Peter Heller

Positive NPR ...what's difficult is swallowing the whole thing in full: believing that Celine not only became a detective, but became so good at it (with a clearance rate on her cases of 96 percent) that she had to turn down offers from the FBI ... But (deep breath), I'm not sure if any of this matters. First because Heller is a gifted writer uniquely capable of describing both the play of Colorado aspen leaves in the last week of September and the strange melancholy that can trigger in the heart of someone who has already seen more autumns than are left ahead of them. And second because I'm not sure how much weight of reality ought to be given to any detective story ... It is a romp, is what I'm saying. Beautifully written, fun if you don't look too close, and touched with just enough heartbreak to make it feel heavier than it actually is. It's a book for anyone who ever wondered what happened to Nancy Drew after she grew up

Sarah Gerard

Rave NPR ...[a] penetrating and deeply felt debut collection of essays ... [In 'Mother, Father, God'] Gerard strikes just the right balance between objective distance and glimpsed emotion. She also establishes the dynamic she uses to great effect throughout the book: unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history ... Sunshine State is not a glowing encomium of Florida, nor is it a snarky takedown. Instead, it's a drifting, psychogeographical exploration of a place she once called home — and that, in return, has come to live inside her.

John A. Farrell

Rave NPR There's a lot to navigate, and Farrell does so with ease. Without dipping into melodrama or hyperbole, he lays out Nixon's rise from a lower-middle-class kid in Yorba Linda named after King Richard the Lionheart to his swiftly acquired identity of 'a man of destiny' ... With a mix of morbid fascination and deep empathy, Farrell humanizes Nixon, but he doesn't let him off the hook ... That dichotomy between brooding schemer and extroverted leader has long defined the Nixon dynamic. But with The Life, Farrell has etched those history-shaking contradictions into the most vivid — and the most startling — relief to date.

B. Catling

Positive NPR Where The Vorrh took place mainly in its eponymous forest as well as Essenwald — two fictional places teeming with the unreal — the sequel spends more time in the real world as we know it. It's a subtle shift, but a profound one. The Vorrh triumphed and frustrated with its dizzying, disorienting swarm of ideas and ornate language. Those elements still abound in The Erstwhile, but they're used with more moderation, as if Catling — a first-time novelist with The Vorrh — is now meticulously sculpting the clay of his epic tale after flinging it all on the floor in the first book. And for those who read The Vorrh and found it sluggish: keep reading. The pace picks up significantly in this installment ... Catling weaves alternate history and retroactive mythmaking into a stunning whole.

Jaroslav Kalfar

Positive NPR Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia is not a perfect first effort. But it’s a frenetically imaginative one, booming with vitality and originality when it isn’t indulging in the occasional excess. Kalfar’s voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks. He has a great snout for the absurd. He has such a lively mind and so many ideas to explore that it only bothered me a little — well, more than a little, but less than usual — that this book peaked two-thirds of the way through ... Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery. He writes boisterously and mordantly, like a philosophy grad student who’s had one too many vodka tonics at the faculty Christmas wingding. This is generally a good thing, though it can also mean periodic forays into pretentiousness.

Rave NPR \"To Be a Machine isn\'t written as an insider-baseball account of transhumanism; instead, it\'s framed as an investigation. With a winning mix of awestruck fascination and well-chilled skepticism, he tracks down various high-profile transhumanists on their own turf, immerses himself in their worlds, and delivers dispatches — wryly humorous, cogently insightful — that breathe life into this almost mystical circle of thinkers and doers ... Not only does O\'Connell apply a healthy curiosity to his subjects, he places them in illuminating context. Amid vivid firsthand reportage, he dwells on the history and ramifications of transhumanism: economically, anthropologically, sociologically, theologically and culturally ... Rather than a dry treatise on science, To Be a Machine is a lucid, soulful pilgrimage into the heart of what humanity means to us now — and how science may redefine it tomorrow, for better and for worse.\

David Bianculli

Rave NPR Laid out encyclopedically and ranging from the 1950s through today, his account of TV's evolution is as dizzying in scope as it is intimate in detail ... As huge as the book is — and it's a whopper — it's not meant to be an exhaustive encyclopedia. Instead, Bianculli conscientiously curates five shows in each of his chosen genres that best exemplify what he calls 'Key Evolutionary Stages' in the growth of television ... a wise, engaging celebration of a type of entertainment that's as much of an art form as it is a pastime.

T.C. Boyle

Positive NPR ...lapses into Boyle's trademark, sometimes maddening style, teeming with tangential inner monologues and hyperaware descriptiveness. They turn the novel's early, exposition-heavy chapters into an uphill climb ... Ultimately, though, Boyle navigates his well-worn territory with sensitivity and finesse. By the middle of the story, the team's web of power plays, personality tics, petty conflicts, grudges, crushes, and buried agendas is drawn taut. Even his excessive attention to detail makes sense ... eerily timely, despite being set over 20 years ago. Even more resonant is Boyle's witty yet poignant exploration of our attachment to the chunk of rock we call home.

Benjamin Percy

Positive NPR If that all sounds like a lot of insider baseball, that's because it is. The lit-vs.-genre debate is something that consumes writers, critics, and publishing industry types far more than the average reader, and it's here that Thrill Me threatens to limit its audience. But Percy is smarter than that: He peppers his observations of today's literary scene with homey, witty anecdotes, and he couches his analysis in no-nonsense wisdom ... None of the advice he dishes out is fresh or profound; these are tried-and-true tips about the art of writing that anyone can readily find online or in dozens of how-to books. Where Thrill Me shines is in Percy's ability to write about writing in a conversational way.

Jade Chang

Rave NPR The setup for The Wangs vs. the World is so rich in conflict and pathos, it's hard to realize at first that it's a comedy ... Chang not only effortlessly juggles this crew of point-of-view characters, she imbues each of them with distinct voice of their own ... Chang tackles the issue of race from a fresh, playful, yet cutting perspective. Her book is unrelentingly fun, but it's also raw and profane — a story of fierce pride, fierce anger, and even fiercer love.

Cixin Liu, Trans. by Ken Liu

Positive NPR \"As trilogy-cappers go, it\'s satisfying — entirely on its own terms, though. Like the two installments before it, Death\'s End focuses on a different protagonist ... Within this intricately structured, staggeringly cosmic, reality-contorting framework, he weaves all the personal and philosophical conflicts he\'s seeded along the way into a resoundingly orchestrated finale ... Unfortunately, a few of the flaws of the first two books are ported into Death\'s End. Liu\'s exposition can get downright leaden, especially when there are reams of scientific jargon and theory to be delivered to the reader.\

Alexander Weinstein

Positive NPR ...[a] harrowing debut collection ... The technology in Weinstein's stories isn't farfetched, and that makes it all the more frightening ... Weinstein writes sensitively and with deceptive simplicity, slicing into the emotional core of his haunted, self-estranged characters. The more they connect via technology, the less connected they feel ... Children of the New World is a nuanced and complex vision of where we as a species might be going — and how, for better and for worse, we're already there.

Jenni Fagan

Rave NPR [Fagan] is disarmingly subtle. Rather than turning the book into some survivalist potboiler, she renders this new Ice Age in snatches of distant newscasts and school closures, an intimate, at times mundane view of the apocalypse that captures what so much apocalyptic literature loses: the way humans can become mute, withdrawn, and even darkly humorous in the face of doom, rather than running around in panic.

Elizabeth Hand

Positive NPR Hard Light is the latest, longest, and most involved book of the series, a sprawl that encompasses black-market antiquities dealing, ancient English ruins, cult cinema, rave culture, and the '70s rock-groupie scene. And Hand makes it all work ... Like many crime series, the Cass Neary books are formulaic in spots — but they follow their own formula, a cyclical rhythm that feels a whirlpool starting to circle. Each book ends with a showdown in some desolate, dramatic, deadly terrain, and Cass collects fresh scars like clockwork ... [a] breathless, absorbing story — and if the stark ending of the latest volume is any indication, it's far from over.

Paul Tremblay

Rave NPR The most powerful aspect of Disappearance, though, is its immediacy. Tremblay doesn't shout or gesticulate. He whispers his tale, punctuating it with the 'clicks and whirrs' of an air conditioner or the life-mocking ring of a child's bicycle bell. His characters are rendered vividly and sensitively. The ambience is all shadows. 'No good news ever calls after midnight,' Tremblay writes early in the book; 'Nothing good happens in the middle of the night, right?' wonders one particularly cryptic character near the book's end. Not only are these bookends an example of Tremblay's immaculate storytelling, it hammers home the horror at the heart of Disappearance at Devil's Rock: That sometimes we can't truly see the ones we love until they've faded into the dark.

Neil Gaiman

Mixed NPR Broken up into sections — 'What I Believe,' 'Music and the People Who Make It,' 'Some People I Have Known,' 'Make Good Art,' and so on — his musings shine with wit, understatement, and a warm lack of pretention ... As these sorts of odds-and-ends collections typically are, View is a mixed bag, both in subject matter and quality ... Together these assorted tidbits form a mosaic — a composite picture of Gaiman as a writer, but also as a thinker, a cult figure, and barometer of genre fiction's trends and sentiments over the past 20-odd years. Not to mention an unassuming guy who just so happens to be a brilliant, best-selling author. As such, View is not only invaluable, but engrossing.

Dan Vyleta

Mixed NPR In an increasingly twisty plot, the true nature and origin of the Smoke becomes a central question — especially after a brewing revolution threatens to challenge England's insular rule of law, which demands that its citizens neither travel abroad nor receive foreign books or ideas ... Obscurity might be apt in a book called Smoke, but at points Vyleta takes it too far. The story has a marked Dickensian slant — the smoke and soot at the start of Dickens's Bleak House are an obvious parallel, and Smoke even comes with an epigraph from Dombey and Son — but Vyleta's mimicry of Dickens's ornate prose sometimes bogs down the pace. And the rules by which the Smoke operates never fully make sense, varying from instance to instance...[but] Vyleta's refusal to make his central premise crystal clear eventually becomes one more gloriously murky layer of atmosphere.

Manuel Gonzalez

Pan NPR Like far too much of Manuel Gonzales' debut novel, this enticing hook doesn't stick; rather than tackling globe-shaking adventure and intrigue, the story dwells on the internal politics and convoluted history of the mysterious Regional Office, as well as the lives of two young women, Rose and Sarah, who find themselves on opposing sides of the book's titular attack. This narrower focus does have plenty of possibility, and to his credit, Gonzales shows glimpses of wit and brilliance. What Office mostly fails to do, though, is give enough of a reason to care about its mythology-heavy plot — or the characters caught in it.

Lavie Tidhar

Rave NPR \"The interplay between the two storylines grows profound as they progress. Wolf\'s investigations take bizarre, grotesque, blackly comedic turns while Shomer\'s horrific existence grows symbolic — and then something magically more than symbolic — when the SS assigns him the task of making doors ... Tidhar tightropes between fantasy, farce, and historical fiction, all while grounding things in brisk, gritty noir.\

Glen Weldon

Rave NPR Weldon breezes through this oft-told history with authority and ease, highlighting the big moments in Batman's timeline while providing rich, witty commentary ... Winks and in-jokes for the hardcore fan abound; casual Bat-lovers, though, won't be lost. Weldon navigates Batman's history with an expert step.

Frank Trentmann

Positive NPR It's an enormous undertaking, and the size of the book reflects that. It's huge. Thankfully it's also hugely readable. Combining a dizzying array of disciplines — economics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, religion, geopolitics, and even etymology — Empire deftly juggles a colossal load.

Olivia Laing

Positive NPR It's a stunning balance. Laing renders her autobiographical vignettes...with dry, haunting anxiety. The Lonely City is subtitled Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, and the irony of that phrase is palpable. The book's so-called adventures are all withdrawn and introspective; for a book about loneliness, it couldn't read more lonely. That's both a plus and a minus. Laing — like Hopper and the other artistic loners she writes about — is an observer, and that passivity lends the book a staggering emotional weight that's both powerful and leaden. It's a gray, overcast afternoon of a book, sometimes oppressively so.