About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Diane Williams
Rave The Baffler Williams’ stories run anywhere from a sentence to two and a half pages—but typically much shorter—into which are packed abstract miniature worlds of razor-sharp intellect, vivid prose stripped bare of illusion or ornament, and psychosexual longing. It is fiction that reads like the residue of a dream. Often there’s a sensation of being caught in a moment of self-realization or a glimpse into the embattled core of a restless psyche ... Williams’s work is not only brutal in the way it squeezes meaning from three or four lines; it’s brutalist in the architectural sense, rough-hewn and modular ... they’re words you can read over and over again with the same pleasurable disorientation; they communicate some wild combination of loneliness, terror, and lurking violence. Doing the work, that is, of the most urgent and outrageous of fictions ... the work is ever-pressurized, crushing inward on the trappings of personhood ... Depending on how you define it, there is as much content in these stories to sink your teeth into than any number of dry social novels. See how much you can do, Diane Williams seems to say, when you concentrate; beyond the bullshit is the raw material of the unconstructed self.
Christian Kracht, Trans. by Daniel Bowles
Rave Longreads ...the novel’s echoes of real-world scandals of the silver screen are expertly disguised and entrenched, designed not to intrude on The Dead’s casual streaming toward historical inevitability, so much so that you wouldn’t know it until the book’s final pages ... Most of the above characters, save Nägeli, are key players in the real world run-up to the Second World War, but they’ve been notably elevated out of historical record and allowed to take up a set of personae that becomes shorthand for their agency as players in Kracht’s drama ... In short, The Dead chooses to linger rather than develop, prefers sometime-glacial close-third POV to action, and takes its time making sense of its daring premise ... The roominess of Kracht’s style, free-floating from his subjects, allows him indulgences unthinkable in a more straightforward novel, resulting in a product that seems like it was...as fun to write as it is to read ... The invisible language of film permeates the novel, an experiment in collapsing the history of film theory into prose, at least in Daniel Bowles wistful translation, that is neutral and shot through with so much darkness, you occasionally can’t find the light ... there is joy here for everyone, prose that astonishes, personal tragedies that mar the heart, and set pieces of outstanding oddness.
Roque Larraquy, Trans. by Heather Cleary
Positive BOMB The second half is, joltingly, set in 2009 and concerns the reminiscences of a world-famous nine-fingered contemporary artist (the missing finger is part of an installation, of course) ... we’re treated to a pair of surreal gothic tales of science and art, each reaching their convergent point of annihilation. Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, the novel has almost no equal in literature ... Comemadre is the kind of humanistic text that awakens one’s \'inner primate,\' an atavism much discussed by the characters. It’s a perverse comfort in the long night of the soul, a horror in the light of the day, and it might even jolt a resigned reader into reappraising some of the things that make literature worthwhile.
Bill Clinton & James Patterson
Pan The Baffler \"I’ve never wished I had a grandfather more than in contending with this book-shaped blob of paranoia and vanquished machismo; I need somebody with a stake in James Patterson (or rather the fiction-production factory to which he lends his name) to translate this bulletin of xenophobia and disposable TV patriotism for my benefit. But I must persevere. For the duration of this review, I will strive to become my own grandpa ... a gross and gristly wank of a book that oozes contempt for the press and democratic norms. Throughout, Duncan delivers banal talking points on the opioid crisis, gun laws, climate change, affordable health care, and racism, but because he so clearly despises due process—his authoritarian sense of superiority is beyond question—the effect is to make him sound less like a tenderhearted head of state and more like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho ... The President is Missing is, on the one hand, a harmless airplane book and a flippant curiosity by an ex-president playing James Bond with the help of a legion of hack writers...But it’s also an indulgent white man’s daydream about casual abuse of power from a president famous for casual abuses of power.\
Harry Mathews
Rave BOMB ...The Solitary Twin is the perfect endnote for Harry Mathews and a superb point of entry for new readers, encapsulating his lifelong commitment to formal invention while simply being an excellent novel in its own right, something anybody could pick up ... This is Mathews in a nutshell: constantly surprising, ever-revolutionary, subversive, and in perpetual search of possibility. His work is a reminder that everything in life can be conceived and experienced—but like John and Paul, the solitary twins, seldom in the same place at the same time. Above all, he was, like Geoffrey, proactive and insistent on two points in particular, namely that art is what exists between extremes. And that it is time to move on.
Yoko Tawada, Trans. by Margaret Mitsutani
Rave BOMB \"The poles between which Tawada oscillates are thus, not quite independently of her choice of language, the interplay between seriousness and frivolity. The result, in which farce is played as tragedy and tragedy as farce, is a big part of what makes Tawada one of the best and most unique writers working today ... The book’s vision of closed states, xenophobia, mass extinction, and the gulf between the undying adults and their feeble progeny makes it one of the few literary futures that makes you sit up and say \'Oh yeah, that’s totally going to happen\' ... From this description, you’d probably imagine Tawada’s book to be a gloomy dystopic nightmare. Instead, it is charming, light, and unapologetically strange, with a distinct \'indie cinema\' feel ... Tawada finds a way to make a story of old men trapped in unending life and children fated to die before their time joyful, comic, and—frankly—a huge comfort.\
Alexander Chee
Rave The New York Times Book Review If writing...is a form of drag for Chee, it is also an act of mystic invocation and transference ... Chee leavens his heaviest topics...with charming episodes like his stint as a waiter at William and Pat Buckley’s Park Avenue maisonette, a job that prompted a crisis of conscience given Buckley’s infamous proposal to brand AIDS patients on their wrists and buttocks ... Other essays have the kind of grandiose titles you’d expect from a more traditional book on craft ... Yet even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity. Chee is refreshingly open about his sometimes liberating, sometimes claustrophobic sense of exceptionality ... Throughout, Chee endeavors to catch himself at a distance and reckon, ever humble and bracingly honest, with the slippery terrain of memory, identity and love ... Chee has written a moving and personal tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where, he writes, \'you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.\'
Alfred Döblin, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
Rave The Baffler Look, any honest estimation of the new translation, by Michael Hofmann, of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz from NYRB Classics is bound to begin with duteous piety, lauding it, since it is a one-and-done masterpiece that’s basically impossible to oversell, as (why not) the single biggest event in publishing in a lifetime, a crucial refurbishment of something English-language readers have been missing out on for a century, and a long-missing piece of Modernism’s ponderous jigsaw. All of which is the case of course.
Tom Hanks
Pan The Baffler \"It’s true that the bulk of these seventeen—seventeen!—stories sound like Tom Hanks movies. Or rather, they are stories that could have been written by an alien whose only exposure to the planet earth is through Tom Hanks movies ... in four hundred pages, there’s hardly even a hint of conflict or a suggestion that American life is anything less than a holiday where everyone rides Schwinn bikes, leaves the immigration office to go bowling, and has a dog named Biscuit. If there’s anything good to observe about Uncommon Type, it’s that Hanks may have accidently revived a long-lost literary form: the idyll, as practiced by Goethe, placid and innocuous pastorals that invoke ornate symbolism ... The impregnable constellation we call \'Tom Hanks,\' with its observations on what life is like a box of, can give no real offense, can do us no lasting harm. But Uncommon Type is pushing it, man, a collection of clichés that only deserves clichés in return.\
Annie DeWitt
Positive The New York Times Book Review White Nights in Split Town City mostly abandons the episodic structure of more traditional coming-of-age narratives. Instead, DeWitt’s supple observations take precedence over rote storytelling, yielding a novel notable for the delicacy of its moods.