About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Anne Berest, trans. by Tina Kover
Rave The New York Times Book Review Powerful, meticulously imagined ... The Postcard (translated into a lucid and precise English by Tina Kover) takes its readers on a deep dive into one Jewish family’s history, and, inextricably, into the devastating history of the Holocaust in France ... If Berest’s search for her identity and for her family history feels, at times, as long and difficult for the reader as it was for Berest herself, that effect is of the essence: In a sense, it’s the point ... Powerful ... Contains a single grand-scale act of self-discovery and many moments of historical illumination
Mala Kacenberg
Rave The New York Times Book Review Despite the difficulties that inhere in Holocaust memoir—we believe we know this history, and its subject matter defies language—Mala’s Cat is fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable. (It is not in any real way about a cat, though cat lovers won’t be disappointed: You, too, will be satisfied by the cleverness, resourcefulness and fidelity of Mala’s feline companion, Malach, whom she fancies to be her guardian angel.) ... This memoir, rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg’s five children, should be read and cherished as a new, vital document of a history that must never be allowed to vanish.
Colum McCann
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...[a] powerful and prismatic new novel.... This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters...reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows ... these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness ... They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and the most difficult to read ... McCann’s brilliant act of novel-making builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around Rami’s and Bassam’s first-person accounts, a rich and comprehensive context that allows us into the fathers’ experiences, their histories, their minds ... the novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project ... Reading Apeirogon we move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; we begin to share it ... Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener ... it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves. It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it’s indisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It does far more than make an argument for peace; it is, itself, an agent of change.
Jen Silverman
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"All of these stories are told from a first-person point of view, but each narrator is distinct; some we’ve met earlier as secondary characters in other stories, and the inside view yields satisfying insight ... These stories, in any case, are irresistible, delivering a portrait of contemporary relationships that, although bleak, is shot through with veins of real connection.\
Christine Schutt
Rave The New York Times Book Review Fans of Schutt, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, expect to be thrown off balance and relish the sensation. Indeed, this collection of 11 stories, stretched on a taut diagonal between Maine and Los Angeles, nimbly kicks us sideways at every turn. Schutt’s stories—awash in money, lush foliage and coyly named houses—menace and sometimes subsume their desperate characters ... The stories are full of trapdoors, but Schutt’s craft is seamless.
Anjali Sachdeva
Rave The New York Times Book Review The strange and wonderful stories that make up Sachdeva’s debut begin on this side of reality and slip to the other—often so gracefully, and with such a precise rendering of the fantastical, that we become inadvertent believers ... The brilliance of these stories—beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose—is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original.