About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jo Hamya
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books \"The Hypocrite opens as a straightforward (albeit biting) satire targeting both the novelist’s failures as a parent and the casual (albeit insidious) misogyny of his generation ... Seemingly tangential to the plot, this fleet of secondary characters ultimately proves crucial to Hamya’s project, contesting Sophia’s righteous framing of her own experience and interrogating the novel’s central art objects: the father’s books, which delight in mocking people and public mores, and his daughter’s play, which is often blinkered by its own moral certitude ... The least realized character among The Hypocrite’s spare cast, Round Glasses reads less like an actual leftist than like a robot programmed to arouse baby boomer ire. But while her pronouncements about whose work deserves to be staged are easy to dismiss, Hamya uses Round Glasses to expose a different weakness in Sophia’s play: perfect narrators are rare, and narrators who stay perfect in the eyes of successive generations are even rarer ... Hamya’s deft last act offers readers the opportunity to view Sophia as an entitled child, a wounded daughter, and a flawed future artist all at once—a messy yet crucial complexity that the novelist’s books and Sophia’s play both lack.\
Zachary C. Solomon
Mixed Forward Solomon offering a deeply pessimistic take on the uses of art under authoritarianism ... A semi-satirical, semi-fantastical novel ... The novel’s consideration of antisemitism suffers for its lack of grounding in space or time.
Jessica Shattuck
Mixed The Washington Post Shattuck tends to sacrifice complexity for narrative symmetry, especially when the piously right-minded Katherine takes over the narrative from her more interestingly flawed parents. Still, by invoking America’s most cherished domestic archetypes, the author extends the novel’s criticism beyond its protagonists ... Unfortunately, Shattuck’s novel retreats somewhat from its own conclusions as it draws to an end.
Lily Meyer
Rave New Lines Magazine \"While focusing on events several decades in the past, the resulting novel represents a new branch of the American Jewish canon — reflecting the community’s ongoing transformation from strangers at the gate to insiders who share fully in responsibility for America’s ruinous interventions abroad ... What these novels (and many others) share is a belief that the privileges that come with being American are won with great difficulty — and must always be carefully safeguarded. With Short War, Meyer situates herself within this canon — if only to pick a fight ... Meyer doesn’t bother answering the question of whether Jews can truly belong in America. By ending the novel on the insurmountable divide between the American and Chilean members of the Lazris family, she reframes the debate, asking instead whether belonging in America is worth the cost of complicity in its disastrous foreign policy ... That small shift — the imagining of Jewish characters not as outsiders in the United States, but as privileged Americans abroad — allows Meyer to take the proposition Roth dismisses very seriously, and marks a significant departure from previous eras in Jewish-American literature. Perhaps her questions are the ones that will guide the tradition through its next century.\
Alexandra Tanner
Positive The Millions Often reads like a pandemic novel, illuminating the personal and communal choices illness forces upon us ... That discovery doesn’t usher the sisters into some utopian state: Poppy’s hives persist undiagnosed, and Jules remains lethargic and under-employed into the very last page. But they do start to see the possibility of a life sustained by care, and not just in moments of crisis.
Leonard Cohen
Mixed The Forward ... not light reading. In fact, it’s so physically and emotionally brutal that after finishing it, I had to put my copy away for a week. But it’s also an astonishingly deft and confident work of juvenilia that prefigures the themes that would propel Cohen to fame and preoccupy him throughout his life: passion and violence, sacredness and shame ... One of Cohen’s earliest works, the novel is raw and forceful in describing the slippery nature of desire. Few people go around breaking windows at will, but most have confronted impulses that contravene social norms or, worse, personal principle ... does stumble in its chauvinistic attitude towards its female characters ... Unburdened by their own motivations or desires and content to help the narrator through his existential crisis, all three read more like plot devices than fully realized characters. The narrator and the old man inflict extraordinary violence on all three, and because of Cohen’s lack of attention to them, it’s hard to excuse that as gritty storytelling or philosophical allegory. To a charitable reader, these three characters might testify to a kind of callousness common in young writers. To an uncharitable one, they demonstrate a fascination with the abuse of women ... Cohen’s narrator learns the bitter consequences of cruelty, but he never learns to see women as anything other than vehicles for his own self-expression.