‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Anthony Doerr

Rave The Boston Globe Cloud Cuckoo Land, [Doerr\'s] erudite, exuberant new work, taps all his gifts while moving in a bold, fresh direction. If All the Light We Cannot See was a lyrical tour de force, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a David Mitchell-esque maze of interlocking stories and characters in three different timestreams, past, present, and future. Doerr’s reach is galactic, but there’s also a surprising intimacy here, as the elements orbit around a Greek text that has all but vanished ... In a big fiction year — and make no mistake, 2021 has been epic — Cloud Cuckoo Land stands out. The trope of the child in jeopardy is hardly original, but Doerr digs deep ... Doerr guides us through lavish backstories and broken hearts, war and peace, each chapter a masterstroke ... Layer by layer, Doerr builds a cathedral of a novel, rich with naves and transepts and soaring stained-glass windows, and yet he keeps us close to the pages, turning and turning. An intricate design emerges: Doerr’s a soothsayer obsessed with our survival, fearing the worst ... a profound compassion undergirds the novel as the pieces snap into place ... Doerr’s characters are astoundingly resilient, suggesting that we may yet save ourselves, with literature an essential tool. Their journeys leave footprints across our hearts ... With its breathtaking ambition and beautiful prose Cloud Cuckoo Land is the anti-Twitter novel we need, unabashedly celebrating the power of books and their caretakers.

Amor Towles

Rave The Washington Post ... gorgeously crafted ... The Lincoln Highway deftly shifts between first- and third-person narration ... Towles binds the novel with compassion and scrupulous detail: his America brims with outcasts scrambling over scraps from the Emerald City, con artists behind the curtain, the innocents they exploit ... Examining the dynamics of race, class and gender, Towles draws a line between the social maladies of then and now, connecting the yearnings of his characters with our own volatile era. He does it with stylish, sophisticated storytelling. There’s no need for fancy narrative tricks ... The Lincoln Highway...is a long and winding road, but one Towles’s motley crew navigates with brains, heart and courage. The novel embraces the contradictions of our character with a skillful hand, guiding the reader forward with \'a sensation of floating—like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.\'

Robert Olen Butler

Positive The Star Tribune Butler offers a fresh spin on the conceit in his immersive if uneven new novel ... moves briskly, paced by boldface headlines and tragic events ... The novel may seem preoccupied with politics, but Butler would argue that canvassing the public square, antennae tuned to rumor as well as fact, is a reporter\'s raison d\'être ... With its robust narrative and staccato cadence, the first half of Late City appeals, but midway the novel stumbles into formulaic plotting and wooden dialogue. God nails his one-liners, but he\'s still just a device to vary the flow of episodes ... Sam, too, flattens beneath the weight of his halo: he\'s preternaturally down with Black sharecroppers, feminist causes and the labor movement, atoning for his own privilege. This may be Butler\'s bid for topicality, but too often he sermonizes rather than telling Sam\'s story ... If the whole is less than the sum of its parts, Late City is still an engaging read and a commendable quest into the underpinnings of the complicated, often contradictory American people. More crucially, the novel is a poignant meditation on the circle of life, the wonder we all feel as it slips away.

Yoon Choi

Rave The Star Tribune Believe the hype. Choi\'s collection of short stories is an inventive, dazzling work that probes the Korean-American experience from myriad angles and perspectives, wielding the double-edged sword of the hyphen to superb effect. Each piece is a banger ... She moves confidently between countries and decades, enriching her surfaces with details from the methods of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff to foods found in a Korean deli (beef leg bones and rainbow rice cakes) ... Choi brings not only a mastery of technique but also a wry humor to her characters ... She probes relationships — particularly marriage — with candor ... From its intricate architecture to its beautifully crafted sentences, Skinship is one of this year\'s literary triumphs.

Carole Hooven

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... clear-eyed, crisply written ... [Hooven] deftly threads the needle of social ferment with her own imperatives as a scientist ... T does what all superb popular science must do: It entertains as it educates ... Ms. Hooven plumbs the dimorphic nature of sex, but she’s also incisive in her exploration of atypical development ... a rich narrative ore, which Ms. Hooven mines with relish ... Ultimately, T is a vigorous defense of the scientific method itself ... She does not shy away from hot-button topics ... confronts ugly truths about male behavior, but also seeks to reintroduce nuance into our discourse by enlarging our grasp of the biological processes shaped by testosterone. T is a gorgeous culmination of an odyssey both professional and personal.

Rodrigo Garcia

Positive Oprah Daily ... spare, affecting ... By keeping a tight focus on his father’s difficult death, played out in weeks, the author expands our sense of marriage, warts and all, as well as the complicated parent-child relationship and the layered calling of the artist ... His tone is intimate, confidential, tender. There’s a dreamlike quality, too, as he weaves in Polaroid-like glimpses of his father ... a gentle ironic humor also suffuses the book ... evokes how our parents linger, ghostly[.]

Katie Kitamura

Positive Oprah Daily ... a tale that burns like dry ice ... In crystalline prose, Kitamura probes the labyrinths of language and the riddles of our humanity ... a judicious, cerebral novel, but Kitamura seasons it with dashes of glamor ... The novel’s innovations build momentum as Kitamura jettisons quotation marks, allowing pronouns to float free of their referents ... The comma is Kitamura’s secret weapon, deployed prolifically throughout Intimacies, giving equal weight to arguments and counter-arguments buzzing inside the narrator’s head, fulcrums that pivot the plot first this way, then that ... chips away at moral platitudes while still holding up the commitments and compromises we make as families and communities. The fragility of those bonds. This slim, graceful novel punches above its weight as Kitamura explores tragedy on an epic scale, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Star Tribune His enthralling, cinematic new work...tweaks a simple heist story to limn enduring conflicts of race and class ... Whitehead\'s sentences are beautifully bricked together—it\'s nigh impossible to wedge a blade between them—and his midcentury deadpan is flawless. But there\'s a touch of Renaissance storytelling, as well ... While a valentine to a time and place, Harlem Shuffle brilliantly tackles the daunting challenges of any American era.

M Leona Godin

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... elegant, fiercely argued ... the most intriguing sections in There Plant Eyes form a kind of seminar, close readings of texts through the prism of blindness: Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Milton ... The author’s dry wit runs throughout ... We sense the influence of weighty critics such as Harold Bloom, but Ms. Godin leavens her narrative with pop-culture references ... Her anecdotes sparkle ... Honest and direct with her readers, she confesses past jealousies and alcohol abuse while celebrating her current stable relationship with her partner ... brings us deeply into Ms. Godin’s experience: the things she said in anger and later regretted, the technologies that boost her, microaggressions that annoy. But as she shifts to memoir mode her tone shifts as well. She increasingly hectors her sighted readers. Her provocations are righteous but often fall flat. She neglects the vast spectrum of other disabilities: a patient with cerebral palsy, for instance, or a teenager with a neuromuscular disorder, hooked up to a ventilator. By focusing relentlessly on blind versus sighted she sometimes affirms the binary thinking she seeks to overturn ... And yet Ms. Godin largely succeeds in her call to arms. All too often disabled writers are treated as stepchildren of social-justice movements ... Ms. Godin enlarges our understanding of the blind and sight impaired, and There Plant Eyes, proves a landmark contribution to the literature of disability...which is to say the literature of the human itself.

Lawrence Wright

Rave The Star Tribune ... lean-limbed, immersive ... Chapter by stellar chapter, Wright charts COVID-19\'s arc ... Wright is at his commanding best, though, when he places the pandemic in historical context — his detours into the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish flu are narrative marvels — and in his portraits of the players ... He threads The Plague Year with delightful transatlantic calls to Gianna Pomata, a former Johns Hopkins professor now retired to her hometown of Bologna. Pomata has long studied the transformative impacts of pandemics on economies and social orders. She sees a silver lining in COVID-19, noting, with Italian brio and humor, that innovations evolve from global calamities. One could say the same about Wright\'s arresting book, birthed by a plague year but rich with peerless reportage and incisive critique.

Monica West

Positive The New York Time Book Review ... atmospheric, layered ... West steeps her tale in a rich broth of religious ardor and personal betrayal ... West evokes Miriam’s naïveté — and awakening — to brilliant effect ... West beautifully nails these details as well as more casual ones, from adolescent flirtations to cups of grape juice ... For all its merits, particularly its winning protagonist, Revival Season toggles between pitch-perfect moments and the occasional clunky sentence ... Still, West creates a vivid, intimate world on the page, dramatizing the compromises evangelical women must make.

Will Leitch

Positive The Washington Post ... witty, vigorously written ... In bold, brilliant strokes Leitch evokes the eccentricities of Athens, haunted in equal parts by the ghosts of R.E.M. and legendary coach Vince Dooley ... Leitch draws his cast beautifully ... Although able-bodied, Leitch has modeled Daniel on the son of a friend, vetting his character meticulously. And yet there’s a nagging sense of one-degree-removed that mars his novel. Although SMA phenotypes vary widely, he gets a few crucial details wrong, or at best half-right, from the functions of the cough-assist to the disease’s progression to a desultory mention of such transformative drugs as Spinraza. Occasionally Daniel veers into tutorials on the disease — one feels the hand of a sensitivity reader at work – but lapses stand out ... Fortunately, How Lucky picks up the trail of its own meandering through-line as Daniel homes in on Ai-Chin’s fate ...It’s a tricky exercise when a writer steps outside his own personal experience to inhabit a character very different from himself; but How Lucky succeeds on more than just luck. With only a few missteps Leitch gives us an authentic, compelling portrait of a narrator who motors through the obstacle course of his life with grit and grace, a sprinkling of sex and a surfeit of curse words. Daniel may be locked in a physically atypical body, but he’s just as human as the rest of us.

Suzanne Simard

Rave The Star Tribune A luminous weave of memoir, scientific treatise and Native-inflected meditation ... She limns her tale with rich anecdotes and family lore ... But the science here is equally absorbing. Simard is foremost a student of trees. Early on, she stumbles across a vital linkage between forests and mycorrhizal fungi, and she devotes years of graduate study and creative field experiments to the complex symbiosis between overstory (the uppermost canopy) and understory (the saplings and shrubs below) ... a literary revelation, that botany class you never knew you needed, and certain to be one of this year\'s most widely discussed books.

Rachel Cusk

Positive The Boston Globe Cusk’s language pulses beautifully — she’s one of Britain’s greatest stylists — even as her story spins into abstract digression. As in her previous work Cusk flickers around erotic sparks like a moth around a candle ... M considers L’s landscapes to be his best work; Cusk’s lush descriptions of the surrounding marshes are hers ... The final chapters of Second Place are less vivid and more cerebral as M skewers L’s contempt and her own erratic behavior. The claustrophobia here mirrors the claustrophobia of quarantine, how the past year has forced all manner of reckonings, but there’s a whiff of first-world problems that feels tedious. Cusk’s tone is deliberately arch, but undermines her more arresting scenes and sentences ... Quibbles aside, Cusk is fearless in her interior journeys, whether they lead to heaven or hell, or, more likely, to a banal purgatory of the self ... The novel’s most moving sections capture the delicate dance between mother and daughter, how Justine reflects back to M her own ambivalences. And Cusk plays up the double entendre of her title: the second place refers not only to the guest house on the estate but also to the role male artists assign to women. Second Place may not rise to the triumphs of her previous books, but it showcases her signature economy of style, her fascination with the schism between body and mind. For Cusk, the heart at war with itself may be the final frontier, and she’s determined to boldly go where no writer has gone before. Her explorations of love and lust are singular.

Haruki Murakami

Rave The Oprah Daily The pieces here tap the author’s infatuations with the Beatles and Mozart, baseball and poetry, transgressive sex and fleeting romance, served up with dollops of American pop culture. It’s all here, narrated in a range of voices, from deadpan poet to magical realist to song critic ... Murakami’s encyclopedic knowledge of music surges to the fore, echoed in vivid imagery ... First Person Singular takes us not only through Murakami’s imagination but also his career, teasing out evergreen themes while offering fresh spins on the meaning of \'I,\' an eye that’s both observer and participant in the stories of others.

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Rave The Star Tribune Quade delivers on the promise of her debut collection ... Her sinewy sentences and emotional daring astound ... the novel\'s vibrant sheen masks deeper, darker currents. Birth—and rebirth—balance against death like yin and yang. Quade glides elegantly across a silken tightrope between comedy and tragedy, twists of fate that buoy her narrative to its resonant conclusion. The Five Wounds is destined to be one of this year\'s most celebrated works of fiction. Quade is a writer on the move.

Peter Swanson

Rave Oprah Daily ... a deftly crafted noir ... If you love nothing more than curling up with an atmospheric murder mystery—or binging a Hitchcock marathon on TMC—Every Vow You Break delivers on all counts ... Swanson imbeds unpleasant truths about marriage and money, and whether or not we can truly know another person.

Richard Flanagan

Rave The Harvard Review ... [a] gorgeous, mesmerizing new novel ... So much is going on in this novel, yet Flanagan never misses a beat. His language is drum-tight, his ear for prose rhythms impeccable ... Death broods over this novel; the reader senses Flanagan’s eye on the clock, his preoccupation with his own mortality. And yet the mosaic of life endures—fitful, imperiled, but also joyous. Transformations are everywhere in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. Flanagan saves his most intriguing reveals for the later chapters ... Flanagan has given us a novel that’s inventive and lyrical, a dark meditation on where we are and where we may be headed. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his finest work yet.

Russell Banks

Rave The Star Tribune ... the protagonist of Russell Banks\' exuberant new novel, Foregone, is such an unreliable if captivating narrator ... that tension is just one of the book\'s many delights ... It\'s a thrill to watch Banks pull off so many risky formal maneuvers. Foregone is a brilliantly cinematic novel; it moves in and out of the past and present like a camera, with montages, dissolves and jump cuts. There are memories embedded with memories, agonized mashups of Fife\'s betrayals ... Few writers have explored the regrets of aging and the door-knock of mortality with Banks\' steely-eyed grace and gorgeous language. Foregone is a subtle yet unsparing achievement from a master.

Cherie Jones

Rave The Washington Post Rare is the first book that reveals the writer fully formed, the muscles and sinews of her sentences firm and taut, the voice distinctly her own [...] But Cherie Jones’s lavish, cinematic debut, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, rises to that high bar, its beguiling title a steppingstone into a Barbados that’s both Caribbean paradise and a crime-riddled underworld. Which is to say: The novel’s a stunner ... Jones’s evocation of Barbados is exquisite, her brushwork assured ... How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House [...] could have veered into melodrama, but Jones is far too savvy a writer, beautifully choreographing entrances and exits as she metes out her story, redirecting our attention at just the moment we think we’ve cracked her code. Through flashbacks, Jones deftly widens the novel’s aperture ... Jones’s prose is supple, often luxuriant, but the structure of her novel is even more impressive as she bobs and weaves through the aftermath of two mysterious crimes. The pieces snap together, one by one, exposing the consequences of dreams deferred. In Jones’s telling, sin and redemption are both personal and communal. With its rich imagery, confident pacing and moral vision, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House reads like a third or fourth book. Here’s the launch of a stellar literary career.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Rave The Star Tribune [Gates\'] vibrant, incisive The Black Church, a companion book to the new PBS series, leads us along hidden corridors as it unearths revelatory stories while pounding the pulpit with passionate arguments about faith and justice ... With a surgeon\'s skill, Gates teases out the threads of the various Black denominations ... Meticulously reported, the book is its own rich sermon. Gates is proselytizing us, and it\'s nigh impossible to not stamp our feet and shout, \'Amen!\' ... The Black Church is a marvel, a breezy, illuminating tale of a distinctly powerful institution at the beating heart of the American Experiment, and an invaluable work from a masterful chronicler.

Chang-Rae Lee

Positive The Star Tribune ... rangy, propulsive ... expands on these preoccupations by embracing dark comedy in the manner of Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders ... Even if Lee doesn\'t quite match the success of Shteyngart\'s Lake Success, he spins an engaging, layered tale that ferries the reader from the bucolic comforts of a New Jersey university town to an Asia in the throes of economic and cultural change ... At its best, My Year Abroad is a pulse-raising page-turner, with dazzling moments and a Saunders-esque riot of marketing gimmicks and junk food. Unfortunately, though, Lee never quite nails Tiller\'s voice, which comes across as overly fussy and long-winded. Less would have been more ... The Val story line, too, fails to deliver the emotional charge we feel as Pong tracks his white whale across the largest continent ... And yet Lee still shines as one of our most inventive writers and moralists, a guide we can trust on any odyssey.

Daniel Loedel

Rave The Harvard Review ... marvel of a literary debut ... If Loedel’s plot sounds like high romance, it is … until it isn’t. He deftly navigates the underbelly of an oppressive regime where ghosts of the past mingle with survivors ... He masterfully treads a high wire between grisly crimes and playful magical realism, paying homage not only to the titans of Latin American literature but also to genre-bending tales such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. The fantastical may be the only way of speaking the unspeakable, of excavating the horrors of the twentieth century ... It’s rare to find an accomplished first novel that moves boldly past coming-of-age conventions and sets the journeys of its characters in relief against a backdrop of grim history. As Loedel suggests, that history haunts us still. He reimagines the platitude \'the personal is political\' by injecting enchantment and morality into one man’s entanglements with forces aligned against him. Hades, Argentina announces a major career, and we can expect great work from this gifted writer in the future.

Joan Didion

Rave O, The Oprah Magazine Through her work, Didion has conjured a culture that’s dazzling and dangerous, mythic and mundane ... [Let Me Tell You What I Mean] brings together previously uncollected pieces in a prismatic retrospective; the critic Hilton Als charts the arc of her career in a rich foreword that’s almost as long as the book itself. The essays could easily feel like bits from the cutting-room floor, but as usual, Didion exceeds our expectations ... there’s also plenty of vintage Didion: her passion for writing is omnipresent, a compulsion to write about writing, which sparks her finest meditations here. These interior debates about what she does, and how and why she does it, resonate ... the Didion of Let Me Tell You What I Mean is also a revelation, as the woman behind the curtain steps forward, more intimate somehow, with flashes of feminist feeling ... Brava.

Daniel Lieberman

Rave The Boston Globe ... sweeping, vigorous ... There’s a dry, didactic quality to Exercised; Lieberman’s a top-flight scientist and cogent writer, but the book lacks the stylistic spark of a Robert Sapolsky or David Eagleman. And yet Lieberman’s clarity never wavers. When the book shifts to prescriptive sections, he readily acknowledges the data is more suggestive than certain ... He’s particularly good at busting myths, organizing chapters around debunking assumptions about what constitutes fitness and health ... His answers to physiological questions dispel lazy platitudes...They also inspire ... If Exercised occasionally reads with the tone of your stern-voiced mother, wagging her finger and imploring you to eat your vegetables and jog around the block, then all to the good. Lieberman has accomplished his mission. But the science beneath his arguments is revelatory, with thrilling implications for evolutionary biology. Written in a brisk prose, with ample graphs, Exercised is an excellent compendium on the broad medical advantages of exercise and a roadmap out of our pandemic to better health.

Michael Bible

Rave The New York Times ... crystalline ... Bible knows his Bible Belt well, its family secrets and summer storms, the rigid social grids through which sex sluices like lake water. He’s drawn to the consequences of rebellion ... Bible beautifully captures the listless yaw of these outsiders as they search for meaning in a place where there’s little to do but drive 90 miles an hour along back roads, light joints and hook up ... Bible treads a fine line between ripe prose and a staccato cadence as he moves into the stories of others scarred by Iggy’s crime. The novel shifts, polyphonic, between timelines, jig-sawing its narrative, revealing depths in the shallowest of characters. Harmony, unsurprisingly, is more nuanced than a Hardee’s menu. There’s the occasional misfire — a diaper-clad 5-year-old, a mystical mood Cleo calls the Constant — but Bible is spot on as he illuminates the patterns of calamity, how they radiate outward ... By necessity Southern writers are uneasy moralists: They go along to get along, plotting their transgressions on the page. It’s fitting, then, that here Bible draws up his own Holy Writ, both recoiling from religious fervor and bowing to its power. At just over 100 pages, The Ancient Hours may seem a slender meditation on a life that jumps the guardrails of right-and-wrong, but it packs a wallop: The actual culprits may be the folks in the pulpit and pews, fanning away the poor in spirit with their \'thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers and thoughts and prayers.\'

Nicholas A Christakis

Rave The Star Tribune ... capacious, gripping ... Christakis grounds his account not only in the events of recent months but also in a larger history. As he rightly reminds us, pathogens have flitted between humans since the dawn of communal living ... Apollo’s Arrow weaves in graphs and tables, all set against crisp, concise storytelling. The book derives its title from the Iliad but wears its erudition lightly, framing our plague with sociological insights and sparkling anecdotes ... From hard-hit locales such as Brooklyn and the Sun Belt, Christakis illuminates our evolving knowledge of SARS-CoV-2, a virus initially thought to attack the lungs but now recognized as a multi-organ predator. He paints an indelible portrait of a world transformed, from goats and elephants skulking along city streets to the lifting of pollution, as in Jalandhar, India, where citizens could view, for the first time, Himalayan peaks over 100 miles away.

Heather Clark

Rave O, the Oprah Magazine Red Comet, Heather Clark’s heroic biography of Sylvia Plath, draws on a plethora of untapped archives and letters—and even a previously undiscovered novel—to resurrect Plath ... illuminates Plath’s life in unprecedented detail. Suicide attempts take a backseat to fiercely focused genius ... Red Comet achieves the remarkable: It’s a majestic tome with the narrative propulsion of a thriller. We now have the complete story.

Heather Clark

Rave The Star Tribune ... [an] incandescent, richly researched biography ... Red Comet takes us on a literary picaresque, drawing on untapped archives, Plath’s complete correspondence, interviews with surviving members of the couple’s social and professional circles, and, most crucially, on Hughes’ journals and letters. From both perspectives Clark evokes how their common purpose rose and later diverged, invaluable reportage missing from other books ... Clark delves deeper than biographers who have gone before: We see the poet as if peering through the Hubble Telescope for the first time, blurred galaxies and nebulas bursting into crystalline detail. Yet this gold standard of a biography does something more: Red Comet is a page-turner, particularly when Clark shifts to Plath’s final two years in England ... By centering Plath’s evolving command of craft—by focusing on her peerless lyrical ear—Clark peels away clichéd interpretations much as the poet shed her false selves ... A bravura performance, Red Comet is the one we’ve waited for.

Don Delillo

Positive The Star Tribune DeLillo masterfully builds thin layers of dread and desire: Musings on Einstein; sex in a bathroom stall; chaos in the city’s streets ... The second half of the book doesn’t quite deliver on the first’s premise—a grating editorial voice occasionally intrudes—but DeLillo’s prose is always supple, his gaze into our culture’s black hole as penetrating as ever. Equal parts lush and spare, The Silence never settles for easy answers.

Alex Ross

Positive The Star Tribune He fleshes out his story with consummate authority and élan, even if he occasionally falls into the trap of elites-speaking-only-to-elites. But perhaps that elitism is purposeful, given Wagner\'s audiences. Ross is an unabashed Europhile ... Ross is particularly adept at highlighting sexual tensions, not only in the operas but also in the composer\'s life ... Ross\' book is one of this year\'s intellectual triumphs.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Rave Chapter 16 ...vibrant ... Dear Ann steers clear of politics; this is not a war novel. Mason is more invested in charting Ann’s inner life as a passionate disciple of literature and how a first great love casts a shadow over the rest of her life ... a crisp collage, the whole of a life greater than the sum of its parts. Mason’s in complete command, from the alternate-reality premise right to the shocking plot twist at the end. Despite its serious themes, Dear Ann is a limpid, riveting read, set in a deceptively light register

Ayad Akhtar

Rave Chapter 16 What emerges is similar to a Calder mobile, an original assemblage of bright colors and jagged shards that move and twirl into a coherent, strikingly beautiful whole ... Homeland Elegies unfolds across a mash of forms, from family saga to political op-ed to Muslim history ... As with Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrative proper may be a farce, with the real action unfolding in a series of carefully inserted footnotes. Each section conjures its own erudite magic ... moments of vulnerability enrich our understanding. Homeland Elegies, then, is a multitude of elegies: for Akhtar’s ancestral Pakistan, for an America that’s lost its way, for Islam, for his youth, for the act of storytelling itself. And yet here he’s forged something vivid, compelling and possibly new.

Ali Smith

Rave The Star Tribune ... a shimmering tapestry of rage and redemption ... She’s at the top of her game here, dovetailing flashbacks with foreground story in sumptuous sentences, capturing the shameful plight of World War II—and present-day—detainees. Summer argues passionately for art as our best weapon to vanquish the chaos of the present, probing the season’s gossamer mystique with a delicate array of motifs ... She\'s...a magnanimous stylist with an ear like none other, a command of both mania and poise that feels beautifully tailored to our time. With its jubilant final act, the seasonal quartet assures that Smith will be studied for decades to come, a beacon to future readers eager to wrest meaning from our turbulent moment.5

Isabel Wilkerson

Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune ...gorgeously crafted ... Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls ... a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists.

Maggie O'Farrell

Rave Chapter16 ... audacious, beguiling ... In our own pandemic era, her novel resonates, filling in the lacunae of literary history, an ode to intimate pleasures and ineffable pain ... Her novel is embroidered with humor as well as sorrow, characters true to their time and yet immediate, reminiscent of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. Faulkner once called the Bard’s oeuvre \'a casebook on mankind\'; here O’Farrell picks up the baton of all great literature, giving us an indelible, moving book destined to stand the test of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The test of time.

Mark Doty

Positive San Francisco Chronicle ... exuberant if uneven ... Doty shifts between exquisite close readings and tales of his own sexual awakening, critical analysis blended with an autobiographical prose poem, a kind of call-and-response to Whitman ... A leading poet in his own right, Doty brings an attuned eye and ear to the backstory behind Whitman’s 1855 poetry collection ... This is Doty at his best: In gorgeous, calibrated sentences, he evokes the flourishes and sprung rhythms that make Whitman so contemporary, the poet’s intimate conversations with his readers, lines that we now hear as come-ons ... Less successful are Doty’s own confessions...These sections come across as self-regarding, a tad fulsome ... Quibble aside, Doty’s passion is contagious at a moment when the American body politic is under vicious assault. An assured, eloquent study of our poetic progenitor, What Is the Grass makes the case for Whitman as the medicine we need.

Samantha Irby

Rave Nashville Scene ...a spicy cocktail that will intoxicate readers — a few fingers of Dorothy Parker and a splash of comedian Wanda Sykes, as bracing and delicious as a cosmopolitan ... If zingers were money, she’d be a zillionaire ... her pieces crackle with conversational electricity, equal parts stand-up comedy and literary craft ... there’s a tenderness beneath the attitude. Irby approaches personal experience with a keen clinical eye ... Immersed in the sparkling flow of Irby’s prose, it’s almost possible to forget there’s a pandemic happening.

Robert Kolker

Rave The Star Tribune A weave of gripping reportage and scientific detective story, Hidden Valley Road plumbs the heart-wrenching tragedies and surprising triumphs of the Galvins...in a page-turner ... He moves nimbly from the foreground plot to broader clinical investigations and the terra incognita of the brain ... a tale like no other ... destined to become a classic of narrative nonfiction.

Anne Tyler

Rave The Oprah Magazines ... entrancing ... Tyler is a keen-eyed but tenderhearted social observer ... Few writers flesh out the malaise of middle age with such delicate, assured strokes. Tyler is an American Vermeer whose canvases keep opening whole worlds within compact frames.

Hilary Mantel

Rave The Star Tribune It’s a stunning capstone to an epic that’s both engrossing history and an unsurpassed literary achievement ... The Mirror and the Light is long and lacks the galvanizing presence of Boleyn, whose arc drove the earlier novels. (Henry’s third and fourth queens, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, are realized here, but they’re no match for Boleyn’s Lady Macbeth antics.) Mantel has far more political ground and plot twists to cover, requiring a reader’s patience with the intricacies of backroom deals and the fledgling Reformation. But the narrative never feels like a maze; Mantel’s language sings gloriously across the register, from lyric to comic to tragic, her punctuation and use of pronouns as liquid and expressionistic as Monet’s brushwork in his late canvases ... The Mirror and the Light is a diadem of riches, binding together the complex pieces of Cromwell’s character while leading inexorably toward the scaffold. With the trilogy now complete, Mantel cements her position as one of our greatest literary stylists and innovators.

Hilary Mantel

Rave The Oprah Magazine The Mirror & the Light bears the stamp of Mantel’s genius; it’s a richly hued mural of meticulous research, enthralling characters, and expressionistic language. She is our literary Michelangelo. In Cromwell, a striver who will do anything to survive, she lets us glimpse the invention of modernity. Teeming with pageantry, intrigue, sex, and salvation, The Mirror & the Light reflects the looming tensions of every era, between those who hoard power and those who crave it.

Steve Inskeep

Rave The Star Tribune ... absorbing ... Inskeep...deftly traces how the marriage mirrored the era’s ferment ... Vibrant and propulsive, Imperfect Union is by far Inskeep’s strongest book, reminiscent of work by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham. Inskeep re-creates the darker currents beneath Manifest Destiny while rescuing John and Jessie from the margins of history, seeing them as precursors to the epic struggles ahead ... a pure delight to read, but beneath Inskeep’s stylish sentences lurk astute insights, illuminating the outsized role celebrity plays in our culture, the outward triumphs and quiet pain it inflicted on two lives that left an indelible, if neglected, mark on our politics.

Erika Fatland

Rave The Star Tribune Fatland’s anecdotes are rich and revelatory ... Sovietistan blends complex history with Fatland’s own clear-eyed reporting, the devastation of the Soviet era always in the background (and sometimes the foreground). With the Russian Bear once again on the move, she plumbs the high cost of dictatorships and the human yearning for self-determination. Sovietistan is a perspicacious, vital book about little-known places and real lives; it deserves a wide readership.

Carola Saavedra, Trans. by Daniel Hahn

Rave Ploughshares ... mesmerizing ... Saavedra brilliantly plays with the epistolary form, crafting the letters into a story-within-a-story ... The erotic storyline peels away to reveal the author’s underlying preoccupation: the chasm of miscommunication between men and women ... It’s a testament to Saavedra’s daring that she explores our desires panoramically, careful not to judge. The novel is both visceral and spare, stitched with motifs ... the novel startles with the inevitability of fate. Obsessive love is a theme as old as the Iliad, but here Saavedra gives it her own enigmatic twist, joining the ranks of Latin American authors who are transforming our literary landscape in vivid, thrilling ways.

Colum McCann

Rave The Oprah Magazine McCann, who began his career as a reporter, examines with skill and empathy the characters’ private agonies as they play out against the backdrop of war; his virtuosic storytelling conjures the confounding realities of the Israeli occupation ... Throughout, there’s a rich tension between the factual and the imagined, and in the way particular tribulations are part of a universal experience ... Apeirogon reminds us that such incandescent art evokes humility and light in the face of oppression and loss.

Aravind Adiga

Rave The Star Tribune The Booker Prize-winning writer Aravind Adiga brings fresh urgency to the issue [of the global migrant crisis] in his searing, inventive Amnesty ... Amnesty is Adiga’s most accomplished novel yet, a gorgeously crafted page-turner with brains and heart, illuminating the courage of displaced peoples and the cruelties of those who conspire against them.

Liz Moore

Rave Oprah Magazine ... electrifying ... In taut, propulsive sentences, Moore draws on the police procedural in conjuring a community on the brink while exploring tensions between two sisters on either side of the thin blue line ... the author has something more transgressive in mind—that is, to use the tropes of crime fiction in composing a deeper morality tale in which the heroes and villains commingle and even change places. Among the first novelists to dive into the riptides of the opioid crisis, Moore navigates assuredly through plot twists and big reveals ... equal parts literary and thrilling—a compassionate, multidimensional look at an epidemic that surrounds us ... it’s got all the ingredients that make for an unputdownable mystery, but it’s got something more, a narrator who leads you into unexpected places, and keeps surprising you until the end.

Thomas Pierce

Rave The Star Tribune Thomas Pierce\'s debut collection, Hall of Small Mammals, taps the aquifer of Southern literature but blends in supernatural elements with a light, deft touch, echoes of García Márquez among the biscuits and magnolias. A praline sweetness glazes the surface of these stories, offset by the occasional bitter aftertaste. Pierce knows his people well, connecting their conflicts to a deeper narrative about the human condition ... Although these stories are suffused in whimsy, Pierce plumbs the darkness that laps at his characters\' lives. He\'s particularly astute in his grasp of the ways men oppress each other, the joys and limitations of the father-son relationship.

Binyamin Appelbaum

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review ...vibrant, trenchant ... The Economists’ Hour...vividly narrates the advance of Friedman and his peers out of academia and into the marbled corridors of Washington, D.C. ... Appelbaum paints a lavish group portrait, from the famous, such as Paul Volcker and Arthur Laffer, to more obscure figures, among them Walter Oi and George Stigler ... To those familiar with Appelbaum’s Twitter feed, his sense of humor is whimsical, leavening the dense history and reflected here in headings such as \'Bubble Trouble\' and \'Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There.\' The Economists’ Hour tacks back and forth across the decades, occasionally diffusing the force and clarity of his storytelling ... Appelbaum’s conclusion is stirring, as he brings a moral purpose to the inequity that plagues our politics today[.]

Eric Foner

Rave The Star Tribune ... a slender yet potent study that illuminates how the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments...were hammered into the Constitution ... With The Second Founding, Foner offers a taut, absorbing companion piece to his magisterial Reconstruction, published three decades ago ... Foner strikes a note as clear as a bell: We cannot sustain a third founding.

Petina Gappah

Rave The Star Tribune Now with her searing, poignant, often hilarious Out of Darkness, Shining Light, she upends the conventions of historical fiction ... [narrator] Halima is a kind of African Wife of Bath...bossy, brassy and brilliantly realized ... Gappah\'s treatment of her characters\' odyssey, by turns playful and tragic, is underpinned by a larger theme: the legacy of colonization ... Out of Darkness, Shining Light beautifully evokes the moral ambiguities that lurk within the human heart, revealing a talent that continues to grow from book to book.

Benjamin Moser

Rave The Star Tribune Benjamin Moser’s authorized biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, is an epiphany of research and storytelling, the definitive life of a writer both more and less than the myth she fastidiously crafted...[with] many juicy revelations ... Sontag strides across Sontag like a colossus ... But Moser’s no hagiographer; he details Sontag’s middling fiction, her petty grievances, a childlike inability to take care of herself ... A searching meditation on the divided self, a warts-and-all appraisal of Sontag’s behavior, scrupulous readings of her texts: all speak to Moser’s luminous achievement.

Etgar Keret

Rave Chapter 16 The stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret comprise a kind of magic show, a mystical whirl of light and dark, humor and heartbreak. His new collection, Fly Already, transports us into his quirky yet profound world, shaped by an obsession with the twinned masks of comedy and tragedy reminiscent of writers as varied as George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, and Isaac Bashevis Singer ... To Keret’s credit, he never brings the Palestinian conflict into full focus, allowing his characters (usually men) to stumble through mishaps of their own making .. Their reversals of fortune are both sudden and moving ... Keret’s ear for the whacky and revelatory is pitch-perfect ... Keret’s stories are not all created equal, but happily the misses are few. Fly Already showcases a writer with a wealth of tricks up his sleeve and a rich, slangy voice, a recognized talent on the global stage who deserves a wider American audience.

Ann Patchett

Positive Chapter 16 ... a big-hearted, capacious novel, like the dwelling at the center of it, with Dickensian touches throughout. Its characterization varies with mileage, but the novel’s exploration of family and place is as searching as any in Patchett’s oeuvre, as she limns the pain of even the most privileged. There’s an affecting twist in her final act, leading to yet more tragedy ... Danny’s celestial city proves elusive, but as Patchett suggests, the striving may be the point, even if it leaves a bittersweet taste to \'happily ever after.\'

Caitlin Horrocks

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Horrocks shines as she renders the Montmartre demimonde in Day-Glo colors, as provocative as a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas. Deftly she plumbs the singular zeal — and occasional neuroses — that drive artists toward achievement as well as self-destruction ... In the second half, the novel’s tension slackens: The decades roll on predictably as Horrocks slips into a formulaic groove that traces the composer’s later years, although cameos from Jean Cocteau and Claude Debussy add sparkle...Fortunately, an elderly Louise rescues the drifting narrative ... Feisty to the end, she remembers her brother’s youthful triumph, a coda to the grand themes that The Vexations explores with grace and conviction.

Chia-Chia Lin

Rave The Star Tribune The trope of the absent child often casts a grim shadow over our literary landscape but rarely with the acute psychological insights of Chia-Chia Lin’s poised debut ... Lin conjures these quotidian lives in a shimmering prose ... If you’re expecting a quirky Alaskan story along the lines of the old television series Northern Exposure, think again: Lin guides us subtly but relentlessly into a wilderness of anguish ... But the bleakness here is redeemed by Lin’s honesty and honed craft, her masterful evocation of the Last Frontier ... And Lin’s characters are fully realized ... The Unpassing is the work of a mature artist, an eloquent, unsparing testament to the vicissitudes of our lives, how love can plunge us into the brutal cold of a long Arctic night.

Ali Smith

Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune \"... Smith spins a beguiling, faceted tale, stirring with underground resistance, ordinary folks doing extraordinary things in the name of morality ... The prose here is vintage Smith: slangy and acerbic but speckled like a quail’s egg with lyrical insights ... With its inventive twists, all-too-human cast and wrenching political reckoning, Spring ushers in a fresh season of Ali Smith’s genius.\

Helen Ellis

Rave Chapter 16 ... [a] gimlet-eyed, laugh-out-loud collection ... zingers enliven the collection while simultaneously dispensing practical advice ... big-hearted ... Pride and Prejudice reimagined as an episode of Designing Women. Ellis draws back the curtain on a class-bound milieu, detailing the polite way to travel on planes, the virtues of mayonnaise and mail-order hams, but with cutting insights about our troubled times.

Nathaniel Rich

Positive Nashville Scene \"... richly drawn, propulsive ... There’s much distinctive storytelling in Losing Earth ... Losing Earth beautifully underscores what it would mean to lose our Earth, but also plots a few steps — wobbly, tentative — toward saving it.\

Emily Skaja

Rave Chapter 16 \"... Emily Skaja writes with astonishing skill and versatility ... Variety is Skaja’s game: she deploys non-sequiturs and elliptical imagery with surgical precision, seeking power in contradiction, masking a drama impossible to disguise ... [Skaja\'s] emotional range keeps extending as the collection unfolds ... Emily Skaja brings an inventive imagination and fearless pursuit of craft to Brute, a voice fully formed in a captivating first book. We can expect great things from her in the future.\

Helen Oyeyemi

Positive The Star Tribune \"Gingerbread struggles to find its emotional sweet spot, leaning into self-conscious flourishes and a plot that occasionally feels unmoored, devoid of gravity, an Escher drawing in print. Oyeyemi loves to poke us in the eye. Only in the novel’s stirring last act, as Harriet, Margot and Perdita seek out Gretel with the help of a creepy real estate agent, Miss Maszkeradi, does Gingerbread come together ... For all her shape-shifting sentences, Oyeyemi still gives us dashes of lyricism; few writers can milk an ellipsis with such dramatic precision ... With this final hook, Gingerbread rises to the level of Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird, revealing Oyeyemi as a master of literary masquerade, forging a singular art.\

Emily Bernard

Positive Nashville Scene \"There are stylistic echoes of Joan Didion — terse yet beautiful writing, a bracing honesty — in the graceful new essay collection by Emily Bernard ... Didion’s essays are models of clinical observation, but Bernard leads us into her inner landscape with candor and confession. Beneath her still surfaces, a rage roils ... This is an essayist who takes risks, casting real people as characters ... Small moments open onto piercing revelations about race ... Black Is the Body often rises to a taut lyricism, rich in detail and feeling ... As is often the case with collections, Black Is the Body is uneven ... Quibbles aside, Black Is the Body marks the debut of an essayist in command of her gifts, a book that belongs beside the best of contemporary autobiography.\

Richard Wrangham

Positive Barnes & Noble Review \"... The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence In Human Evolution explores in rich detail ... The first half is maddeningly repetitive and often textbook-dull; Wrantham can’t quite shed the tweeds and lecterns of academia ... But as its pieces jigsaw into place, The Goodness Paradox picks up velocity, its themes emerging with force and clarity ... Once The Goodness Paradox has methodically mapped out self-domestication and its selective underpinnings, the book shrugs off its academic chrysalis; its prose eases into graceful lines, mimicking the syndrome itself. Wrantham moves beyond biological survey into the realms of politics and philosophy.\

David Treuer

Rave The Star Tribune \"Treuer blends a scholar’s tenacity with vivid reportage and personal anecdotes, but beneath his compassionate storytelling a magma of anger flows ... Treuer movingly probes the horrors of Indian boarding schools, for instance, a project dreamed up by well-meaning white progressives but destined to rip apart thousands of families, scores of children forever cut off from their parents ... The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee looks back unflinchingly at the suffering and self-reliance of Indians, sifting fresh insights from well-trod soil ... Beautifully written and argued, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee dares to imagine, even in our own cynical time, the arc of history bending toward justice.\

Zach Vertin

Rave Star Tribune A Rope From the Sky...is a masterful account of the birth and near-death of a nation. Minnesota native Vertin, a seasoned diplomat and journalist active in Sudan for decades, offers a wealth of \'you are there\' reportage and revelatory interviews with South Sudan’s founding fathers. He seams together a staggeringly complicated puzzle, re-creating the savage street battles and high-level diplomacy that has informed South Sudan’s infancy and childhood. But much of the book’s texture comes from beautiful portraits of the South Sudanese people, as they carve out lives in thatch-roofed tukuls in the bush and in Juba’s electronic shops and open-air markets. A Rope From the Sky is an invaluable contribution to the literature of global politics, an intimate diary of a young nation’s tenuous struggle to survive, and a cautionary tale of two men whose personal animus pushed their country to the brink.

David W. Blight

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...authoritative, meticulously researched ... Blight’s arc traces the familiar lines of Douglass’ story...but assiduously fleshing it out with rich detail and context ... This is scholarship on an epic yet accessible scale, occasionally dry but always vital, as Douglass’ writing, activism and contradictions speak directly to us today. Blight taps previously neglected archives to re-create Douglass’ later years ... Blight’s exhaustive, donnish approach may not suit every reader’s palate. But it’s a commanding account of a singular life, a sumptuous portrait of a crusader unyielding in his pursuit of racial justice.

Mary Gabriel

Rave Barnes and Noble Review ...authoritative and enthralling ... Gabriel chooses to trace, in lush, meticulous detail, the lives and careers of five women featured in that show, shifting back and forth between them, revealing their gifts and idiosyncrasies ... Gabriel astutely draws a bright line between Krasner and Elaine de Kooning ... By any metric Gabriel’s accomplishment is formidable. She brings a perspicacity to Ninth Street Women, packing exhaustive research and original reporting into a dense but richly hued narrative. Her execution is essentially perfect ... Art criticism: Gabriel is always incisive but she never trips over exegesis. She keeps her language sophisticated but smooth ... And Ninth Street Women wouldn’t be the landmark work it is without an unflinching appraisal of gender politics. Gabriel plays it fair and square ... Mary Gabriel’s magisterial book clasps each woman by the hand and waltzes her gracefully to center stage.

Max Hastings

Rave The Star Tribune With Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, British military historian Max Hastings offers a literary analogue to PBS’ series; in his introduction he acknowledges a debt to Burns and Novick. But while equally stellar, Hastings’ book skews differently, an outsider’s detailed, under-the-hood investigation into the United States’ unwinnable war; China and the Soviet Union’s chicanery; and a people determined to strip away the bonds of colonialism, even to the point of self-immolation. Richly drawn, the dramatis personae leap from Hastings’ pages. There’s moral rot aplenty, on all sides ... while the tragic arc is familiar, Hastings paints his mural in fresh hues, his strokes concise yet colorful, guiding us through each trauma-wracked episode, from the acrimonious collapse of French imperialism to the Geneva Convention’s partition of Vietnam to mounting war ... the complete story is here, masterfully told, in the tradition of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Seymour Hersh.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Trans. by Anne McClean

Rave Star Tribune ...a layered, meticulously observed new novel ... Vásquez’s pacing is leisurely, but a story-within-a-story emerges ... Dense and allusive, with a broad cast of characters, The Shape of the Ruins may tax the patience of American readers. It occasionally comes across as an obscure lecture on Colombian history rather than a deep dive into a country’s damaged soul ... Dense and allusive, with a broad cast of characters, The Shape of the Ruins may tax the patience of American readers. It occasionally comes across as an obscure lecture on Colombian history rather than a deep dive into a country’s damaged soul ... But stick with it. The Shape of the Ruins is far more than a tutorial; it’s a gripping Deep State novel that richly illuminates how the powerful brutalize the powerless. Its implications should serve as a cautionary tale for other nations under authoritarian threats. Vásquez has written the epic of his people.

Ashleigh Young

Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune When poets turn to prose, images spark off the page and incantatory rhythms thrum in the minds of readers ... The feel of the reins is different: A taut power surges through the lines. Enter New Zealander Ashleigh Young, whose new collection of essays, Can You Tolerate This? is an edgy, vibrant portrait of electricity in language and the body in crisis ... Young infuses a quirky energy into her surreal moments ... These essays are interior, keenly felt, occasionally shocking, sprinkled with enigmatic bits of history ... Can You Tolerate This? adds up to a memoir prismed into multiple perspectives, drifting restlessly from first-person confessions to second-person meditations to third-person dramas ... In exacting sentences she probes the body’s mysteries ... These essays were reading me. She sees to the marrow of our humanity with a kind of MRI vision ... Can You Tolerate This? is an assured debut from a prodigiously talented, empathic writer whose prose shines as brightly as her poetry.

R O Kwon

Positive New York Journal of Books ...a luminous and propulsive if uneven debut ... Kwon wisely keeps the characters cloaked in mystery, gradually revealing their tragic backstories in short, seductively impressionistic chapters ... Kwon’s language is often intoxicating, but in her drive to layer on poetic sentences she occasionally overreaches ... Her pacing in the final stretch feels rushed, wrapping up loose plot threads, as if she’s unsure about the narrative choices she’s made ... But these are minor quibbles ... The Incendiaries marks the genesis of a dazzling career and showcases a writer who pushes herself courageously into the dark.

Carl Zimmer

Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune Unlike previous books, which focused almost exclusively on the mysteries entwined in our DNA, Zimmer chooses heredity as his subject, which includes nongenetic arcs as well. He commences with vivid historical anecdotes ... For all the rich cultural ground Zimmer covers, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh shines supernova-bright as he teases out the genomic threads of heredity. Mendel’s Law, epigenetic influences, the revolutionary CRISPR molecules — they’re all here, painted in the nuanced tones of a Renaissance master ... Zimmer’s medical investigations unfold with the suspense and flair of a novel ... a lush, enthralling book that transforms the reader with its insights.

Menno Schilthuizen

Rave The New York Journal of Books Each day we pillage habitats of myriad animals and plants—think of all the miles of Brazilian rain forest maimed each year—and yet nature somehow bounces back with plan B, on our own turf. Darwin Comes to Town brims with absorbing, evocative stories, but it’s also cutting-edge science; Schilthuizen, along with only a handful of biologists around the world, is plumbing the genomic mutations and natural selection erupting around us ... Darwin Comes to Town, then, is surprisingly optimistic as it dives deep into the data of HIREC, or Human-Induced Rapid Evolutionary Change. As our world grows increasingly urbanized, as we design \'green\' buildings among our congested downtowns, Schilthuizen’s book makes for essential reading. But don’t expect a dry textbook: he’s written an enthralling account that stands out from the pack of environmental literature.

Carys Davies

Rave The Star Tribune A Welsh native now living in northern England, Davies conjures the frontier ethos and landscape in a spare yet elegant prose. Her imagery and cadences glide beautifully into place ... Davies deftly exposes her characters’ magical thinking, how we’re all too eager to sacrifice our most intimate relationships in pursuit of personal Manifest Destinies. From a distance, West looks like a slim fable; but a closer view reveals a peculiarly American self-delusion, opening up like a vast prairie. Davies is an audaciously talented writer to watch.

Mark Eisner

Positive Barnes & Noble \"The book bleeds purple in sections where Eisner’s admiration swells, and he rushes through the poet’s final decade: the 1971 Nobel Prize, a diagnosis of prostate cancer, Neruda’s sad, self-indulgent liaisons with his wife’s niece even as he was dying amid the Pinochet coup. But in meticulously dissecting Neruda’s poems and in mapping out the chronology of a rich if profoundly flawed life, Eisner gives us a definitive work. Neruda: The Poet’s Calling unfolds as a masterful weave of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, a scrupulous portrait of a genius as vast and contradictory as the continent he loved.\

T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...a captivating page-turner ... The book’s narrative is grounded in Marie, but brilliantly cuts back and forth between her story and subsequent sexual assaults in Denver suburbs. There’s a gripping 'you are there' immediacy as crackerjack officers and criminalists pore over scant evidence before finally homing in on their man ... The authors flesh out their through-line with vivid portraits of attacker, victims and police, speaking powerfully to our cultural moment (even as they skirt the thorny issue of due process). Rich in forensic detail, deftly written and paced, A False Report is an instant true-crime classic, taking its rightful place beside Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and Dave Cullen’s Columbine.

R. Marie Griffith

Positive The Barnes and Noble Review R. Marie Griffith probes the answers to these questions, and so much more, in Moral Combat, that rare academic work that weaves incisive research into a spellbinding tale of American piety and its restless twin, sex ... She comes by her arguments honestly...and spins her story with skill and grit. As with Frances FitzGerald’s magisterial The Evangelicals, Griffith breathes spirit into dry history, fashioning sinew and muscle onto brittle bones ... Moral Combat hews to a simple argument — those who seek plurality and change will wrestle unto death with those invested in tradition and order — making its case with vivid anecdotes ... Griffith’s diagnosis is dark but spot-on: Christianity has ruptured over the political weaponization of gender. Similar to class warfare and the legacy of slavery, reactionary puritanism is an enduring strand in our national DNA.

David Giffels

Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune As he nears his 50th birthday, Giffels, a professor of creative writing at the University of Akron and a native of that city, sketches an enigmatic project: the building of his own coffin with his octogenarian father, Thomas ... As father and son embark on the project, Giffels’ longtime best friend, John, an artist, is diagnosed with fatal esophageal cancer; his rapid decline imbues Furnishing Eternity with elegiac power ... The memoir is strongest when it’s focused on Giffels and his father in the workshop, tactile and immediate, as Giffels evokes the lush grains of wood, the tools’ allure, the 'mealy' spray of sawdust. Occasionally the narrative goes slack, marred by gratuitous asides and editorializing... A varnished, carefully crafted box, a spark of life within: Here’s an obvious yet affecting metaphor for the book itself.

Neel Mukherjee

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Mukherjee tracks five characters as they migrate back and forth across the country, their stories gradually braiding together in an assured, beautiful prose. His India is a lush kaleidoscope, but one with sharp edges, mysterious shadows, vanishing crowds — a touch of surrealism pervades A State of Freedom, as in a De Chirico painting … Few writers come at the intersection of class and politics with his subtlety and compassion … Mukherjee’s accomplishment: a ravishing prose style, a lavish mural of an India that is sinister and sublime, characters that sing to us the epic of their cobbled-together country.

Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Moss and Baden deftly highlight the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the evangelicalism, how and why the faithful cherry-pick Scriptures that buttress their own beliefs while dismissing contradictions among the texts themselves ... Bible Nation is a geek’s delight, seasoned with the historical skulduggery and theological debate found in a Dan Brown novel or an Indiana Jones film. Moss and Baden draw on extensive research and interviews with a revolving-door cast of so-called experts and hangers-on, leaving no proverbial stone unturned in their quest to determine the value and validity of the Green collection, the Bible Museum’s underlying purpose. Bible Nation peels away the bark on one of the largest branches of the American family tree, using an academic story to tell a broader one: the evangelicals’ unshakable conviction in their own fantasies and the demonization of anything, or anyone, that dares to challenge them.

Caroline Fraser

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"In Caroline Fraser’s magisterial and eloquent biography, Prairie Fires, Wilder, in a willful act of reinvention, sanitized the people and events of her life with the support of her troubled only child, Rose Wilder Lane … From politics to art, Prairie Fires is virtually a double biography of mother and daughter and the work they forged in the crucible of their torments, creating an awesome achievement in children’s literature. Fraser assiduously avoids the sentimentality of earlier books, such as Donald Zochert’s Laura, proving herself a fearless chronicler, adept at skewering sacred cows. She’s given us the definitive biography of a self-taught writer whose pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology cloaked the shame of poverty and airbrushed a life perpetually teetering on the brink of doom.\

Jed Perl

Positive The Barnes & Noble Review In the first of two planned volumes spanning the life and career of Alexander ‘Sandy’ Calder, the art critic Jed Perl argues that Calder’s greatness sprang from his canny ability to harness time and movement to explore form. Here Perl is following the lead of John Richardson, doing for Calder what Richardson, in his definitive, multi-book opus, has done for Picasso. Exhaustively researched, exuberantly written, Calder: The Conquest of Time captures in exquisite detail the first half of Calder’s life … Calder: The Conquest of Time is a dense but fulfilling read, enriched by an abundance of anecdotes and Perl’s command of art history, making a persuasive case for Calder as a colossus who blended American self-reliance with French intellectualism, looming (literally) over Europe’s avant-garde.

Daniel Alarcón

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"The King Is Always Above the People, delivers on every level, from the intricate to the inventive, from the subtle to the sublime ... it’s Alarcón’s first-person narrators that give the collection its velocity and vulnerability in the face of love, lust, fear and cruelty ... In dazzling prose, then, The King Is Always Above the People mulls weighty philosophical questions, but through intimate personal dramas that Alarcón deftly teases out to surprise endings, a David Lynch-style menace and surrealism brewing beneath the surface of everyday lives. There’s daring and defiance in these stories, a beauty that will make your soul soar, as Alarcón ascends steadily to the top tier of American writers.\

Richard Lloyd Parry

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...nothing quite compares to the tsunami that struck the northeastern coast of Honshu, the archipelago’s largest island, on the flurry-flecked afternoon of March 11, 2011. In his vivid, suspenseful Ghosts of the Tsunami, British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry opens with his own account of that day in Tokyo...re-creates the tragic events in a cinematic style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, weaving in and out of the central mystery...a harrowing intimacy here, as he brings us into families senseless with grief, the desire for a justice that eludes them ... Lloyd Parry’s elegant, clear-eyed prose allows him to circle ever closer to the heart of Okawa’s mystery — why virtually all the children there died, unlike any other school in the country. Part detective story, part cultural history, part dirge, Ghosts of the Tsunami probes the scars of loss and the persistence of courage in the face of unspeakable disaster.

Sylvia Plath, ed. by Peter K. Steinberg & Karen V. Kukil

Mixed Star Tribune \"Readers may feel suffocated by Plath’s smarmy tone; what more can be said about a biography pored over for decades? But two ghosts haunt Volume I: Aurelia’s sanitized Letters Home (originally published in 1975), which purged allusions to her daughter’s fierce eroticism and emotional volatility, and Ted Hughes’ destruction of Plath’s late journals and ruthless editing of her work. Hence everything and the kitchen sink: The record must show all. And yet a nuanced imagination emerges from ad nauseam ramblings about term papers and tutorials, a rotating cast of boyfriends, as Plath riffs in the caustic vein that would make her famous. She confesses secrets and gossip to friends and pen pals and to Aurelia, always Aurelia.\

Daniel Mendelsohn

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune We hear Jay rather than see him — Mendelsohn artfully avoids excessive visual details, allowing Jay to define himself through bluster and unexpected moments of tenderness. He’s a marvelous character, anchoring the class discussion and nudging his son to different perspectives, not only about the Greek poem but also their family’s history ... After the class ends, father and son take an Aegean cruise that traces the path of Odysseus. Unfortunately, these scenes feel dashed off, failing to deliver on dramatic expectations. And Mendelsohn’s prose, while beautiful and precise, sporadically lapses into self-conscious flourishes ... Quibbles aside, An Odyssey is a candid, majestic book on the art of teaching and the push-pull relationship between professor and student, especially if the student is one’s father ... With this graceful and searching memoir, we all drink from the cup of knowledge proffered by one of our leading philosopher-writers.

Jesús Carrasco

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review Margaret Jull Costa’s pitch-perfect translation evokes the textures and urgency of Carrasco’s prose ... Festering wounds, slaughtered goats, the rasp of breath, body stench: all bring us fully into Carrasco’s fictional world. There’s a David Lynchian quality to the characters as well, among them the legless owner of a village commissary and the chain-smoking bailiff, whose lusts and crimes drive him to his own doom. Perhaps Jull Costa’s brightest accomplishment here is her skill in conjuring Carrasco’s mood and pacing, the taut suspense of withholding information that eventually trails back to the doors of the very institution that glues the culture together.

Robert M. Sapolsky

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Sapolsky is that rara avis who’s both eminent scientist and elegant prose stylist ... His new book is his magnum opus, but is also strikingly different from his earlier work, veering sharply toward hard science as it looms myriad strands of his ruminations on human behavior. The familiar, enchanting Sapolsky tropes are here — his warm, witty voice, a sleight of hand that unfolds the mysteries of cognition — but Behave keeps the bar high ... a stunning achievement and an invaluable addition to the canon of scientific literature, certain to kindle debate for years to come.

Joselin Linder

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune In her crisply written, deeply informed memoir, The Family Gene, Joselin Linder captures the dread and fatigue that accompanies such an odyssey, how it ripples out to engulf multiple branches of a family ... Linder evokes the twists and turns of Seidman’s yearslong investigation with a wry wit and flair ... Like any memoir, The Family Gene detours into details of the author’s personal life. Linder occasionally indulges herself with vexing romances and beer-soaked misadventures as she roams from city to city after her father’s death. Less might have been more here. But her underlying insight is revelatory ... The Family Gene nails this truth in a clear, honest voice, an invaluable addition to the literature that dramatizes severe illness and its impact.

Mohsin Hamid

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune In gossamer-fine sentences, Exit West weaves a pulse-raising tale of menace and romance, a parable of our refugee crisis, and a poignant vignette of love won and lost. Hamid’s imagery is gorgeous, his sentences unfurling languidly ... Hamid portrays his characters’ plight with an aching beauty, particularly when they decide to part ... Let the word go forth: Hamid has written his most lyrical and piercing novel yet, destined to be one of this year’s landmark achievements.

Katie Kitamura

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review ...[an] exquisitely wrought if occasionally static novel ... Kitamura skillfully draws the cast and setting, creating a Hitchcockian mood among the bright colors and bleached sunlight of the Mediterranean ... [Kitamura] takes her place among a set of women authors who explore ambivalence about marriage through their female characters. There’s a classical feel to these explorations, a need to revisit — to reinvent — the old stories.

Aravind Adiga

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...a spirited if uneven tale that depicts the triumphs and travails of two brothers, athletic prodigies whose competition threatens to tear them apart ... The elements of Selection Day are strong throughout: a dramatic, readable arc; satire glinting with hints of tragedy; a witty, vibrant voice. Adiga also deftly teases out the strands of India’s fluid society...He wrestles with transitions in places, though, especially in the first half, unwieldy sentences that escaped the eye of his editor. Fortunately, the novel loses its awkwardness as it gains velocity, illuminating a country in the throes of change as well as one boy’s troubled yet beguiling embrace of himself.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 depicts ER’s emergent public persona with more detail and anecdote than in the previous two volumes, and Cook’s prose reflects that shift, with cool, crisp sentences that avoid her earlier worshipful tone. Even as Cook treads familiar history, her perspective, through ER’s eyes, is vigorous and fresh, the comparisons with our own darkening world subtle and yet potent ... Cook packing ER’s last 17 years into an afterword, a rich period in which the former first lady traveled extensively, advocating for human rights and the critical importance of the United Nations as a hub of international peace and goodwill. Despite this editorial misfire, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 achieves the biographer’s lofty goal: to bring ER to life through her own words and deeds.

Mary Oliver

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune This is no mere anthropomorphizing, but rather a deeper, quasi-religious connection to the natural world, a singular passion that shines in each paragraph ... Oliver immerses us in an ever-widening circle, in which a shrub or flower opens onto the cosmos, revealing our meager, masterful place in it. Hold Upstream in your hands, and you hold a miracle of ravishing imagery and startling revelation.

Robert Kanigel

Positive The Minneapolis Star ...a nuanced, intimate portrait of this influential if arrogant figure whose theories transformed the ways we view our cities ... Kanigel is superb at fleshing out Jacobs the woman; he’s less adept at showing how her ideas evolved and were embraced across the world. Eyes on the Street is a personal story, not an intellectual history. The last third of the book is the weakest ... But these are minor quibbles when compared with the dazzling merits of Eyes on the Street. It’s an exhaustively researched, beautifully rendered tale, revealing the human contours of a vigorous, original mind.

Imbolo Mbue

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Mbue’s fluent prose captures the aspirations and flaws of both couples, trapped on opposing sides of the darkening American dream, each character staring into a chasm below ... The novel occasionally loses momentum as it moves from one domestic squabble to another, bleeding out drama. In this respect, Behold the Dreamers might have worked better as a novella or short story. But Mbue’s meticulous storytelling announces a writer in command of her gifts.

Ed Yong

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...[a] beautifully written account ... Yong — who like Carl Zimmer belongs to the highest tier of science journalists at work today — weaves revelatory anecdotes and cutting-edge reporting into an elegant, illuminating page-turner that deserves a broad readership ... But I Contain Multitudes is hardly pure science. Yong paints a lavish mural teeming with vivid characters.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune [Mukherjee] renders complex science with a novelist's skill for conjuring real lives, seismic events...Despite the book's elegant craftsmanship, some technical sections will lose lay readers, particularly among the dense thickets of his later chapters, as Mukherjee delves into thrilling recent developments in gene therapy, epigenetics and gene 'editing.' Sometimes the specifics can't be dumbed down for the rest of us, despite a beautiful prose style.

Mia Alvar

Positive O: The Oprah Magazine ...[an] accomplished debut of longing and redemption. In lush, sinuous sentences, Alvar probes the enduring stain of race, colonialism and especially class, giving voice to all strata of Philippine society.

Laura Cumming

Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune [The Vanishing Velazquez] elegantly weaves a narrative that is equal parts criticism, detective story and pure enchantment ... a layered, irresistible tale, one that resonates today.

Helen Oyeyemi

Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune In less gifted hands, these stories would fly apart, casualties of their own centrifugal energy. Oyeyemi remains in perfect control, though, her voice bracingly unique, with What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours a testament to her growing reputation as a contemporary master.

Edna O'Brien

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune The novel’s sections occasionally feel discrete from one another, strung out over multiple perspectives and tense shifts; but Fidelma is a triumph, the thread that binds the narrative together. Beautifully crafted, The Little Red Chairs is a bold indictment of violence, played out in one woman’s life, an intimate canvas that expands beyond its frame, filling rooms.

Sunil Yapa

Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist goes long on theme and language while coming up short on story and characterization, but Sunil Yapa's voice and ambition leap off the page.

Stacy Schiff

Mixed Minneapolis Star Tribune As Schiff moves into the trials and convictions, her narrative slows down, its language tightening beneath a surfeit of detail: Cotton Mather’s self-serving observations, Stoughton’s cruel reversal of Rebecca Nurse’s acquittal.

Margo Jefferson

Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Jefferson’s method is impressionistic, discursive and often lyrical, revealing the deep divisions of black elites, who have fought silently but stoically against institutionalized white racism even as they’ve remained aloof from lower-income people of color. Negroland lifts the veil from the 'Talented Tenth,' striking at the hypocrisies still curdled beneath our conversations about race and class.

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October 12-15, 2021