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Recent Reviews
Eugenie Montague
Mixed The New York Times Book Review A coolly crafty debut ... Stylish, convention-allergic ... While reiteration of the depressively cyclical is an audacious narrative strategy, it also means our girl remains chimerical; I did not soulbond ... Montague’s debut is bold and ingenious but ultimately confounding.
Marie Ndiaye, trans. by Jordan Stump
Rave 4Columns Superbly controlled ... Throughout, the icy, bright audacity of NDiaye’s language made me scrawl inch-high exclamation points of delight in the margins ... No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.
Max Porter
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"Shy’s disordered, multidimensional consciousness careens through Max Porter’s brief and brilliant fourth book, a bravura, extended-mix of a novel that skitters, pulses, fractures and coalesces again with all the exhilaration and doom of broken beats and heavy bass lines. It’s best read in one deranging sitting. The ostensible setting is an institution called Last Chance, a boarding school for troubled boys in a dilapidated old house in the countryside. With uncharacteristically printable eloquence, the usually profane Shy sees the building as being \'hunched over the garden like a chunk of grumpy history.\' Despite the best efforts of the saintly-patient staff, it’s a grim place, not least because \'the boys just rip and rip at each other, endless patterns of attack and response, like flirting’s grim twin.\' The book’s true setting, however, is the sprawling, shifting terrain of Shy’s mind. Though the novel’s time frame is just a few hours of one night, it’s a night of \'a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories\' and one in which \'the solid world dissolves then coheres like broken sleep, and he shambles into it, remembering.\' In other words, the night’s as big as Shy’s life ... He’s both a hapless, hurting child and a dangerous, violent young man, and his author has loved each part of him into being with the same steady attention ... This is, however, an ultimately optimistic book, even if saying so risks casting a slick of the sentimental over a work so admirably grounded. I won’t unsee that sheet of blood, but nor will I unsee a comic, charismatic, deplorable, lovable, still living and not-entirely-hopeless boy doing a little dance by himself, headphones on, at 3 a.m., to an audience of two dead badgers.\
Carmela Ciuraru
Positive The New York Times Book Review What could be more fascinating than others’ unhappiness — and what more fruitful ground for extravagant misery than the bad marriages of crapulous egotists? It’s upon this shameful little human truth that Carmela Ciuraru’s lively Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages is built ... Reading her five portraits of these conveniently deceased figures and their fraught unions feels a bit like chasing fistfuls of candy with slugs of vinegar. The sweetness comes by way of all the fabulous dishing and tidbits of gossip.
Judith Thurman
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Evidently shaped by psychoanalytic thought, Thurman is romanced by the recurrence of things — the Freudian return. In her profiles, which are mostly of alluring women, haunting emerges as both theme and formal device...Sometimes the device is overworked. The tricky task of shaping the inchoate mess of a person’s life and work into a pleasing and digestible few thousand words — a task Thurman executes with élan — lends itself to a neatly looped structure. But this tidiness can strike a pat, whimsical or overly credulous note ... The Earhart profile, which was written in 2009, is one of the most disappointing in the book. Not aesthetically — it’s constructed with characteristic artfulness and insight — but because its subject, a mediocre pilot damned as \'a charismatic dilettante who lectured college girls about ambition yet never bothered to earn a degree,\' emerges, miserably, as pure image, a substance-less confection of style. Why then focus on her, an empty celebrity, rather than dwelling longer on the misogyny and classism of the 1930s America that elevated her to such a position?...Generally, however, Thurman doesn’t seem much interested in her subjects as products of their time ... Instead, her appetitive eye for visual charisma in all its forms yields sumptuous descriptions of clothes, art, faces. She can also be deliciously droll ... the collection reveals Thurman’s suspectibility to both her subjects’ style and her own, usually gorgeous, prose. In terms of the former, several profiles made me hunger for less about the image of the woman in question, and more about her work ... The beauty of a sentence can occasionally blind Thurman to its veracity.
Katherine Dunn
Rave 4Columns ... a remarkable, disquieting, and judiciously revolting posthumous novel about, among other things, unrequited love ... succeeds not by being incredible, but by being so credible. It is, definitively, a novel for grown-ups, not just because of the advanced age of its narrator—the ornery Sally Gunnar—but because a thrilling, subtle, and wholly persuasive adult anger animates the book. I believed every word ... Despite its jumbled chronology, Toad tells a brutally straightforward story ... beneath the bite and verve of its prose, Toad is attuned to the quietly tectonic nature of intimate relations, and things between these frenemies shift in strata and run deep ... What a peculiar experience it is, then, both galling and gratifying, to read this book decades later, now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. It’s not that Toad is exactly prescient—assaults on female autonomy are of course ongoing (the galling part), and concomitant female rage remains their warranted result (which explains much of what is gratifying.) But I wonder if Dunn had any idea how much her strange, savage, tender book would come to be protesting.
Tomi Obaro
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... loving and lively ... In life, such steadfastness is welcome; in fiction, which tends to derive its life from rupture and breakage, less so. While I was carried smoothly through the travails of these women, a line from elsewhere crept up on me. It was the quip attributed to Francis Bacon, remade famous by Kanye, about champagne for real friends, real pain for sham friends, although in this case, \'fictional\' replaces \'sham.\' In other words, I caught myself thinking a sadistic thought. Then again, isn’t the best and truest way for an author to love her characters to drive them into the kind of pain — real pain — that strains and changes their bonds, and with that, their selves? ... Events are relayed in plain, genial prose, unfussed by the occasional cliché. Mystifyingly, some dramatic moments are ushered offstage or skated over ... This can lend much of the novel a feeling of account, rather than selectively crafted story. Nonetheless, Obaro’s unadorned style can come into its own, as it does most arrestingly with a bravura abortion scene. Here, the procedural quality of the writing takes on a political power; it seems entirely appropriate that we learn each step — the dilation, the curettage — all conducted illegally, under cover of darkness, in the Nigeria of 1984 ... The novel’s greatest pleasure, though, is the indelible, show-stealing Funmi.
Laura Kipnis
Positive Bookforum ... a jeremiad composed of four essays that leavened critique with anecdote, everything well-peppered with gags...each a shotgun blend of cultural criticism and chatty anecdote ... glibly totalizing rhetoric seems...to elicit a laugh, rather than to be taken seriously. This, however, can feel confusing, because elsewhere we find Kipnis in forensic, dialectic mode. Her swashbuckling style can distract from the serious and well-stocked mind at work beneath ... Love in the Time of Contagion does not refute [Kipnis\'s previous book] Against Love so much as bicker with it, finish its sentences, and, like many a married couple, occasionally pass off the other’s thoughts as its own ... Kipnis is more interesting when engaging with specific, newly established contradictions of American life ... She is, however, realer than she knows—not so much an anti-love warrior as an accidental bard of ambivalence ... Kipnis is right, of course, that couplehood is not always a bower of bliss, but nor is it a prison camp to be tunneled out of with a sharpened spoon. Sometimes a bare and soulful question rings out from Love in the Time of Contagion, made all the more arresting for the prevailing tone of jocularity.
Sean Thor Conroe
Mixed Bookforum A startling, scabrous, big swaggy flex of a debut ... Sean’s a charmer...and he’s funny with it ... The author demonstrates his fictive priorities. Personality is privileged over facts, voice over content ... Conroe is a protégé of the late and beloved Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books, a publisher whose relationship to the mainstream was energetically antagonistic. In Fuccboi, a similar attitude presents in two ways, one more successful than the other. First, and most appealingly, it’s in the book’s magnetic voice, specifically, the total commitment to the distinctive argot by which this type of urban, young-millennial American male is recognizable ... There’s a seductive confidence in his full-blown, take-me-or-leave-me style ... Fuccboi’s style proves to be a more successful vehicle for a fuck-the-mainstream taunt than its substance ... Our man-of-the-people author (alma maters Swarthmore College and Columbia University, annual tuition $54,856 and $66,880) is not The People. As a general principle, the distance between author and autofictive narrator should be respected—this is literature, not life, and this is literature about how a life becomes literature. It is notable, then, that the fictive Sean is not (unlike Conroe, whose biography he apparently shares in all other respects) an MFA candidate at Columbia ... Instead of staying somewhere in the uneasy realm...Conroe’s book takes a strivingly exculpatory swerve, and in the process betrays its project ... Abandoning unanswerable inquiry for an embarrassingly binary alternative, Fuccboi finally asks a very dumb question: Is ya boy A Good Guy or A Bad Guy? ... It’s an ending to comfort the comfortable.
Sally Rooney
Rave 4Columns ... wise, romantic, and ultimately consoling ... Once again, Rooney has drawn a circumscribed world—four people, tightly wound in the small universe of one another’s lives—and once again, this is a love story, although the book’s most compelling romance is the platonic one between its two main female protagonists ... it is the epic minutiae of human relations, not the grand structures of economic inequality, that send the blood pumping through the writing. Nonetheless, we know the two can’t be extricated; the latter impinges on the former ... In [some] moments, Rooney deprives herself of access to her character’s interiority—the very medium of most fiction concerned with personal relations. Here’s an alternate way of seeing, one derived from a camera lens rather than the traditionally omniscient novelist’s gaze. The effect—implying the novelist herself might not fully know her characters, or at least withhold some of her knowledge—is one of delightful modesty ... Maybe Rooney knows that it’s the small dimensions of her fiction—the close, funneled, loving attention she pays her characters—that allow her books to trap within their confines anxieties of huge historical breadth.
Laura Lindstedt
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... sly, intriguing ... Perhaps novelist chauvinism made me read the assignments more as creative writing prompts than credible therapeutic exercises, but then again hasn’t that distinction always been somewhat moot? A glib observation, but also a truism playfully inhabited within these pages as the psychologist laments and celebrates \'this hall of mirrors that we call life\' ... Ostensibly recounted with nothing but clinical curiosity, the transgressive patient’s evasions, provocations and sleights of hand are in this way craftily enacted by the novel itself.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Mixed 4Columns We find ourselves in an unnamed city with that fashionable thing, an unnamed narrator. She maintains an elegant distance from us. She can be a little portentous ... Against her novel’s backdrop of patchy realism, Lahiri intends the universal but gets only the generic. A first-generation Indian American woman’s wish to cast off the weight of cultural identity and dodge the politics of representation to simply be \'a\' writer is, however, an understandable and interesting response to pigeonholing. In this light, the choice of a deracinated cipher for narrator is hard to begrudge. Once again, though, the freedom might serve author more than reader. ... I long for Lahiri to break out of disciplined timekeeping and just let it wail for once. Hell, maybe even kick over the drum set. Doesn’t she want this too?
Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd
Rave 4 Columns ...a moving, messy aria of supremely female grief-letting that sees love and rage mingled up like cracked yolks and shell ... These females bleed and breed, they get drunk and bleach their nipples, they seek breast implants and sperm donors, and, most horrifying of all, it’s possible they might find single motherhood a completely satisfying state of affairs ..there is something fundamentally girlish—that is to say ingenuous and hence disarming—about [Kawakami\'s] writing. It makes sense that she was a blogger before she became a famous author; the novel is gratifyingly artless, delivered in a frank and funny prose that shines with unselfconsciousness and a kind of flat-footed grace.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Rave Harpers Spanning more than two hundred years in the life of the abbey, this strange chronicle is more concerned with the petty travails of a small community than with the great events of the plague, the Peasants’ Revolt, or any other historical convulsion ... the narrative meanders. What lends the novel vitality and inestimable charm is the fullness of Warner’s love for characters as unholy as us all. Her attention alights completely on a single character, granting them a rich interiority usually only reserved for a book’s heroine, then she leaves them, on to the next ... The Corner That Held Them is Warner’s masterpiece and her favorite of her novels, perhaps because it is the work which, in doing away with plot, most blatantly disregards convention. She seems to have become free to experiment, as Harman puts it, \'purely for herself.\'
Mona Awad
Rave The New Yorker ... a work of toothsome and fanged intelligence ... Awad has winkingly deployed the great ruse of the supernatural ... Though Awad plays knowingly with the tropes of eighties movies (the book’s hot-pink jacket copy mentions the cult classic Heathers; like Winona Ryder in that movie, Samantha has an air of quiet mutiny), we recognize these Bunnies as the apotheosis of that most contemporary archetype, the basic bitch ... In true Frankensteinien fashion, the proof of the author’s brilliance is her character’s apparent autonomy.
Lucy Ives
Positive The New Yorker Lucy Ives’s funny, cerebral Loudermilk, which takes its epigraph (\'Rilke was a jerk\') from Berryman himself, lampoons...masculine swagger ... Ives’s hyperbolic satire—her outsized, loquacious characters, her stylistic brio—lays bare the central fallacy of \'write what you know.\' In one sense, we believe Ives is drawing from her own, all-too-real experience. And yet, with its ludic meta-fictionality and the self-conscious construction of characters, the novel cleverly dodges knowable reality, circumventing the question of authenticity altogether ... Ives has constructed a postmodern playhouse to deflate the notion of authenticity[.]
Salvatore Scibona
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"One of the most thrilling things about Salvatore Scibona’s second book, The Volunteer, is a refusal not just of this novelistic trend of smallness, but also of our own craven, personal brand-driven cultural moment ... What follows is a magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons who roam geography and experience as Scibona braids the narrative strands of his various men in a way that is both disciplined and symphonic ... Scibona is a savage coiner of similes, one who’ll cut sublimity with bathos to snatch a reader’s breath away ... There are also roving, lyrical long shots of Queens streets that, in their grit and dazzle, recall the boyhood Bronx of Don DeLillo’s Underworld ... By paying grave attention to both worlds, both the self and everything beyond it, Scibona has built a masterpiece.\
Helen DeWitt
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"...a DeWitt short story is a thing crafted with unimpeachable skill, even genius, but as you marvel at the stitching you might also shudder at the sense of a cruel, even brutal, joke ... There is much madness in DeWitt’s method, a madness of pure logic ... These stories eventuate a better kind of amusement — not indulgence, but the sometimes discomfiting pleasure of being dazzled.\
Zadie Smith
Rave The New Republic \"Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity ... The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both. After the bracing dynamics of so much thought, the essays in Feel Free leave the reader not with a succinct theory of metaphysical dialogue between a global pop phenomenon and twentieth-century philosopher, but rather an image: the endearing, enduring image of one of our finest public intellectuals bickering with her husband, in a car, as she hankers for a sausage roll.\
Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
Rave The New York Times Book Review In good fiction, every sentence and detail is necessary. The same is true of these impeccably economical essays, which, collected here with a wise introduction by Pinckney, offer a rich immersion in both her brilliant mind and the minds of so many others ... As these essays demonstrate, criticism should be commensurate with its subject ... This collection is also, then, an education in 20th-century American literature; a book to send a reader to other books ... A mind delighting in itself on the page is not always palatable, but Hardwick, in doing so with such restraint, is irresistible ... Astringent and unsentimental, these essays span over half a century and, as such, constitute a monumental, if unwitting, autobiography. There is indeed a pathos in that. The literature has primacy over the life, yet the truest and most vital life is not in the facts, but the fictions.
Daisy Johnson
Rave The New York Times Book Review Some short story writers lay such claim to landscapes that those places become unassailably theirs: Annie Proulx has Wyoming, the South belongs to Eudora Welty, rural Canada will always be Alice Munro’s. With this debut collection, Fen, the young British writer Daisy Johnson stakes her fictive territory on the Fens, the expanses of once flooded, now drained land in the east of England. Johnson has a marshy imagination and wind-whipped prose; the latter is an effective counterweight to the sometimes hyperbolic lore of this shape-shifting world ... characters can be strained thin by their narrator’s wish for them to be more than they are ... crosscurrents of connection add up to a consonance that might almost be mythic.
Alexandra Kleeman
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...the world is parsed with a charming exactitude that magnifies all its latent marvels and especially horrors — the blacker and more peculiar these stories get, the funnier they are ... Kleeman, a highly cerebral writer, is especially fascinated by the oddness of bodies ... Kleeman’s stories [are] brilliantly alive.