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Recent Reviews
Glynnis MacNicol
Positive The New York Times Book Review Absorbing ... Steamy as it may be, MacNicol’s sexual odyssey serves as a smoke screen — at times entertaining, at others oddly tedious, at yet others nerve-racking ... She employs a harder, cooler tone and style, scaffolded with a tinge of defensiveness, as if anticipating the judgment of prudish readers who clutch pearls to their necks as they gape in horror at her flouting of convention ... Her distrust of — and disdain for — the reader often threatens to undermine her sharp observations and analyses, not to mention narrative momentum. Still, the force of MacNicol’s elegant prose presides, alongside her uncompromising intellect. The novelistic approach to scene and character that animated her first book is largely a delight.
Dana Spiotta
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... exhilarating ... while Spiotta’s previous novels run on Didion-like cold fusion, Wayward reads like a burning fever dream, powered by hot fury rather than icy remove. There is a mythic quality to her narration, as well as a dark strain of humor, as if she — like Sam — can’t quite believe the world in which we’ve found ourselves ... a virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.
Nicola Derobertis-Theye
Rave The New York Times Gabriele, the 24-year-old narrator of Nicola DeRobertis-Theye’s absorbing debut, looks outward, rather than inward ... That all of this dense, difficult history unfolds naturally in the scope of Gabriele’s present-day story — she does, of course, eventually contact her aunts and cousins, and allow herself to be brought into their fold — speaks yards to DeRobertis-Theye’s deft, masterly storytelling ... deeply gratifying ... This complex, substantive debut offers a singular and transfixing take on the nature of identity — both national and personal — and the dangers of secrecy, both national and personal. And, of course, what it means to come of age in a broken world, a world that has been broken for generations.
Myla Goldberg
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...ambitious ... Goldberg’s passionate depiction of Lillian rings heartbreakingly true at a moment when discussions of emotional labor dominate certain sectors of the media ... At times, Goldberg crosses the slender line between clever and cute ... The constraints of the catalog form, hinging on descriptions of photographs we cannot see and Samantha’s labored contemplations of how Lillian might have composed them, grow tedious as the novel wears on ... Though the novel’s plot hinges on the obscenity trial, its most powerful moments arrive in the form of Lillian’s wrenchingly intimate reflections in her journal.
Alice Adams
Positive The New York Times Book Review Alice Adams’s irresistible debut novel falls squarely into that most ­English of genres: the comedy of manners ... A crackerjack storyteller who deeply inhabits her characters — deploying pitch-­perfect dialogue to poignant and hilarious effect — Adams uses the conventions of the form to examine larger ideas about class and commerce, art and science, friendship and family at the time of the most recent fin de siècle ... Ultimately, though, this is a novel that strives to define a generation — the one known, ominously, as X — and it falters when Adams overreaches, struggling to establish her characters as representatives of their era, shaped by the historical events of their day.