‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Blake Crouch

Positive NPR Crouch\'s books are fun the way a summer blockbuster is fun. And on the page, he exudes the smooth, slick confidence of someone who knows exactly where he\'s going and just how to get there. Even his surprises seem like clockwork. They all go off precisely when he wants them to ... Crouch could\'ve just gone on from this point and told a dull, standard-issue technological superman story. Dude gets magical sci-fi powers, saves/destroys the world, the end. But what\'s interesting about Upgrade is that Crouch doesn\'t do that ... Crouch doesn\'t linger. He knows how to do a chase, when to blow stuff up and when to bring the house lights down ... what makes Upgrade special is that his path is unique. He takes turns that are unexpected, explores some stunning vistas along the way, and even if the endpoint is a little bit obvious, watching him get there can be a lot of fun ... Bloody, grim and occasionally pedantic, but still fun.

Fonda Lee

Rave NPR You fall into these books like a love affair — all rough physicality and surprise — but stay (across thousands of pages) because there\'s so much more to it than that. Laughs. Heartbreak. Depths that loom unexpectedly. Friends that come and go ... Mostly you get hooked because Lee has created a world that feels as real and logical and lived-in as the one outside the covers. Both more ordered and more chaotic at the same time. Deadlier and more beautiful. They are terrible temptations, these books. You pick them up and it\'s hard to put them down ... Thirty years of love and war and vengeance and betrayal — that\'s what Lee is offering here. A long slide into an imaginary history glimpsed in explosive, Technicolor bursts, punctuated by the stutter of machine guns, sweetened by rice wine and almond tarts. There are deaths and defeats in Legacy that will rock any long-time Green Bone fan. Victories that feel so tenuous you want to dig your nails into the pages just to hold them tighter.

Brent Spiner

Positive NPR It isn\'t great literature, but it is weird (which counts for a lot) and fun (which also counts for a lot), might be an elaborate prank being played by the author, and it is absolutely a book that could\'ve only been written by Brent Spiner ... It is an odd thing, taken all together, and the voice wavers more than a little as it tries to maintain its pulpy noir aesthetic amid the several challenges presented by its setting (1990 Los Angeles), narrator (the victim, rather than some tough-as-nails private dick) and its author (Spiner\'s taste for weird physical comedy and overblown caricature make the whole thing borderline surreal) ... Look, it\'s a lot, okay? And the whole thing is threaded through with dream sequences in which Spiner deals with his feelings about his abusive step-father and his own inadequacies, thoughts on fandom and funerals, the meaning of make-believe, and many scenes spent wandering around in his underwear. So if you\'re into that kind of thing, you know, jackpot ... It is a strange book, done completely straight-faced, doused liberally with sad-sack, self-deprecation from the author about ... himself. Or his made-up self. Or both. A more skilled writer would\'ve given the whole thing depth, meaning, weight. A less accomplished storyteller would\'ve made himself come off like less of a schlub. And either would\'ve ruined Fan Fiction\'s madcap energy, its Bizarro-World charm. As it is, the writing varies wildly between manic and terse, the ending is sudden, bizarre, completely nonsensical and absolutely predictable all at the same time, and the characterizations of women throughout are unfortunate in that they\'re largely appearance-based — though that\'s a tough thing to gauge in a book where every character is a caricature and the tone is trying so hard (with occasional success) to read like the kind of sunshine noir that would absolutely have hard-nosed dames with legs up to there, or whatever ... And while there were moments while reading that I felt sure this was all some elaborate gag by Spiner, ultimately, I think it is exactly what I said it was earlier — a yarn. The kind of story he\'s told a hundred times before, to friends and fans, changing names and places, embellishing and inventing as he goes. It\'s a barroom epic, a party piece for dull cocktail hours, a story told without ego or shame just for the pure, weird joy of the telling.

Anthony Doerr

Rave NPR Doerr does amazing things with his story, with this narrative spread unevenly across such disparate characters, such different voices. He makes links that persist across centuries, flits from place to place and person to person with an enviable grace, making seemingly impossible logical and temporal leaps seem as natural as breath. Between the covers, across hundreds of pages, he has everything — birth and death, love and war, heists, escapes, the particular (though not unique) perils of growing up in 1453, 1940, 2020 and 2146. He breaks the story into a thousand pieces, then spends every page carefully putting it all back in order again ... Doerr does not overstate the importance of the story-within-a-story. If anything, he makes a point of reminding us again and again how easy it is for books to be lost across the ages ... The book is a puzzle. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian\'s. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong ... It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.

Cadwell Turnbull

Mixed NPR ... a terrible gut-punch of a thing once you get past the surface. Once you dig in and start thinking about it maybe more than you meant to. It has layers to it. Questions that don\'t ever get answered. Possibilities scattered like pennies on the ground ... And I\'m not saying the surface is any walk in the park either ... both beautifully fantastical and wondrously mundane as each of Turnbull\'s sharply detailed characters work through (or don\'t) both the enormity of regular life and the parallel enormity of the Fracture ... difficult.

Claire North

Rave NPR It\'s been days since I finished Claire North\'s newest book, Notes From The Burning Age, and I am still angry at it. Not because North did anything wrong, but just because there isn\'t more of it. And I don\'t mean a few more pages, a couple more scenes. I want heaps. I want volumes. I want to go back to my Kindle, open it up and see that, magically, its 450 pages have become a thousand. I spent a handful of late nights and early mornings in the ruined, rescued and re-ruined world that North has made of our own not-terribly-distant future. They were good days. There was a strange sense of peace in them — of sliding into a fantastical nightmare so skillfully sketched that it felt like truth. And when it was done, I simply didn\'t want to leave ... compelling because it is beautiful. Because it is a mess, skillfully rendered, with a recognizable past (our own) and a believable present witnessed primarily by three characters who aren\'t just living through it, but actively shaping it ... The sharpness with which North shifts gears comes with an almost audible snap. It feels so obvious the moment it happens, the relief of it deeply satisfying personally, and a splash of rocket fuel for the plot ... North has created a world that works, that lives and breathes and suffers and dies, and populated it with characters who are all flawed, all broken, and struggling to make something better. It felt seamless, like it was written in a day, maybe two, coming out whole and smooth and perfect on the very first try ... And even when North was done and Notes reached its explosive conclusion, I just wasn\'t ready to leave. Her world was such a fragile, beautiful, doomed place, I felt like I should stick around just to make sure it would all be okay.

Simon Van Booy

Rave NPR I\'ve been a fan of Van Booy\'s work for a long time. His short stories read like jagged glass set in beautiful boxes. Night is not a lot different. A novel, yes, and maybe his best — best of all his work I\'ve read, for sure, and better, by a long stretch, than so much I\'ve read that wasn\'t written by him. But if his short stories are pieces of glass, each distinct and different, Night is a stained-glass window, shattered. It is a series of vignettes — of moments lifted whole and raw from the lives of a Kentucky family, generations deep — and not pieced together but curated. Each on display. Each its own and complete, but part of a greater whole ... a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book. A story told in the native tongue and tempos of paint factory employees and domestics and diner waitresses, of the guys working 20 years on the line at the Ford plant and those walking dazedly out into the light after 10 spent in prison...It\'s a language that Van Booy understands. An ordinary world that he sketches with sharp clarity and a softness that borders on magical. In Night, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived ...And in telling their stories, he makes every one of those lives enormous to behold.

Martha Wells

Mixed NPR ... a lot of things that you probably don\'t expect. It is an unadorned whodunit. A cozy mystery garlanded with plasma cannons and spaceships. An IT thriller (like so many Murderbot stories) that functions at least partially as a forensic examination of linked surveillance and data systems. A locked-room variant ... It\'s fun, sure. It\'s a romp. Murderbot is, as always, fine (if grumpy) company. Its parenthetical digressions on the sloth and squishiness of humans, its obsession with its shows and its constant internal moral battles over passing as a harmless, mostly-normal, free, former corporate slave that\'s no threat to its human neighbors or leaning into its darker past and becoming the full-on Murderbot it truly is are all there. Every Murderbot book is, in some sense, a passing narrative. The larger arc (Murderbot trying to escape its violent, repressive past and become the best, truest possible version of itself) has been read as many things by many different people, and one of the things that makes Wells\' series so comforting is that Murderbot\'s primary story is about a nonhuman trying to pass as human and invent its own better self along the way. You can root for a character like that. You want them to succeed ... But Fugitive Telemetry is also an oddity in Wells\' canon...It\'s a story that takes place over the course of a single day — leaving little time for the usual moping around, media consumption and snarky commentary on human systems that makes Murderbot so charming. It hints at (but doesn\'t directly address) much of anything in the series\' primary storyline (the actually-murderous GrayCris corporation, Murderbot\'s past or those in pursuit of it) and operates largely as a stand-alone story ... Still, one of Wells\' superpowers has long been her ability to pack an epic\'s worth of material into a very small package. And here, she uses the condensed timeline and single location as a way to put Murderbot in a situation of constant moral reckoning ... Murderbot was made to be Murderbot. That will never change.The question is, can it choose to be more?

Stina Leicht

Mixed NPR Stina Leicht is trying to do a lot with Persephone Station. She\'s trying to do a book that feels both weighty and light, both serious and fun, and for long stretches, she pulls off what is a very difficult balancing act. And while success would\'ve been masterful, given the weight of all the different stories she\'s carrying, the falls and failures seem almost inevitable ... Leicht dumps a lot of background here — character backstories, corporate info, the histories of Rosie and Vissia. And I get it. This stuff has to go somewhere. It\'s not fluff (well, not most of it), and much of it becomes important later. But two things go wrong. First, after the thumping shocks of the opening, the middlegame happens in a kind of vacuum without propulsion and without stakes. You know all the main characters will survive this mid-point action because all of their plotlines have become so tangled that any resolution requires them all to make it to the end. Second, that neatly measured tempo established in the front of the book simply vanishes for a long, muddling stretch ... Most of this is okay. Most of it — even the squishy middle bit — is buoyed along by Leicht\'s talent for making characters you want to hang with just a little bit longer ... But of all the parts that make up Persephone Station — amid all the miniguns, explosions and robots — it\'s the four people in the center of it all that stitch it together. Even in the moments when it feels like it\'s coming apart at the seams.

Cixin Liu

Rave NPR Cixin Liu\'s To Hold Up The Sky is a 1974 Chevy van with icy moons and swirling nebulae painted on the side that you saw for sale by the side of the road in a snowstorm. It is a copy of Heavy Metal you found stuck in the back of the rack at Empire Comics when you were looking for old Savage Sword of Conan issues to read on a long road trip with your parents. It is the torn cover of a faded sci-fi paperback you found at the thrift store and spent the afternoon reading in the car while you waited for a girl to get off work and let you into her apartment for which you didn\'t yet have a key. It is magic, this collection of short stories Liu wrote and published ten, 20, 30 years ago. It is a time machine; a split-vision tunnel that lets you go back in time while staring forward ... To Hold Up The Sky gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we\'ve seen in decades.

Matt Haig

Mixed NPR The Midnight Library is unusual in that it follows a plot with no twists, no turns that don\'t feel like a gentle glide. Inside the library itself, Mrs. Elm\'s job is to present everything to Nora very clearly and to lay out the stakes very directly. Infinite options, yes, but maybe not an infinite amount of time in which to choose. Infinite possibility, sure, but only one shot at each of them. When Nora loses hope, the library starts to collapse. When she finds herself excited again about living, things calm down. And there\'s a deliberateness to it all. A simplicity to the narrative that has to be taken as a choice on Haig\'s part, not an accident ... what sucks a measure of the color and life from The Midnight Library is that Nora, as a character, doesn\'t really want anything. Or maybe she does, but the arc of the plot hinges on her trying to figure out what exactly it is. And a character who doesn\'t actively want something—even when it is something so basic as to keep on living—is a hard character to identify with. Ultimately, Haig gives Nora (and those of us following along with her) a straightforward path from suicide to closure, from regret to acceptance.

Maria Dahvana Headley

Rave NPR The first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don\'t care if you\'ve read Beowulf (the original) before ... Headley\'s version is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing. A remarkable thing that probably shouldn\'t even exist, except that it does ... Headley has made it modern, not in form or style or content, but in temperament. In language ... Headley\'s Beowulf is a big release — discussed, debated, talked about (as it should be) because it has everything: Love, sex, murder, magic, dungeons, dragons, giants, monsters ... she starts it all with \'Bro.\' Bro. Bro! I mean, that\'s ridiculous. And brilliant. And genius-level washed-up barstool-hero trolling all at the same time ... It sings straight through, the alliteration and temper of it invigorating (as it should be) and roaring (as it should be) ... But Maria Headley\'s Beowulf I love for exactly what it is: a psychotic song of gold and blood, stylish as hell, nasty and brutish and funny all at once.

Tamsyn Muir

Rave NPR Harrow is a walking trauma ... unreliable narrator? Yeah. But in this case so utterly unreliable that she alters our memories of what came before—which, not for nothing, is a BIG swing on Muir\'s part, and one that she pulls off, not gracefully, but with devastating brute force ... But where Muir takes it is so deliciously bonkers, achingly, heartbreakingly twisted and purposefully broken [the] narrative barely even matters ... It is wickedly challenging to read, deliberately impossible to comprehend in full and, frankly, I still feel like I only got about 80% of what actually happened. But there\'s just something so gorgeously Baroque about it all. So beautifully, wildly and precariously weird that I couldn\'t help sliding through page after page ... none of it was clean or easy and none of it...was what I was expecting.

Cherie Dimaline

Rave NPR And Dimaline writes out their love story in thick, physical prose, with a smothering closeness that is so warm, charged and profoundly personal that it is almost claustrophobic ... Down in its bones, Empire Of Wild is a monster story. Mythic but not epic, swimming in Indigenous medicine, not magic ... It is tight, stark, visceral, beautiful — rich where richness is warranted, but spare where want and sorrow have sharpened every word ... Dimaline has crafted something both current and timeless, mythic but personal.

Paul Tremblay

Rave NPR ... a zombie story and a virus story and a disaster story and an intensely personal, focused drama all at the same time ... Quiet. That\'s what it is. Except for when it is very, very loud. Plodding (which might seem weird for a book with such a compressed time-line) except for when it absolutely is not. It\'s a ticking-clock action novel that is, at the same time, timeless, like all the clocks have been turned to liquid. It\'s an outbreak story released in the middle of a global pandemic which, in its awful reality, absolutely dwarfs the fiction contained between the covers, and it\'s a horror story with no scares because you know (you know) just how bad, how awful, how sad and how bloody it is all going to get before you\'re through ... None of this is a criticism. These were all deliberate choices. They all work. They all make Survivor Song what it is, which is a claustrophobically small, painfully real novel of everyday horror that feels (sickeningly, depressingly) like it might\'ve been a long-form non-fiction story if things today and yesterday had gone just a little bit differently than they did ... Straight stream-of-consciousness stuff that Tremblay weaves into the wobbly narrative framework that jumps from narrator to narrator, that switches person and tense, that messes with time and convention in ways that feel both jarring and real. What\'s one of the things that our own crisis has taught us? That time bends and stretches in strange ways. That the apocalypse is, for the most part boring (except when it\'s not) ... a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. It goes on, piling banal complication on top of the awful terror of time running out, and crushes you in the most surprising of ways — with a look, a line, a touch, a memory, an inevitability that you saw coming from page 1. It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn\'t a fairy tale. It\'s a horror story.

Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell

Rave NPR Samanta Schweblin is not a science fiction writer. Which is probably one of the reasons why Little Eyes...reads like such great science fiction ... [Schweblin] basically gives everyone in the world a Furby with a webcam, and then sits back, smiling, and watches humanity shake itself to pieces ... There\'s a finality to the relationship. A heavy reality, bounded by life and death at either end and the juicy, exciting, terrifying, horrible middle bit where two human beings connect via the lens of a felt-covered plastic mole with camera eyes ... If the idea of a human pet, of a Furby with a person inside, was a loose thread idly toyed with on page 1, then Schweblin spends the next 249 slowly pulling at it — expertly unraveling the humans on either end of the kentuki\'s virtual connection. You know from the start — from the very first all-too-plausible vignette set in a teenage girl\'s bedroom in Indiana — that everything will end in fire and blood and tears. You just know ... But still, you can\'t stop watching. Even when you want to — even when Schweblin shatters your trust and twists the knife as Little Eyes reaches its absolutely gutting, absolutely haunting conclusions — you just can\'t look away.

Ken Liu

Mixed NPR ... isn\'t even really a book of discreet short stories so much as a series of tightly interlinked, self-referential chapters of a distributed novel, broken up by diversions, digressions, thought experiments and a couple pieces that read like intellectual exercises in imaginary brand PR ... These linked stories are broken up by unattached tales that fall like partial non-sequiturs in Liu\'s larger conversation about family, memory and immortality ... There are beautiful moments in these stand-alone tales, to be sure ... as fun as such dissembling can be for those more interested in the way a writer\'s brain works than settling down with a good yarn, The Hidden Girl just doesn\'t hang together as a complete collection. It meanders and repeats itself. It can\'t commit to a single tone, but can\'t arrange disparate ones into a sensible flow. There are too many places where process overshadows character, or where Liu presents an argument clothed in threadbare narrative rather than a story that proceeds along the natural path of an argument. Like the rogue intelligences that skulk in its pages, The Hidden Girl is smart, sure. How could it not be?...But something about it feels not altogether human.

Claire North

Rave NPR It\'s heavy. It\'s cruel. There are not many pages of The Pursuit of William Abbey (as there were not many moments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) that are not haunted by dead things ... North can sketch a character in a sentence, a phrase. She can evoke an entire city in the space of a breath. There is no piece of The Pursuit that is forgettable, that fades, that is used merely to fill time between this thing and that. The entirety of Abbey\'s life as a truth-speaker is propulsive. It is like one long chase scene that never slackens, told in frantic, disconnected pieces until a moment comes when need requires depth, breadth ... It is bleak. It is beautiful. It has, buried deep inside, a hopeful heart. Because The Pursuit of William Abbey is a chameleon. It is a shape-shifter. And, like the truth, it will break your heart every time.

Annalee Newitz

Rave NPR It\'s a time travel story — there\'s no other way they go. It stumbles in the prose sometimes. Gets wrapped up in referential nerdery. But Newitz grounds things in character details and the focused, dual, coordinated concerns of Beth in 1992 and Tess everywhen else. They color (and in some cases spackle over) the science in emotion ... And then Newitz gives the whole twisty mess a solid driver in an edit war ... But Newitz isn\'t content to end with nicely put-together or solidly plotted or any of the other faint-praise bull that generally gets heaped on troped-up genre novels. It\'s tough enough to write a time travel book that maintains its own internal logic throughout and doesn\'t descend into a series of ex machina miracles to put a neat bow on the last page, so that\'s where most writers stop. But not Newitz ... Another Timeline is a revolutionary novel in that it is about revolutions ... To burn down the past and start over again new. That Newitz can contain these both inside the skin of a single novel is not genius, it is necessity.

Tamsyn Muir

Rave NPR ... a freaky science-fantasy-horror-romance mash-up that owes its innards to M.A.S.H. and Harry Potter in equal measure; to a thousand Agatha Christie locked-house mysteries and Sweet Valley High. The set-up is genius ... Muir uses the claustrophobia and narrowed focus to fine purpose ... too funny to be horror, too gooey to be science fiction, has too many spaceships and autodoors to be fantasy, and has far more bloody dismemberings than your average parlor romance. It is altogether its own thing — brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through. With a snorting laugh and two middle fingers, the whole thing burns end-to-end. It is deep when you expect shallow, raucous when you expect dignity and, in the end, absolutely heartbreaking when you least expect it.

Leigh Bardugo

Positive NPR ... for all the good work that Bardugo does in crafting a believable alternate world where Yale\'s secret societies work powerful magic to alter the course of fortunes and history, it is Alex that makes Ninth House so readable. She is as disbelieving as any of us, as innocent, as skeptical, as furious. She is equal parts hard and soft, vulnerable and powerful. She may see ghosts, but she doesn\'t understand magic — real, nasty, visceral magic. And in Ninth House, Bardugo gives us the chance to see it all — the real and the imagined versions of Yale, the rich, the powerful, those they prey on — through Alex Stern\'s eyes.

Salman Rushdie

Positive NPR It is, on the one hand, a gutting satire of America right now, India right now, the U.K. maybe five minutes ago (things change so fast...) ... It is a road trip story that lives on a steady diet of pop culture references which, rather than broadening its appeal, narrows its targeted audience almost exclusively to recent retirees who will catch all its glancing, rapid-fire mentions ... It is a novel of magical realism that bends the notions of \'magical\' and \'realism\' so far that it\'s like China Miéville trying to rewrite Roberto Bolano ... A comedy where every single joke fails to land completely. It\'s got so much music in the words it almost demands to be read aloud. Its so inconstant you\'d need one of those serial killer boards made of index cards and string just to unpack the plot ... Quichotte, as a book, is a mess. But it is a beautiful mess. A resonant mess. A daring mess. An absolute mess that somehow hangs together anyway through digressions and departures, looooong stretches of didactic, narrated passages on history and immigration and the opioid crisis, shifts in POV and, you know, reality ... It\'s a mess that makes noble (if misguided) heroes of total head-cases — just like Cervantes did. And that\'s not nothing. It could be argued that Quichotte is a novel that attempts to reflect back to us the total, crumbling insanity of living in a world unmoored from reality — that shows what happens when lies become as good as facts. But I won\'t make that argument here because I just don\'t think Rushdie entirely pulls it off. He has the crazy down solid, but fails in examining the consequences. Or chooses to ignore them. Or simply does not care. B

Temi Oh

Positive NPR Do You Dream is an oddity for a science fiction book. It is slow, contemplative, moody. It doesn\'t even make it into space for more than a hundred pages, and when it does, space is ... dull. Beautiful sometimes, dangerous as hell, but just exactly as boring as a whole lot of nothing must eventually become to those forced to live in it ... Oh is fantastic at writing about growing up — about the fear and the intimacy, the misery and exultation. She\'s particularly good about documenting it happening at the hothouse speeds bred by close-quarters and diminished options ... I didn\'t love the way [Oh] chose to end it. There were some narrative choices and character moments that didn\'t land for me as things accelerated toward the final pages. But the ride itself was more than worth it.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Rave NPR El-Mohtar...and Gladstone sidestep the pitfall of the time-travel story by leaning way into the chaos of it all. They embrace the inexplicable convolutions of narrative rendered by bending time\'s arrow and make each chapter a vignette—a specific time, place, moment, detailing starship battles or coastal fishing villages where subtle, long games are played to shape the course of the future. But they don\'t traffic in the how or the why. There is no larger picture here. No grand design revealed ... El-Mohtar and Gladstone\'s voices as Red and Blue are dissimilar enough to give each a flavor, yet enough alike that there\'s an almost alien sense of dislocation about them ... And the thrill of This Is How You Lose The Time War suddenly becomes not the time travel, not the war, not any of those things that no one could ever describe anyway, but just the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava.

Paul Tremblay

Rave NPR And god, these stories. They take you like a bullet just south of the heart, opening something up inside you that feels awful and wrong and full of poison ... should be read in order for the full effect. The placement of every single story doesn\'t matter, but the placement of some of them absolutely do. It should be read in big, frantic gulps, like breathing while nearly drowning. And when you\'re done, read the author\'s notes at the end. Because Tremblay explaining himself is precisely the kind of decompression required. To sit, for just a moment, with the entirely normal man behind these stories and have him tell you that it\'s all okay, that they really are just stories, nothing more, written between preparing for the classes he had to teach and vacations with his family, is ... comforting somehow. A slow return to reality.

Chuck Klosterman

Rave NPR They sound like jokes, these stories. Barroom tales saved up for that hour before last call when everyone has run out of interesting things to say about their jobs, their kids, their fantasy football league ... short stories that stretch from the vaguely science fictional to the vaguely thriller-y to the vaguely vague. And that\'s not an insult. That\'s design. That\'s deliberate, this sense of disconnection. Of extreme oddity cloaked in muffling banality ... taken in the aggregate, Klosterman\'s microdoses of reality present something larger than the sum of their parts: A clear-eyed vision of consensus reality as a breakable construct, easily manipulated by those who can see the complicated workings inside and come up with the one great play that bends those rules and works every time.

Fonda Lee

Rave NPR Lee has created an entire modern world here, complete and round with its own history, customs, traditions, language. In Jade City she built it up and tore it down again. And in her newest, Jade War, she shakes up the pieces that remain and sets half the world on fire ... Lee moves between these worlds with the grace of a dancer. She is just as comfortable in the wide shot of international relations as she is close-up, in a conversation between estranged brothers or dire enemies or a husband and wife in bed. She can walk a battlefield as artfully as she describes a knife fight, and all of it is beautiful, oddly restrained, compulsively readable as Lee bounces between viewpoints, characters and storylines that each spend hundreds of pages naturally converging in cinematic, firework-bright bursts of action ... If The Godfather never was, Jade War (and Jade City) would be how we define generational organized crime stories today ... [Lee] juggles the personal and the epic with deft, admirable skill, weaving a story that is equally sweeping and intimate; a magical, almost operatic crime and family drama that feels all the more true because all of her jade-fueled supermen (and women) come with human hearts that bend and break the same as ours.

Reed King

Rave NPR It is, in many ways, the sort of book I\'m always looking for—a glorious mess; a jangly, spit-and-duct-tape creation that you can feel shaking itself to pieces even as you read; a visionary head-trip of apocalyptic political satire; a kitchen sink quest story that reads like someone\'s high school RPG session gone full-on Technicolor bonkers ... I love the abuse of footnotes. I love the story-within-a-story set-up. I love the opportunity it offers for multi-layered satire. It rarely works, (and it doesn\'t always work here), but when it does, FKA USA becomes like Rudy Rucker writing The Handmaid\'s Tale. It\'s an irradiated, poisoned, oppressive dystopia, sure, but that doesn\'t mean we can\'t all have a little fun along the way, right? ... This is a weird, loud, violent, funny, profane journey across the blasted ruin of our future from the first word to the last, that never pretends to be anything else. And if you aren\'t interested in the ride, that\'s fine. That just means more goats and robots for the rest of us.

Neal Stephenson

Mixed NPR I can say that I hated the first few pages of Fall. Hated \'em like poison ... I can tell you that Fall starts bad, recovers slowly, builds to a level of awesome not seen since Stephenson\'s early days of sound and fury, then settles for an achingly long time, into a kind of back-and-forth narrative discursion on immortality, the singularity, chaos, life and death ... There\'s no part not drenched in his didactic obsessions and love of the world\'s underpinning minutiae ... gives equal weight to religion, mythology and technology in a way that, by page 600 or so, feels almost revolutionary ... his best bits are still those when he is firmly rooted in the real, looking out over a too-near horizon of history and telling us what is coming ... There is actually a run in the first third of Fall that is flat-out amazing — a riff on fundamentalism and the weaponization of false information in post-fact America that I haven\'t stopped thinking about (or telling people about) since I put the book down ... Stephenson\'s greatest strength as a writer has always been that he sees just a little bit further and a little bit clearer than the rest of us do. He can\'t always seem to decide what\'s worth rhapsodizing about. But when he focuses, he can show us some truly amazing things.

Blake Crouch

Rave NPR ...you think you know where this is going ... Only you don\'t. Not even a little. Because what Crouch has made here is a puzzle box time-travel story, all based on memory and death ... But there\'s a catch. A big one and a clever one with some weird modern resonance ... Crouch handles the build-up well ... he juggles the multiple narrators and timelines with a confident economy. He couches the occasional (necessary, sometimes fascinating) infodump in character and tension most of the time, only rarely resorting to flashbackery or moody staring-off-into-the-rain soliloquy. And even though some of his relationships come with a whiff of plot contrivance, he has always been rare among that cadre of speculative fiction writers who traffic in big, near-future ideas in that his characters, on an individual basis, come off as actual humans rather than robots programmed to spout off dialogue ... Recursion ... is fuller than you\'d expect. More fleshed. More human. It has a thrumming pulse that moves beyond big ideas and into their effects on a larger, more complex world.

Elvia Wilk

Mixed NPR Oval itself — the book, the story of it — seems to be going nowhere, and taking a damn long time to get there, too. But then, something clicks ... And when you get it — when the nickel finally drops — you see Oval for what it is: a disaster story just waiting to happen. A disaster story that is happening, while you were paying attention to other things ... Though, by the end, I could see the balance of Wilk\'s various metaphors, her careful obscuration of very real, serious problems by small, petty, day-to-day ones, getting there was a mighty wander. Oval is a short story dressed in novel drag. It\'s a game of chicken played with a lovely sense of boredom ... as much as I liked where Wilk ended up — as much as I appreciated her juicy language, her eye for trauma, the scalpel-edge to her sense of the absurd — the road she took to get there just wasn\'t interesting enough to make the trip worthwhile.

Seanan Mcguire

Positive NPR Reed is a little flat. His assistant (a vicious, murderous, blood-spattered creature called Leigh who loves and hates Reed with equal ferocity) is the same. They\'re both mustache-twisting caricatures driven by non-specific hate and vengeance and not exactly, you know, \'rounded\' ... But that\'s okay. Chills and narrative torque can be wrung out of characters like this by writers with chops enough to balance different motivational weights (see early Darth Vader, Moriarty, Blofeld), and McGuire absolutely has those skills ... has a complicated structure that demands some fairly close reading ... The narrative architecture really lands just to the sane side of experimental, and it is a tribute to McGuire\'s skills that it never actually feels all that complicated ... Opens out and takes on layers and a compelling seriousness that McGuire spent 400 pages building toward.

Ted Chiang

Rave NPR There are books so jammed with brilliant, mind-exploding ideas it\'s like the author packed fireworks between the covers, all strung together on a very short fuse. There are others that take a single fascinating notion and walk all the way around it ... to read Ted Chiang is to do both at the same time. Chiang is, among other things, a short story specialist ... His voice and style are so beautifully trim it makes you think that, like one of his characters, he has a magical looking-box hidden in his basement that shows him nothing except the final texts of stories ... Like Annie Proulx or Jim Harrison, he has that tool in his box that makes him capable of telling a story of decades in a handful of words.

Caitlin Starling

Positive NPR \"It\'s tough to know here how much more I should tell you, because the entire architecture of the story hangs on the slow-burn paranoia and the fraying personal connection between Gyre and Em ... The Luminous Dead is too meticulously twisted to let anyone simply be evil without cause, without depth. And that, actually, is the best thing about these kind of one-man (or, in this case, two-woman) shows ... It is a torturous book. Horrifying in small, cutting, personal ways, and in the more classic scare-in-a-dark-room way. But there\'s an iron rod of panicked strength that runs through the middle of it.\

Salvatore Scibona

Rave NPR \"... a war story unlike any other war story ... Sound dull? You\'re wrong. Tired and worn-out? Not even a little. Not here, in Scibona\'s hands, where the simplest things (nature, pride, a white t-shirt, the taste of water from one\'s home place) become mythic and strange, almost magical, imbued with meanings beyond the plain fact of their existence ... the way Scibona writes, there are few moments that don\'t feel enlivened with something ... more. Something extra. Some secret power of history, family or fate thrumming away unseen behind the curtains of the world, driving events. Some force that everyone who\'s paying attention can sense but not see, that drives a chain of bad decisions and selfish acts that echo down through generations of families ... Scibona is a remarkable writer and The Volunteer is a remarkable book.\

Don Winslow

Positive NPR \"The Border, like all of Winslow\'s books, is written in Winslow\'s voice, which is choppy, curt, atonal, ugly. It\'s the voice of someone who\'s trying to make fun of bad tough-guy pulp — stringing together the least amount of words into a sentence, the least amount of sentences into a paragraph. Worse, the voice of someone faking the affectation (which Winslow is not) ... The book is trope-heavy, stereotype-heavy, occasionally (okay, often) one-dimensional. It feels, for long stretches, like watching a fantastically good 80\'s action movie — one of those made in the days before self-awareness and irony became marketable ... All of that to weigh against the counterargument, which is that The Border is a very good book precisely because of some of those reasons mentioned above. Because it is a huge, meticulously researched book that comes at the end of a series 20 years in the making. Because it is a book that eschews flowery language for precision and quick action. Because the internal monologues of quiet men are often the ways we are given to understand their internal histories. Because — and I am not saying this lightly — this is all basically Shakespeare ... But taken all together, in its entirety — taken as a full, sweeping, fictionalized tale rooted and grounded in very real tragedy — The Border becomes a book for our times.\

Charlie Jane Anders

Positive NPR \"And yes, I get it. This all sounds YA-simple, doesn\'t it? ... But stick with me a minute because there\'s more here. Lots (and lots) more .. And yes, there is adventure and action. I mean, this is a book with spaceships, pirates, smugglers, rebels, rich girls and alien lobster monsters. And Charlie Jane knows how to tell those stories, for sure. But it is more than that, is what I\'m saying. It is an intimate portrait of people as much as it is a piece of culturally aware social scifi — a look at our moment in history through a distorting lens of aliens and spaceships. And it is those people who break everything that lies broken by the end of things...\

Martha Wells

Rave NPR This book is sneaky. As much as you want to think this is just some lightweight little confection made of robot fights and space murder — and as much as All Systems Red wants to present itself as nothing but robot fights and space murder — Martha Wells did something really clever. She hid a delicate, nuanced and deeply, grumpily human story inside these pulp trappings, by making her murderous robot story primarily character-driven ... I\'m not alone in my love for Murderbot...we are all a little bit Murderbot...we see ourselves in its skin...reading about this sulky, soap-opera-loving cyborg killing machine might be one of the most human experiences you can have in sci-fi right now.

Simon Stalenhag

Rave NPR \"[The Electric State] feels like something brought back from a nightmare ... [Stålenhag\'s] Swedish books read joyous when they were happy, bittersweet (but rarely sorrowful) when they were not, and adventurous in between. But The Electric State is Stålenhag\'s American book. His vision of an alternate post-war, post-drought, post-human 1997 in the desert West and California. And it is haunting ... [The story] unwinds slowly, [Michelle\'s] past, the reasons for her trip, her relationship with the little, big-headed robot revealed bit by bit. On the opposite track, the history lesson becomes orders given to a mysterious man who\'s been following Michelle all the way to San Francisco. And when the two storylines cross, they do so in silence. Pictures only. Like snapshots from a horrifying past that never quite was ... And if you\'re anything like me, you\'ll take those images to bed with you for a long time and dream of Stålenhag\'s America — lost to sand, to drought, to war, to loneliness, and stalked always by the low, distant rumble of something terrible rising out of the earth and coming for you.\

Irvine Welsh

Mixed NPR \"That language — that rock-mouthed, mushy, dense Scottish radge slang that made Welsh\'s name back in the day — works the same as it always has. It\'s musical, propulsive, both brilliant and maddening, sensible only when your eyes are half focused; when you hear it rolling off the page rather than trying to read it straight ... When he\'s at his best, Welsh spins a story of four men broken by addiction and betrayal ... It\'s to Welsh\'s credit that he gives none of them any kind of sudden forgiveness or moment of redemption that doesn\'t come with a thousand strings attached and a baggie of coke in the pocket because these are not good guys ... And if that\'d been the whole of the book, it might\'ve been great ... instead, there\'s a subplot about sex tourism and another about an illegal kidney, another about getting the clap, another about Hibs finally winning the cup. There\'s a whole choppy b-plot about Begbie and an L.A. ex-cop who thinks he\'s a serial killer, plus a murder by sword, and a whole lot about the international art-and-EDM scene ... by the end, what could\'ve been a fitting, apt, even startling counterweight to Trainspotting has been weighed down with so much awkward sex, so many grown men on drugs and so many antic, unlikely capers, that the great idea Welsh had at the beginning has been lost.\

Lavie Tidhar

Rave NPR Lavie Tidhar is a genius at conjuring realities that are just two steps to the left of our own—places that look and smell and feel real, if just a bit hauntingly alien ... This is a story that gets weirder the deeper you get into it; that cultivates strangeness like something precious ... There are echoes of Chabon\'s The Yiddish Policeman\'s Union in it, wild strains of P.K. Dick and Roger Zelazny\'s Chronicles of Amber. But Unholy Land is its own thing. Something that no one but Tidhar could\'ve written. Gorgeous in its alienness, comfortingly gray in its banality, and disquieting throughout. And yes, it\'s a story about the magic of writers, partly, and that may rub some people the wrong way ... but because it\'s Tidhar, somehow, that makes it okay. Because he approaches it with a certain reverence for the pulps and the hacks, for the cheapness of collections of Golden Age sci-fi space-ships-and-ray-guns imaginings, for the sadness of worlds that never were.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Pan NPR \"So on the one hand, moon murder! And who doesn\'t love that? On the other, there\'s Kim Stanley Robinson laying down an extended, 400-page riff on a future where an ascendant China has become the world\'s superpower and human law, politics, class and culture are all being reforged in the harsh environment of lunar colonies. That\'s how he chose to write his book. And that\'s fine. It\'s just no way to tell a story ... in Red Moon you can really see the strings. It feels like a spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-medicine-go-down kind of situation. Give \'em a little moon murder and then they\'ll GLADLY stick around for my lecture on quantum cryptography! ... Red Moon reads like a TED Talk being given in the middle of a car chase. Too often, it sacrifices rhythm and structure for pages of back-and-forth debate. Fascinating, sure. Occasionally revolutionary, and beautifully deliberated. But ultimately it makes for a book that is too dry, didactic and choppy to sustain itself through to the end.\

Alyson Hagy

Rave NPR Alyson Hagy\'s Scribe is a lean, hard wolf of a thing. There\'s something feral and panting about it. Vicious. It is sour and cruel and vivid, with a long memory and blood in its teeth. It gives nothing away ... Scribe\'s story is clear, simple and plain. In Hagy\'s future, most everything has been lost. Literacy is no exception. But her main character is a professional writer of letters...a man named Hendricks,...comes to her house one day to ask her to write him a letter, then to take the letter to a certain crossroads and read it aloud. And that\'s it. The entire book is the wish and the fulfillment, nothing more. Some people would call Scribe a short book. A fast read. But it isn\'t really either of those things. Really, it\'s a hungry book — one where every sentence seems to imply a second that it never offers; where every page and every paragraph offers the ghost of a feast, but never lets you eat.

Simon Van Booy

Positive NPR Every story in the slim new Simon Van Booy collection, The Sadness Of Beautiful Things, is about the end of the world. In none of them does the world actually end. In none of them does it even come close. But that doesn\'t change the fact that these are stories of apocalypse. Even the quietest of them shakes the ground and darkens the sky.

Sam Munson

Rave NPR Sam Munson\'s Dog Symphony is a weird book ... It doesn\'t hide its weird, but it doesn\'t glorify it either with a lot of tricks or frippery ... There\'s no moment in it that\'s not weird. It is like Kafka that way. Its oddity is like a long, sustained hum, never varying in pitch or volume, that suffuses every page and every line ... Munson is trafficking in surrealism here. In a twisted kind of social satire that has things to say about authoritarianism, fascism, paranoia and man\'s animal nature ... Dog Symphony is not a novel so much as a mood given chapters and form ... Munson is a champion stylist here. He inhabits this world, making it all feel hot and lurid and lived-in and rank. He puts you there with a deliberateness belied by the slow pace and soft curves of the plot. But the place he has created is remarkable because it feels so unreal ... He captures precisely that sensation of being cut off from a reality that everyone else seems to understand but you.

C Robert Cargill

Positive NPR In We Are Where The Nightmares Go, he has assembled 10 short horror stories that cover the territory of fear from Virginia to Iraq to Australia, that whipsaw back and forth between the classic and the very modern. He has ghost stories and supernatural thrillers, a gore-porn short-short with a surprising, gentle twist ... \'The Town That Wasn\'t Anymore\' is what Cargill calls it. Not the best title, but apt. Kind of. It\'s modern horror, slow to unfold, absolutely supernatural but anchored enough in the details that it feels ... I don\'t know. Possible? Like a story you hear from a local when your car breaks down in a small town that doesn\'t show up on any maps ... Every ghost story is immortal. That\'s why we love them. Every ghost story ever can be twisted, repurposed, recycled and built into something else because, really, every ghost story is just a story of regret. And Cargill gets that. He understands that a bad decision is what happens before the story starts and peace is what comes when it\'s done. In the middle is the change, the comeuppance, the duty, the sacrifice. In between is where the soul comes clean. All the blood and monsters are just window dressing.

Kate Atkinson

Rave NPR \"And through all of it, Atkinson is brilliant. Her characters are brilliant. Her command of the back-and-forth narrative, the un-fixedness of memory, the weight that guilt accrues over time and how we carry it is remarkable.\

Lawrence Osborne

Rave NPR \"You read the first five pages of Only To Sleep, the first ten maybe, and, if you\'re a Chandler fan (which I am, though not as obsessive as some), you\'ll be pissed. Not hugely, but a little. You can see, in the arrangements of commas, the pauses, the clipped and bittersweet rhythm of the ink on the page, someone doing a pretty good Chandler impersonation. But you can see the impersonation, and that\'s the problem ... But then the first chapter closes. Old Marlowe has gotten his call to adventure in the shape of two insurance men who want him to look into a mysterious death. And Osborne walks off with a paragraph that might be one of the most beautiful things I\'ve seen in a year ... Like all great gumshoe novels, there are cavernous depths there that only look shallow from the surface ... It\'s the kind of book where, when you read it, it turns the world to black and white for a half-hour afterward. It leaves you with the taste of rum and blood in your mouth. It hangs with you like a scar.\

Paul Tremblay

Rave NPR \"Read Paul Tremblay\'s new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, and you might not sleep for a week. Longer. It will shape your nightmares for months–that\'s pretty much guaranteed. That\'s what it\'s built for. And there\'s a very, very good chance you\'ll never get it out of your head again ... I want to tell you everything about it. I want to detail every switchback and psychological reverse that happens, deconstruct how Tremblay layers in these genius feints of paranoia and disbelief, explain how he builds to these perfect trigger points where everything explodes into blood and violence, then settles, then starts again. I want to, but I can\'t. It would ruin it. There is a meticulousness to The Cabin that depends entirely on the slow reveal; on the tension of misunderstanding and inherent bias.\

Katie Williams

Rave NPR I loved Katie Williams\'s debut novel Tell the Machine Goodnight. So much that I read it twice. The first time was straight through — not driven by plot or thrumming action, but in a languid drift across 280-some pages, a feeling like being drunk on a raft in calm water. The second time I dipped in and out, 10 or 20 pages at a swallow. I might read it again when we\'re done here ... The novel is almost a series of interlinked short stories ... Taken separately, they are little short ditties about life in a future where unhappiness can be cured with a dog or clarinet lessons. Taken in small groups, they form movements. All together, they are a symphony.

Claire North

Rave NPR There\'s Theo figuring stuff out and then there\'s Theo doing things about what he has learned and then there\'s Theo remembering things from the past (mostly, how he became Theo and how the world became the world). But North handles it. With style and voice and a wicked grip that never lets the three-way plot spiral out of control. Long sections run in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, with words just rolling out of her. Others are surgically precise, describing the thousand small horrors of the world that Theo, Dani and the rest occupy. And all together they make a story that is rare—one of those that is so good I didn\'t want it to end, but so sad I didn\'t want to read another page.

Lauren Groff

Rave NPR \"Groff\'s language is, as always, gorgeous and precise. Her ability to map the inner contours of characters who seem to exist entirely in extremis — and, almost entirely, within a fragile shell of feigned competence and normalcy — is remarkable. Her Florida is a frightening place that bends (solely through the eyes and experiences of her characters) into a discomfortingly modern Southern Gothic tradition. Her stories — all of them — are haunted. There are always extra eyes somewhere off in the dark ... What haunts every line of \'Above And Below\' is the inevitability of it. It stands as the summation of Groff\'s entire tone: This idea that storms and panthers and violence and love and weariness are all out there. That women are all going to take their share. That life, maybe, is measured in the ration of misery that you take and the grace with which you suffer it.\

Chuck Palahniuk

Positive NPR It is Fight Club franchised. Gone national. Sick with all of our current ills and darkest, weirdest desires ... Chuck Palahniuk just wants to see how far he can push you before you get offended, throw the book down, walk away from it for good. He wants to see how thin of a tightrope he can walk between satire and slur, provocation and revulsion ... And I gotta tell you, watching him try it? It\'s fun. It\'s fun like watching NASCAR but only for the crashes ... He\'s masterful at making readers feel and understand the desperate, grasping needs of his underdogs, and maybe too good sometimes at making us cheer for them when they achieve their violent catharsis. And in Adjustment Day, he\'s at the top of his game. At least for most of the book.

Catherynne M. Valente

Rave NPR \"There are really no words to describe Space Opera, Catherynne Valente\'s new novel. Know why? Because she used them all in writing it. I can say that it is square-ish. Made of wood pulp. Composed mostly of sentences. I can say that it\'s a wicked-fast read (if you can handle the whiplash and the pure, 12-gauge crazy-pants nonsense of it all) and enjoyable at speeds unsafe for upright mammals ... In between it\'s all big ideas written in glitter. It\'s surprising tenderness on a galactic scale. It\'s about loneliness and nerdliness and acceptance and making fun of the old, frowsy powers that be. Valente offers up a universe in which the only thing of true value is rhythm. Not guns, not bombs, not money, not power, but sex and love and pop songs.\

Matt Haig

Positive NPR \"How To Stop Time plays like a meditation on the tick and tock of time and mortality. On the preciousness of every moment and the nightmare of having both too few and too many. There\'s a conspiracy element thrown in to give the plot a little kick, but it\'s a minor secondary plot until the book\'s final third, and serves as an armature to keep the laggier parts of the narrative upright ... suffers when it grows heavy and lingers too long in any one time or place, but in the moments when Haig allows his narrator to flit from moment, recalling spans of decades as if they were a long weekend, then land somewhere for a few paragraphs to describe Paris or New York at instants when they mattered to Tom and his tale, the book can be remarkably beautiful, achingly sad and completely alien all at once.\

Paul Goldberg

Rave NPR \"...a fast-forward screed on our current historical moment, scattered and digressive and insane in the best possible way ... At moments, it is like Stanislaw Lem writing real estate copy for The Atlantic. At others, like Carl Hiaasen getting under the Florida blacktop and smelling the swamp beneath. And all through, it is bonkers — a careening voyage that feels like falling because never does it seem like Goldberg is completely in control of his own plot, pen or characters ... No book could be written about this moment in America that wasn\'t fractured; if one was, it would be a pack of lies. Or worse, propaganda. And Goldberg seems to know this. He finds truth in randomness and the unlikely outcome, character in who these people aren\'t as much as who they are.\

Christopher J. Yates

Positive NPR Our first image of it all — the day, the crime, the aftermath — comes from Patrick. It is his eyes we see through, his thoughts we hear, the blossoming of his self-loathing to which we bear uncomfortable witness … The novel bounces back and forth between retellings of the events that led up to the shooting in 1982 by the three primary characters, Patrick, Matthew and Hannah, and the eventual fallout that only comes 26 years later, when all three of them find themselves living in New York, still suffering, each in their own ways, and still connected by that one awful day — by secrets that each of them carry and can not ever tell … His twist...packs a slow-burn punch when all the threads of narrative and back-story start pulling together.

Nick Harkaway

Positive NPR \"Gnomon is a big, ambitious book that sometimes trips over its own bigness, but reads like some kind of game of literary telephone played by Philip K. Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Gibson ... Harkaway lays this out beautifully, mysteriously and mischeviously. After reading the first 50-some pages of Gnomon, I was fully on board ... The parts of Gnomon I liked best were the bits about books, videogames and the future—because those are my things, my own personal passions. But it\'s a big book, a digressive book, and it contains so much that it sometimes feels (like Diana Hunter\'s house is supposed to feel) like a museum of curiosities trapped between two covers and shaken vigorously.\

Matthew McIntosh

Positive NPR It doesn't read anything like a traditional novel — not as quickly, not as smoothly, not as satisfyingly, none of it. McIntosh's second book reads shattered. It reads fragmentary. It reads like trying to unwind Christmas lights from a thorn bush — pinpricks of brilliance hung up in confusion and pain. It reads like a symphony written by a speed freak and performed by industrial robots. All crashing symbols, and between, only silence ... It is a novel that fails in its attempted modernity — its vivisection of the form — about as often as it succeeds. And there's a sense that McIntosh doesn't really care about the ratios. That a lot of it just wasn't meant for you. Does that sound mean? Good. Because I didn't enjoy reading this monster and neither will you. My experience went something like this: I hate this I hate this I hate this Zzzzzz (That's where I fell asleep) Oh, God, there are still 1,400 pages to go? I hate this I hate this I hate this ... And then, for some reason, something would catch my eye. A phrase, a picture, something, and something would turn over in my chest and I'd get it. I'd understand what McIntosh was doing. And I'd love the damn book for making me feel the way that almost no book ever has — for making me feel alive and rooted in this one stupid world of ours with all its randomness, all its awfulness and all its beauty ... [McIntosh] meant you to feel it, and you will. What he's attempting with this novel (and sometimes succeeding at) is writing a story for this moment. One that is just as scattered as we are, just as rotten with memory, just as distracted, just as haunted by the strangest things ... It feels like life, which is a strange thing to say, but maybe the truest thing I can tell you about theMystery.doc.

Joe Ide

Positive NPR And Isaiah Quintabe, the protagonist of Joe Ide's debut novel, IQ, is a Sherlock for a very specific neighborhood: South Central L.A. ... The novel runs with parallel narratives — IQ in 2013, doing a 'payday job' for famous rapper Black The Knife, trying to figure out who tried to murder him with a monstrous pitbull, and IQ in 2005, living his backstory as an effortlessly brilliant young teenager forced into bad circumstances by the death of his brother ... He [IQ] is smart, absolutely. He knows things. But the leaps he makes (where a man was hiding to avoid security cameras, for example) are more modest than those epic Sherlockian jumps ... It's a detective story that plays out very close to home, on the streets and corners that Ide (who grew up in South Central) knows best.

Robin Sloan

Rave NPR [Sourdough] is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book. It knows as much about the strange extremes of food as Mr. Penumbra did about the dark latitudes of the book community ... I love that because Sloan has a pop-culture brain, and he gave it to Lois. Because his voice in her head and her mouth fits so beautifully into the time and place and moment he is writing about. Because he imbues everything about Lois's journey with mythic overtones, with rules and lessons gleaned not from school or church or elders, but from our entertainment. From stories.

Brendan Mathews

Rave NPR It is that rarest of historical novels, a book that catches a moment in a jar, holds it aloft and displays it for what it really is: Somebody else's day before tomorrow, the instant right before the future comes ... His entire novel takes place over the course of one week in June of that year, culminating at the Fair itself, in a fast-paced finale worthy of a Scorcese long-take. And I love this about the book. I love the bright-eyed joy of it. The meticulous attention to detail that isn't just a 1,000-word digression on mittens or taxi cabs but actually serves the plot. The sense that every single character in it seems somehow infected with this sense that the past is a curse that must be borne only until tomorrow comes. And I like that Mathews made this big book so intimate ... One of the strengths of Mathews's story is the way it sprawls and loops. It finds odd little corners of time and place and character to get into and, in those corners, it finds both a balancing seriousness and a wideness of vision that makes it somehow all okay.

Christopher Brown

Positive NPR Tropic Of Kansas is like a modern dystopian buffet. It plays out in a world where all of our terrors have become manifest — climate change, wealth disparity, terrorism, an authoritarian government in power suppressing its own citizens, corporate control of everything from food to media. It is, in this particular moment in history, frighteningly prescient. It is the nightly news with the volume turned up to 11 ... From about the hundredth page forward, you know how it is all going to go down. But Brown, to his credit, uses the pages given to him to paint a frighteningly believable portrait of an American future that is closer than you want it to be. He sketches small-town fury and ultra-super-uber-right-wing nationalism in detail.

Michel Faber

Positive NPR ...is cool because it's a remarkable work of imagination and genius. A 'poignant meditation on humanity,' a mesmerizing exploration of faith and love and a 'genre-defying' masterpiece ... Faber's great strength, trotted out right from the opening pages — this ability to write believable, lovely, flawed and inept characters. To animate his creations by exposing their great loves and human frailties, and to make us want, somehow, to follow along behind them as they traipse across the pages, the miles and, in short order, the light-years ...Faber brings little that's new or original to the trope, save a masterful skill for sketching the slow accretion of dread and mistrust in the hearts of his characters ...Faber tells a beautifully human story of love, loss, faith and the sometimes uncrossable distances between people. It feels, more than anything, like an achingly gentle 500-page first chapter to an apocalypse novel yet to come.

Jeff VanderMeer

Rave NPR Area X is magic in the same way Lovecraft's Rhode Island was magic — which is to say, inhabited by impossible things beyond human description. At the same time, it is haunted (which is an entirely different thing) by the previous expeditions and the things they left behind — the tents and supplies, the curiously incomplete maps, the bullet holes, the bloodstains. And VanderMeer is brave in the telling of his story — of the Biologist's story — because he attempts to explain in full almost none of it … And yet, the ending is satisfying. It is one of those rare endings that is, all at the same time, ambiguous, terrifically unfinished, and the only possible ending that the story could have had.

Don Winslow

Rave NPR \"Trust me when I tell you that you gotta read this book not because it\'s beautiful (it isn\'t) and not because Winslow is a virtuoso stylist (he isn\'t) and not because it\'s one of those Important Books that everyone will be talking about (they will), but because it is just fantastic. Like can\'t-put-it-down, can\'t-get-the-voices-out-of-your-head fantastic. An instant classic, an epic, a goddamn Wagner opera with a full cast and buckets of blood and smack and Jameson whiskey ... Winslow is good, no doubt. He\'s smart enough to be tricky without looking like he\'s being tricky. He\'s clever enough to get away with what is essentially a double prologue (in a universe where, most times, one is too many), but his best trick is a buried, pulsing, live-wire second plot that hums just beneath the surface of the first: The Force is basically Game of Thrones without the dragons. The Wars of the Roses played out with New York City cops and robbers...It\'s a weird thing when you first realize it, brilliant and almost subversive as you watch it play out across the pages. Amid all the drugs and guns and skyscrapers and cop bars, there\'s this shimmering image of an ancient tale hovering just at the edge of things.\

Cory Doctorow

Rave NPR [Walkaway] is remarkable. It's one of those books that I don't want to describe at all, because doing so would ruin the new car smell of stepping into a fresh-off-the-lot universe. It would sour the joy of getting face-punched over and over again by the utopian/dystopian ideas, theories, arguments and philosophies that Doctorow lays down. It would, in short, wreck the fun ... And yes, it sometimes reads like a series of philosophical set-pieces stitched together with drone fights and lots of sex. Like a Michael Bay movie if all the explosions were emotional. But the philosophy is fascinating and, somehow, rarely dull ... It's all about the deep, disturbing, recognizable weirdness of the future that must come from the present we have already made for ourselves, trying to figure out what went wrong and what comes next.

Leonardo Padura, Trans. by Anna Kushner

Positive NPR ...what holds everything together is Conde. His goofy cool, his self-destruction and generosity, his obsessions and his premonitions. Heretics can drag when Conde is not on the page, but it winks by like sun on chrome when he is. And besides all of Padura's beautiful words, all those gorgeous sentences loaded down with strangeness and terrible history, it's the waiting for Conde to come slouching and cursing back onto the page — embodying the link between past and present, goodness and evil — that is the primary joy in Heretics' darkest places.

Giorgio De Maria

Rave NPR ...a spooky, strange piece of Magical Realism prestidigitation that captures, nearly note-for-note, the turmoil and chaos of a community whose center has shattered but is being held together by a willful, communal rejection of the breakage ... No Gibson, no Sterling, no cyberpunk or spec-fic scribbler of the '80s or '90s ever captured the poisoned zeitgeist of social media better than this: a room full of the violent, disgusting, lonely and broken ramblings of shut-ins and social rejects, all held in the abandoned wing of a former insane asylum ... conceived under fire and born into a world shaking itself to pieces, it captures the chaos and randomness of terrorism and the fear of hidden furies in a way that only something that treads the ragged edge of surrealism can. It was a book written for a different world. And the most disturbing thing about it is how appropriate it is for ours.

George Saunders

Positive NPR Lincoln In The Bardo is not an easy book, but it gets easier with the reading. At the start, it jags, loops, interrupts itself a thousand times. Somehow, the whole thing together feels staged like a terrible student play that just happened to be written by an absolute genius working at the ragged edge of his talent. But there are moments that are almost transcendently beautiful, that will come back to you on the edge of sleep ... Lincoln's grief, as witnessed by the ghosts, as experienced by Willie, is enormous. The pain of it radiant as the President languishes in his own private bardo. In comparison to the grief of America at war, it is infinitesimal, but at the same time, no less potent or real. And in the friction between these two true things, Saunders finds his terrible, brutal truth: That all lives end too soon. That no one leaves complete. That letting go is the best, hardest thing anyone — even the dead — can do.

Javier Marias, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

Mixed NPR \"At its best, Thus Bad Begins rolls on like a great spy story played for (comparatively) low stakes. Juan becomes Muriel\'s ears and eyes, investigating the sordid past of Dr. Van Vechten ... The narrator is trustworthy because everything feels like a massive unburdening. Like Old Juan is finally telling a whole story out loud that he has had in his head for years — the pace of it as familiar as his own heartbeat, the reveals all polished smooth by long, silent practice. Which is, in a way, unfortunate because for all of Marias\' gorgeous, looping, carefully structured sentences — and for all of his tales of sex and death and revolution — what Thus Bad Begins could\'ve really used was a little bit of the bravado and rawness of youth.\

Derek Palacio

Rave NPR It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a moment, it does so with the weight of ten butterflies...all of this is touched on so lightly, Palacio's gaze settling here and there across a span of years and observing the quiet details that make up the roots of life's narrative ... [There] are beautiful observations, too. Sometimes gentle, often gotten at sideways, through the lenses of experiences so native to the characters that not a word rings false.

Mary Robinette Kowal

Positive NPR It was the idea of it that got me into the book, and Kowal's affectless presentation of the mediums and their work that kept me going ... But it was that rare ability of Kowal's to make what could have been a completely goofy add-on to the British war effort into something that felt completely wedded and solid that sold me — that spark of a great idea, well-executed ... The book has flaws, of course. For every deeply considered character like Ginger or her fiancé, there are two who are adorable stereotypes.

Alan Moore

Rave NPR ...you're going to ask yourself that one, all-important question when it comes to Really Big Goddamn Books: Do I need to read this one? Yes, you do ... Inasmuch as anyone ever has to read anything, you have to read Jerusalem. People are going to say a lot of things about it — that it's massive (obviously), that it's brilliant (it is), that it's beautiful and maddening and sweet and stupid all in equal measure (true, true, true and true) ... awesome. Amazing. Lyrical and beautiful.

Nathan Hill

Rave NPR It broke my heart, this book. Time after time. It made me laugh just as often. I loved it on the first page as powerfully as I did on the last, and I think I was right, right from the start. Because Nathan Hill? He's gonna be famous. This is just the start.

China Miéville

Rave NPR Will it help you going into Last Days if you've got a master's-level education in art history with a focus on French Surrealism? Maybe. I don't and I loved the vicious, weird little thing anyway ... Last Days is Miéville's war story. It is beautiful, stunningly realized, mind-bendingly bizarre.

Blake Crouch

Positive NPR ...a book which is sometimes maddening in its refusal to be as good as you want it to be ... Crouch's affection for poetical (really, haiku-ical) structure within a work of prose is annoying at first, then infuriating, then simply numbing. And really, it's unnecessary — because almost the entire book is one big chase scene anyway ... [but] Crouch pulls off the big trick that makes it all worthwhile — a killer twist that is dark, horrifying, funny as hell, bizarre, completely earned and utterly original all at the same time.

Donald Ray Pollack

Positive NPR Pollock's characters all live in the slipstream of this onrushing future, their lives upended by engines and automation, milking machines, telegraphs and a great war that they don't understand. The result is a story that reads almost like surrealism — like weird fiction save for the certain fact that all of it is real. In its bloody, violent, terrible collisions, The Heavenly Table feels like Blood Meridian if Cormac McCarthy had been born with a streak of black humor in him rather than just terseness and rage.

Justin Cronin

Rave NPR Yes, it ties up a lot of the loose ends (but, notably, not all of them). Yes, it is just as beautiful, brutal and obsessively detailed as parts one and two and (bonus) comes out of the gate with an extra-special dose of confidence that you only get when you're a writer coming into the home stretch knowing exactly where you're going and how to get there ... For those of you who've read the previous books, this really is the big event you've been waiting for: A full-scale war of virals on virals and virals on humans, a true last stand that builds and comes with a bloody, roaring payoff you won't see coming, then builds again to the big face off you've been waiting for.

Aziz Ansari & Eric Klinenberg

Mixed NPR Ansari was obviously committed to his goal of investigating the way that people (primarily heterosexual, primarily middle-class and smart phone-owning) find each other, pair off and form relationships. The man put in the time and effort. And what he comes away with is...pretty much exactly what you'd think. Because it's not a self-help book or a guide to modern dating (either of which might've allowed Ansari more latitude with his voice and personal stories) but is a rigorously researched and data-driven field study on the dating-and-mating habits of modern humans, the conclusions he draws are largely of the 'Well, duh ...' variety — a problem not exclusive to this book by any means ... ultimately, I found myself wanting more masturbation jokes and fewer graphs made from demographic data

Etgar Keret

Rave NPR [a] collection of unusual coincidences, and tiny vignettes of a life lived on the constant, bittersweet edge of surrealism. This scattering of laughs. This pack of sighs. This charming and heartbreaking pile of stories that cover the years between the birth of Keret's son, Lev, and the death of his beloved father ... it takes us back through seven years of Keret's history, showing us the world (its beauty, madness, and inescapable strangeness) through his sharp and sympathetic observations. It's not an overtly political book, but one defined by violence, bookended by life and death.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Rave NPR When Luz and Ray strike out, Watkins' world opens, becomes more shattering, more starkly beautiful, exponentially more deadly. Gold Fame Citrus is a dreamy story with a mystical streak and a core of juvenile irresponsibility that does not go unpunished. But Watkins' vision — not just of a world broken by ecological disaster, but of the sorts of people who would thrive in that world — is mercilessly sharp. She's got a knife eye for details, a vicious talent for cutting to the throbbing vein of animal strangeness that scratches inside all of us.

Alexandra Kleeman

Rave NPR \"In her debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, [Kleeman] writes like a gonzo journalist embedded in skin, discovering things like hair and saliva and eyeballs for the very first time ... Body Like Mine begins as a navel gaze, a searing inner catalog of mushy biology, and becomes a takedown — chilly in its precision — of beauty standards, face creams, junk food, reality TV, love, hunger, closeness, human connection. And Kleeman owns all of it. Her voice is brutal and fragile at the same time. Her eye for the absurdity of normalness is so sharp that the book puts you into a bubble of weird you won\'t be able to shake off for hours.\

Rob Spillman

Positive NPR He's not a stylist, but has a plain and conversational voice. I like that. The this guy/that guy chapters are short, punchy and focused, and I like that, too. They twine around each other in their motif of rambling attempts at finding and living an authentically artistic life ... if you can inoculate yourself against this engorged sense of self-importance going in — if you can transmute long passages about the importance of living like an artist into a kind of pleasant humming noise in your brain without it tripping all your rage switches — the ride is still very much worth it.

Mischa Berlinski

Positive NPR Berlinski operates in a world where the gray middles of everything (choices, declarations, morality) far outspace the black and white at the margins.

Mark Leyner

Positive NPR Gone With The Mind is Leyner's new novel. A novel that is, by turns, autobiographical, fictional, touching and just flat-out insane...I loved the thing. All of it. Or anyway, 90% of it. It is looping and self-referential, alternately bonkers and manic and depressive.

Augusten Burroughs

Rave NPR [Burroughs has] a beautiful sense of rhythm, a preternatural knack for knowing the precise point at which graceful self-deprecation (coming from a successful New York Times best-selling author) tips over the edge into smarmy humble-bragging, and stops with his toes wiggling just on the edge of the bank.

Peter Behrens

Positive NPR Behrens is a beautiful, lyric writer. His understanding of the age and command of it, moment to moment, is impressive. What is less so is the arc of Billy and Karin's romance, so often interrupted by war and politics, and their final escape from Germany as it collapses completely into the street-fighting and savagery of Nazism.

China Mieville

Rave NPR This Census-Taker is a small, quiet and gentle book with murder at its center. It's a beautiful chocolate that you bite into and find filled with blood. It is Miéville at his most sparse, his most controlled and restrained.

Rick Moody

Positive NPR This book is to middle-age what Albertine was to youth and Ice Storm was to suburbia. It's Moody at his most inventive, most playful, most bitter and biting and cruel.

Oscar Hijuelos

Positive NPR In many places, any sense of narrative flow is broken by Hijuelos bouncing in and out of different heads, jumping from city to city, place to place and year to year. But when he digs his fingers into something good and lets his chosen pony run a little? There's just a kind of gorgeous magic to the disparate but parallel lives he is charting.

Umberto Eco, Trans. by Richard Dixon

Mixed NPR “The main plot of Numero Zero is a kind of potboiler that never really boils. Once the bones of the main story have been laid out, Eco turns Numero Zero into a kind of see-saw game.”

Anthony Marra

Positive NPR The Tsar Of Love And Techno should be a sad book, but I walked away from it remembering it as funny. Marra's gimmick here is that the world is cruel, is capricious, is murderous absolutely, and his characters are, too — just not all the time. Where the world is consistently terrible, the people Marra fills it with are occasionally kind, occasionally joyous, occasionally funny.

David Mitchell

Positive NPR [A]ll the joy in Slade House is in the discovery. It's in seeing different people make the same mistakes over and over again — in seeing the same story play out, the same weaknesses be preyed upon, the same arrogance of the twins who have been doing this for decades.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Mixed NPR “Hallberg writes like he's not sure anyone will ever give him a second chance. There are places where you can taste his panic and his need to use every word he knows now. And there should've been an editor around to tell him that keeping something in your back pocket for later ain't always the worst idea in the world — but there's also something to be said for a guy that just leaves it all on the table.”

Lauren Groff

Rave NPR \"[I]f you do want to learn how to be a great writer, you could do worse than skipping out on that M.F.A. program or pricey writer\'s retreat, dropping 28 bucks ($17-something on Amazon!) on this book, studying the hell out of it, and then spending all that money you just saved on gin cocktails and hats. It\'s that good. That beautiful. Occasionally, that stunning.\

Jonathan Evison

Mixed NPR Slowly, and with admirable, dark precision, Evison lays Harriet bare. The lies, the dodges, the secrets and frustrated desires. With a touch of snark and a lashing of perfectly affected irony, he flenses her to the bone and, somehow, seems kind in doing it.

Bill Clegg

Positive NPR “But you should stick with it because there will come a point where you'll suddenly find your footing. Where (maybe on the road with June, or in the story of Luke's mother) the whole delicate origami construction of interlocking stories that Clegg is building will blossom outward and you'll see it for the first time as the whole thing that it is — this spindly web of connection, this sticky, terrible, comforting, fully realized community of small, damaged and ordinary people all brought together by a moment that no one can understand.”

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December 16 – 20, 2024