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Recent Reviews
Clare Carlisle
Rave New York Review of Books Eliot’s imaginative attraction to violently cruel and thwarting marriages, in contrast with her personal investment in a trustful, lasting intimacy, is a fascinating paradox that Clare Carlisle’s interesting book sets out to investigate ... Carlisle is more fascinated by the disconnect between the painful marriages in the novels and the devoted relationship with Lewes ... As a biographer Carlisle is careful and ruminative rather than trailblazing or defensive. She doesn’t go in for blaming and shaming but picks her way delicately through the story.
Keiron Pim
Positive New York Review of Books Absorbing ... Endless Flight is a welcome aid for people like me who can’t read Roth, or his critics and biographers, in German, and for any English-language readers who might want an introduction to his work. And now, more than ever, is the time to read him.
Natalie Livingstone
Positive New York Review of Books Livingstone tells this story in a tone of well-oiled, celebratory enthusiasm ... A great deal is crammed into this highly populated narrative, leaving the reader sometimes reeling back to the byzantine family tree for help.
Jan Morris
Positive The New York Review of Books She is much more than grumpy, indeed despairing, about the hideous state of the world: \'wars and rumours of wars…sleazy capitalism and dubious diplomacy, democracy coarsened, loyalties abandoned, religions squabbling, footling gossip and squalid accusations.\' Her main feeling, in old age, is \'Count me out.\' ... her way of writing about the onset of her \'dear old friend\' and partner’s dementia is as touching and truthful—and humorous—as was her writing many years before about transitioning, and probably as helpful to others in the same situation.
Marilynne Robinson
Positive The New York Review of Books As is her habit, Robinson keeps going over the emotional ground, edging backward and forward in time, in slow scenes with many passages of repetitive, inconclusive dialogue ... It is extremely claustrophobic. All the same, this method of attentive close-up does painstakingly illuminate a strange and difficult character ... Jack is not only a personal story of \'apophatic loneliness.\' It opens out into a social and political history of painful significance and relevance ... She has always written with great tenderness and delicacy about the very poor, people at the bottom of or on the margins of society. And there’s a great deal of feeling in Jack (an urban novel, unlike her other books) for people living under adverse circumstances.
Sebastian Barry
Rave The New York Review of Books Had the story been told conventionally, as a third-person historical novel, it might have been thrilling enough, a dark drama of the postwar South to be set alongside To Kill a Mockingbird, and all the more striking because not written by a southern American author. It has a powerful plot (and is historically precise and carefully researched) ... a lyrical language celebrates...unorthodox love and their refuge of dance and music and ordinary domestic life, hidden inside \'the deep dangerous drama of the times.\' But Winona’s narrative, to the novel’s benefit, mixes up rhapsody with plain, forthright speech ... compassion is the key to Sebastian Barry’s writing. If anything, there is almost too much of it here. Winona is a noble and pitiable victim, and doesn’t have the shaming blood-guilt of Thomas McNulty for his killing of her people, which makes Days Without End a more complicated and deeper book. For all that, A Thousand Moons is a brave and moving novel. Above all, it has a tender empathy with the natural world. This has always been one of Barry’s strengths. But here, in imagining a person divided between a way of life shaped by moon and sun, land and seasons and animals, and a culture of documents and letters and numbers, prisons and courtrooms, nature is felt with particular intensity.
William Trevor
Rave The New York Review of Books [Trevor is] one of the finest writers of this and the last century ... There is deep strangeness in Trevor’s work, and these last stories are no exception. He is fascinated by odd minds and buried pasts, by secrets and regrets and disappointments. His characters are often caught in limbo ... Whispers, shadows, doubts, unknowns haunt the last pages of this great artist. At the same time he can be caustic, severe, and devastating.
Jenny Diski
Positive The New York Review of Books Both stories are told with painful, ruthless precision, savage humor, anger, frustration, and bewilderment ... She brings the dying life of the body startlingly onto the page ... Diski is unforgiving about Doris Lessing, as well as obsessed by her, and her account makes harsh reading ... This fierce tone of Diski’s about Lessing is not entirely consistent. The question of gratitude remains unresolved. Part of Diski’s life story—and part of why she wrote this book when she knew she was dying—is that she did, also, feel some gratitude to Doris Lessing.
Stevie Smith
Positive The New York Review of Books ...an invaluable and complete collection of her poems and drawings ... Will May opts for Stevie Smith’s final versions, notes earlier variants, provides brief but helpful notes to her wide and eclectic variety of sources and allusions, and gives clues to some of the characters in the poems. Though consistency must be the best editorial policy, occasionally I regret his commitment to her final choices.