About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Steve Paul
Positive Harper\'s Literary Alchemist, Paul writes, is in part a response to a challenge he found in a letter to Connell from the critic Webster Schott, that someone would \'eventually try to figure out how to reconcile the author of Mrs. Bridge with the one who wrote Deus lo Volt!\' This, he knows, is a somewhat quixotic undertaking, but he goes about it sensibly and energetically. While Connell, who died in 2013 at the age of eighty-eight, had an ambivalent relationship with fame, he would doubtless have respected Paul’s approach, in which superlative research and a sensitive appraisal of Connell’s writing accrue to form a subtly vivid portrait of an \'introverted rebel\' wholly devoted to the \'quaint mania\' of the craft.
Lauren Oyler
Mixed Harpers Oyler can write with lovely precision...but her characters are simultaneously thorny and abstract, almost ghostwritten, and her narrator’s motives are fuzzy ... The content and language of those fake accounts are glossed over, and Felix’s enigmatic personality stays blurry from start to finish. In the end, his various duplicities (the last of which provides the book’s not-quite-denouement) feel a bit so-what, since he never lived very vividly on the page to begin with. The lacuna that is Felix is interesting only if we care about its effect on the narrator ... Fake Accounts suffers from too little of...the narrator’s consciousness...a hermetic one, private about its actual griefs and incurious about those felt by others.
Patricia Lockwood
Rave The New York Times Book Review In her first work of prose, Priestdaddy, the poet Patricia Lockwood proves herself a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases ... Sometimes she’ll tie off sections with too Hallmark-y a bow but for the most part, her voice is wonderfully grounded and authentic. She writes well about difficult things: abortion, the too-short life of a maintenance man named Darrell, molestation in the church ... What I loved about this book was the way it feels suffused with love — of literature, nature and the English language; for her family, those loved ones whom this book is for.
Roxane Gay
Positive The New York Times Book Review Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing, breaking up some stories with internal chapterlets, writing long (upward of 20 pages) and very short (under two pages). She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. She creates worlds that are firmly realist and worlds that are fantastically far-fetched ... Nearly every story in the collection features one or more bouts of ferocious sex during which shoulders and earlobes are gnawed and tongues half-swallowed ... The dialogue in Difficult Women occasionally falters, tending toward telegraphic language that broadcasts too tidily a character’s interiority.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Positive Bookforum What [Foer has] lost in precociousness he’s gained in a certain self-aware world weariness ... Here I Am has its own darling youngsters and moments of heartache, but what some would call treacly I will call sincere ... This book is big and awkward, not honed and refined, but the mess feels true.
Kristin Dombek
Positive The New York Times Book Review Dombek dignifies the genre. Her essays are personal in the way of Montaigne or Virginia Woolf: bold, humane and more imaginative than ­navel-gazing ... while Dombek’s straight-as-a-­razor tone can sometimes make it difficult to decide whether she is credulous or skeptical, her understatement allows the reader to draw her own conclusions.