacked from within is spiked with references to ancient Greece and Rome, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and a litany of recent American mass and police shootings and other horrific crimes. It is also electric with literary echoes from Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald, and vivid with cinematic tributes to Buñuel, Bergman, and Hitchcock. This contextual amplitude is matched by narrative complexity as René experiments with different approaches to a story that is forever intensifying ... There is a scorching immediacy and provocation to Rushdie’s commanding tragedy of the self-destruction of a family of ill-gotten wealth and sinister power, of ambition and revenge, and the rise of a mad, vulgar, avaricious demigod hawking 'radical untruth' and seeding chaos. The Golden House is a headlines-stoked novel-on-fire sure to incite discussion. But it is also a ravishingly well-told, deeply knowledgeable, magnificently insightful, and righteously outraged epic that poses timeless questions about the human condition. Can a person be both good and evil? Is family destiny? Does the past always catch up to us? In a time of polarizing extremes, can we find common ground? Will despots and their supporters be forever with us? Will humankind ever learn? Can story and art enlighten us? As Rushdie’s blazing tale surges toward its crescendo, life, as it always has, rises stubbornly from the ashes, as does love.
Claire Messud
RaveBooklistAfter the fierce complexity of The Woman Upstairs, Messud presents a more concentrated, no less emotionally intense novel about an adhesively close friendship ... Messud’s entrancing, gorgeously incisive coming-of-age drama astutely tracks the sharpening perceptions of an exceptionally eloquent young woman navigating heartbreak and regret and realizing that one can never fathom 'the wild, unknowable interior lives' of others, not even someone you love ... [her] exquisitely realized young characters and their tough initiations into adolescence are captivating and profound.
Laura Shapiro
RaveBooklist...six crisply written, ardently researched, and entertainingly revelatory portraits of very different women with complicated relationships with eating and cooking ... A bounteous and elegant feast for hungry minds.
Curtis Dawkins
RaveBooklist...[a] staggering debut collection ... Each tale of incarceration expands this theater of grim comedy, repercussive tragedy, and warped adaptation ... In stories that range from high-definition realism to wistful surrealism, Dawkins illuminates the nuances of prison life from the fragility of inmate friendships to the constant assault of memories and regrets, sensual deprivation, the intricate web of lies and power plays, and the many shades of stoicism. Sorrowful, hard-hitting, and compassionate, these finely formed, quietly devastating stories are told with unusual and magnetizing authority.
Ann Beattie
RaveBooklistThese gorgeously complicated, psychologically astute tales are catalyzed by holiday gatherings, weddings, birthday celebrations, and reunions, joyous occasions wildly derailed by divorce, sibling rivalry, generational clashes, financial disasters, violence, and medical emergencies. The directions in which these encounters veer are beyond unexpected, thanks to Beattie’s puckish imagination ... Beattie’s profoundly intriguing and unsettling stories abound in delectably witty and furious inner monologues, barbed dialogue, ludicrous predicaments, many-faceted heartaches, and abrupt upwellings of affection, even love.
Maile Meloy
RaveBooklistInfusing literary fiction with criminality and terror in a mode similar to that of Ann Patchett and Hannah Tinti, Meloy compounds the suspense in this gripping and incisive tale by orchestrating a profoundly wrenching shift in perspective, and morality, as well-meaning tourists face the dark realities of a complex place they viewed merely as a playground. Meloy’s commanding, heart-revving, and thought-provoking novel has enormous power and appeal.
Sherman Alexie
RaveBooklist...a profoundly candid union of prose and poetry catalyzed by the recent death of his Spokane Indian mother, Lillian, one of the last to speak their tribal language, a legendary quilter, and a fighter to the end. Alexie’s deeply delving remembrance expresses a snarl of conflicting emotions, ranging from anger to awe, and reveals many tragic dangers and traumas of reservation life, from the uranium dust generated by nearby mines, which caused Lillian’s lung cancer, to the malignant legacy of genocide: identity crises, poverty, alcoholism, and violence, especially rape, in which the 'epically wounded . . . turned their rage' on each other. Alexie chronicles his own suffering as a boy born hydrocephalic and an adult diagnosed as bipolar, and tracks his flight from the rez and his life as a writer, pouring himself into every molten word. Courageous, anguished, grateful, and hilarious, this is an enlightening and resounding eulogy and self-portrait.
Courtney Maum
RaveBooklist...a work of zealous social critique laced with sexy romantic comedy and a just-in-the-nick-of-time family reconciliation ... With a weirdly nurturing driverless car, a family emergency, a sexy art director, and wrenching and hilarious confrontations and meltdowns, Maum’s incisive, charming, and funny novel ebulliently champions the healing powers of touch, the living world, and love in all its crazy risks, surprises, and sustaining radiance.
Gail Godwin
RaveBooklistWith intriguingly eccentric supporting characters and a dramatic setting, Godwin’s riveting and wise story of the slow coalescence of trust and love between a stoic artist and a grieving boy, and of nature’s glory and indifference, subtly and insightfully explores different forms of haunting and vulnerability, strength and survival ... [a] tender and spellbinding supernatural novel.
Ed. by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon
RaveBooklistTheir dramatic testimonies are radiant with telling details, vital portraits, and explosive facts. Geraldine Brooks tells the crushing story of two young Palestinian cousins. Dave Eggers meets courageous artists in Gaza, a dehumanizing 'open-air prison.' Assaf Gavron tells harrowing tales of Palestinian soccer players; Porochista Khakpour meets rappers. The soul-crushing bureaucracy of the occupation is exposed in Raja Shehadeh’s narrative about a Palestinian taxi driver and in Chabon’s tale of a businessman. This sensitive, galvanizing, and landmark gathering brings the occupation into sharp focus as a tragedy of fear and tyranny, a monumental failure of compassion and justice, a horrific obstacle to world peace.
David Sedaris
RaveBooklist\"...a mesmerizing volume of deftly edited passages ... Sedaris is caustically witty about his bad habits and artistic floundering. Even when he cleans up his act, falls in love, and achieves raving success, Sedaris remains self-deprecating and focused on the bizarre and the disquieting. A candid, socially incisive, and sharply amusing chronicle of the evolution of an arresting comedic artist.\
Amelia Gray
RaveBooklistHistorical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan ... As Isadora plunges into near madness, then slowly reclaims her artistic powers, Gray, performing her own extraordinary artistic leap, explores the nexus between body and mind, loss and creativity, love and ambition, and birth and death. The spellbinding result is a mythic, fiercely insightful, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory portrait of an intrepid and indelible artist.
Richard Ford
RaveBooklist...an exquisitely sensitive double portrait of his parents ... Illustrated with family photographs, Ford’s remembrance of his parents is a masterful distillation of sensuous description, psychological intricacy, social insights, and a keen sense of place. Ford’s reflections are bright with wit, edgy with candor, and lustrous with extraordinary poignancy and love.
David McCullough
RaveBooklistIn these clarifying and uplifting presentations, rich in historical anecdotes and portraits, he speaks of freedom and responsibility and 'courage and patience.' At an Independence Day naturalization ceremony at Monticello, he told 'new Americans' that 'the nation is richer for you.' McCullough reminds us, 'If we are beset by problems, we have always been beset by problems.' And we have always drawn on our American spirit and convictions to find our way forward.
Howard Norman
RaveBooklistNorman puts a sweetly comic spin on his signature themes to create a delectably clever tribute to cozy crime fiction ... With a masterfully constructed plot, brilliantly realized characters, and deliciously witty repartee, Norman offers a soulful variation on Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, while also addressing the tragic legacies of war, paying homage to books and libraries, and celebrating love. An emotionally vibrant, keenly funny, genuinely suspenseful, and altogether spellbinding novel that will thrill Norman’s fans and readers who relish creative improvisations on the grand noir tradition.
Lesley Nneka Arimah
RaveBooklist...a slender yet mighty short story collection that delivers one head-snapping smack after another ... Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she writes with subtlety and poignancy about the struggles of love and hope between daughters and mothers and fathers, including relationships complicated by the legacy of the Biafran War, class divides, and transatlantic separations ... Arimah’s stories of loss, grief, shame, fury, and love are stingingly fresh and complexly affecting.
Jerome Charyn
RaveBooklistAs Charyn, deeply versed in Kosinski’s worlds, reaches back to young Jerzy’s mastering of the art of lying to survive the war, he ultimately portrays a traumatized, desperately masquerading artist 'caught between languages,' identities, and cultures, and between renown and scandal. Daringly imaginative and profoundly insightful.
Omar El Akkad
RaveBooklist...[a] vigorously well-informed, daringly provocative speculative first novel ... El Akkad has created a brilliantly well-crafted, profoundly shattering saga of one family’s suffering in a world of brutal power struggles, terrorism, ignorance, and vengeance. American War is a gripping, unsparing, and essential novel for dangerously contentious times.
Hannah Tinti
RaveBooklistWith life-or-death struggles in dramatic settings, including a calving glacier, and starring a fiercely loving, reluctant criminal and a girl of grit and wonder, Tinti has forged a breathtaking novel of violence and tenderness.
