About Book Marks
Katie Kadue
Recent Reviews
Mixed Bookforum Amateurs! is also like the internet in its juxtaposition of the high (as in high theory) and the low (as in LOLcats). Sometimes this evokes the textual tension of a meme, an enjoyable friction between content and form ... Sometimes, though, it feels more like a specific meme...an ocean of text in a microscopic font, a treatise where a snappy phrase should do. Some juxtapositions can feel embarrassing, even cringe ... The problem isn’t that Walsh...merely mimes professionals like Ngai; it’s that the imitation game isn’t fun ... Walsh summons smart-sounding support for a claim like an academic aiming to impress a peer reviewer rather than helping the reader see ... Playful and illuminating apposition can easily devolve into...parody ... The book’s mashing together of aesthetic autonomy and Autostraddle...works best as a kind of scrapbook ... But the failure of a point to land doesn’t offer the same delights as the failure of a tweet.
Lili Anolik
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books Reduces the two writers not so much to brands as to types, two girls fat and thin ... Anolik needs to commit to the binary bit to justify the book’s existence ... At her best, Anolik channels the collagist sensibility that Babitz took from the visual to the verbal ... Even I—someone who, like Anolik, is on \'Team Babitz\'—longed for taut, spare, cold, clear, clean sentences.
Olivia Laing
Positive The New Yorker Extended discussions of war, disease, and climate crisis do nothing to dampen the tone of the book, which proceeds like a pleasant garden-party conversation. Laing is a welcoming but unobtrusive hostess, handling her dark materials with social grace ... She embeds others’ words in her own sentences as carefully as I imagine she transplants seedlings, adapting them to their new conditions without compromising their integrity ... There are sections that do, however, feel like a slog, waterlogged by dutiful moralizing.
Julia Fox
Positive Bookforum The book is not without bizarre details ... But the overall image she presents of herself is almost archetypal ... In real life, or life mediated by non-print media, Fox is fantastically fascinating. Those who dismiss her as almost-famous-for-being-famous, trying and failing to keep up with the Kardashians, miss how perfectly she’s mastered her metamorphic art of self-fashioning.