RaveThe Nation... a writer seemingly of another time ... Kushner’s first collection of essays,assured intelligence of an autodidact, a distrust of easy answers, and a preternatural gift for situating textured human narratives and political struggles within a wide, cinematic frame ... Kushner’s settings are united by little beyond her wide-set vision, which details each setting and character with cinematic realism and old-school, Dostoyevskian depth. Through these essays we are given access to some of her most powerful influences and instincts. The essays come together to form an image of the writer as a vehicle through which images and experiences pass, rather than a pulpit out of which declarations are issued. In other words, Kushner reminds us of the crucial difference between writing and branding.
Matthew Salesses
PositiveThe Nation... salient and instructive ... While the gambit of Craft in the Real World is decidedly unrevolutionary (adjusting the pedagogy of writers’ workshops is a pretty tame proposal), writers and readers alike stand to benefit from Salesses’s insights into literary production and the insipid ways in which the creative industries perpetuate milquetoast, dominant-culture artistic production ... Offering a fresh framework as well as concrete exercises and workshop paradigms, Craft in the Real World is an attempt to renovate what others might call to dismantle ... Salesses gamely redefines various craft terms...illuminating the assumptions and expectations implicit in the conventional, accepted reading of each term. He then goes one step further and proposes redefinitions that are both broader and deeper, and therefore more useful.
Mary South
RaveThe NationSouth writes as though she has always been where we find ourselves now: looking back on a world where we believed we might gain personal agency over technology’s dominion, entering one where such agency is a luxury we might never again hope to afford ... stories of exceptional loss, spilling out at the point of conflict between the cool detachment of the technological world and the tender vulnerability of the users living within it ... This collection’s power, though, comes from South’s dark sensibility, her comfort with brutality, and her narrative insistence that, while the nightmare of tech capitalism won’t wholly eradicate the personal and the private, it will compress beyond recognition the spaces where personal, private moments can unfold ... South writes with the assurance of someone who knows she has no answers to give. But instead of resulting in a shrugging ambivalence, You Will Never Be Forgotten mounts an ever more effective critique of technology-amplified structural inequality ... [the] stories are united by South’s keen examination of the thrill and risk of human connection—between lovers, siblings, parent and child, care-giver and care-receiver, and digitally connected strangers—under increasingly cruel conditions ... Still, You Will Never Be Forgotten shows us there is still tenderness to be found, and protected, in the brave new world to come.
Anna Wiener
PositiveThe Baffler... incisive ... Inherently timely, it aims for timelessness and achieves it. Its style is of a part with the dry, affectless writing of the period that Wiener seeks to capture but goes beyond the Sally Rooney-Tao Lin axis to deliver something sharper and more complete ... That Wiener manages to make her passive observation of this easy drifting so compulsively readable is a testament to both her skill as a writer and the distinct absurdity of her subject matter. I tore through Uncanny Valley, riveted by the wit and precision of Wiener’s observations ... Whatever unseen surveillance cameras took in my facial expressions while I was reading Uncanny Valley on public transit will have found me squinting, laughing, manically underlining whole paragraphs, and sighing loudly with equal parts weariness and recognition ... moments of Uncanny Valley can feel irresolute, as though the author is walking a very fine line, taking care not to offend the more powerful residents of the city she still calls home. It’s clear that Wiener is canny enough to see behind the curtain, but it can seem, at times, like she still wants to believe in the Wizard ... At so many moments, Wiener gets within a finger’s distance of speaking truth to power and then—points us in another direction, or ends the chapter, or describes a bread basket. Of course, speaking truth to power isn’t her project; if it were, this would be a completely different book. But there is something unnerving about a memoir that so brilliantly captures the mood and neuroses of San Francisco in the 2010s yet seems somehow still respectful, occasionally reverent. Even as Wiener critiques the Valley, there is a part of her that is protective of it, a part of her still in its thrall.
