MixedThe Boston GlobeDederer weaves her experiences as a working writer, mother, and teacher, writing what she calls, \'an autobiography of the audience\' ... Her essay on alcoholism, redemption, and the midcentury short story writer Raymond Carver displays the rewards of this autobiographical approach ... It’s her very ability to empathize with monstrousness — to recognize that we are all equally capable of behaving badly — that pushes her final arguments toward an apolitical, amoral nihilism ... Dederer’s rejection of agency here does a disservice to her book, which is intelligently nuanced even if I disagreed with it frequently. To collapse categories of privilege and agency in the face of capitalism is to pretend that a person of privilege doesn’t have agency at all ... Maybe, as Dederer suggests, our debates about moral relationship to art must be fought on the rocky terrain of individual feeling. But I sincerely hope they don’t end there before making bigger, more collective leaps in the name of accountability and repair, harm reduction and change. To believe this is possible, however, you also have to believe that the actions you take in a rigged system matter — even if they only matter to you.
Matthew Salesses
RaveThe Boston GlobeAudacious ... Throughout The Sense of Wonder, Salesses refuses to shy away from frank discussions of race or racism, even as he centers the hopes and fears, frustrations and professional triumphs, of his protagonists. Salesses also declines to bench a complex formal device that would, in the hands of a lesser writer, dissolve under pressure as the clock runs out. Above all, the novel chooses itself. Like \'the Wonder\' or \'Linsanity,\' you may just have to see it to believe.
Elizabeth McCracken
RaveThe Boston GlobeMany of McCracken’s characters, like her novels, have a way of doing this: they reel you in with a joke, a wink, or a dry remark. They tremble with emotional vulnerability (or make you tremble in recognition). All the while, they retain a core of mystery, which is part of their charm ... Playful, mythic, and mysterious ... Evidence of what an alternative strategy to remembrance can offer, and the narrator’s mother, in all her imagined glory, emerges in tender specificities.
Jason Fagone
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesAfter years of archival research wading through recently declassified documents, Fagone pieced together Elizebeth’s life in his new book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies ... What emerges is not just Friedman’s forgotten contribution to code breaking but also a fascinating swath of American history that begins in Gilded Age Chicago and moves to the inner workings of our intelligence agencies at the close of WWII ...based on a true story. Elizebeth reverse-engineered the Nazi cipher that was based on this potboiler ... She was a poet and a literature scholar. And yet she was able to use her abilities to see deeply into this world of secret communication ...when you start to look at history through Elizebeth's eyes, you realize that the rise of these agencies was very messy. Her whole career, she was called in to fix the messes.
Ali Smith
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books\"In many ways, Smith’s novel can be read as an argument that art matters—especially in times of political upheaval. Art can transform, talk back, and turn vandalism into a beautiful message. It connects historical and cultural moments that might otherwise be left untethered ... Autumn works convincingly as an aesthetic marker of political darkness and its repudiation. At once a brighter and more absurd world than our own, Autumn is steeped in puns and paintings and unlikely love stories. And like Elisabeth’s mother, stockpiling things to throw at the fence, Smith invites the reader to take what they need in order to mount their own defense of play, beauty, and the freedom to break down whatever wall stands in their way.\
