About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Cory Leadbeater
Mixed The Washington Post Less a revelation of life with Didion than a poetic, ruminative chronicle of Leadbeater’s struggle to synthesize the author’s sophisticated world with that of his lower-middle-class family ... This book’s well-wrought sentences mostly carry it forward despite loose plotting, but there are times when it stumbles due to uneven pacing ... And we hear less and less about Leadbeater’s time with Didion as the memoir progresses. We’re left to wonder what she made of his lowest periods.
Diego Gerard Morrison
Rave The Believer Both haunted and haunting ... A formally inventive tour through Mexico’s nightmares that looks straight into the face of death.
Alina Grabowski
Rave NPR Kaleidoscopic ... Through her pitch-perfect summoning of this intergenerational female cast, Grabowski explores the fickleness of truth, the fallibility of memory, how difficult it is to really see those closest to us, and how easy it is to betray one another.
Lawrence Ingrassia
Rave The New Republic A Fatal Inheritance thus forms testament to the power of scientific research, but also a stark reminder of how frustratingly incomplete our understanding of cancer remains, and of the very human costs of that incomplete knowledge.
Elizabeth O'Connor
Positive NPR Spare and bracing ... O\'Connor grapples with the dark side of idealizing isolation ... O\'Connor concretizes the stakes for the island, avoiding what might otherwise be a plodding rehashing of history ... Haunting and lucid.
Deborah Jackson Taffa
Rave The Washington Post In its mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time, Whiskey Tender recalls Mary Karr’s now-classic memoir The Liars\' Club. What sets Taffa\'s memoir apart is its study of the political, racial and ancestral forces that shape a life.
Manjula Martin
Positive NPR \"As she recounts months spent dodging and being followed by wildfires, months when the siren on her local firehouse blared almost daily and when smoke overwhelmed her senses, Martin reflects on what it means to make one\'s home in a place that is destined to burn, and to live \'inside a damaged body on a damaged planet.\' Indeed, The Last Fire Season is just as much about learning to live with chronic pain as with fire ... This perspective melds with Martin\'s nuanced way of seeing fire as both something to fear and as a necessary element in the evolution of the Earth\'s ecosystems ... The Last Fire Season eschews a redemptive arc in favor of witnessing and sitting with the discomfort of reality, with understanding that, as Martin puts it, \'what happened to the land would happen to me.\'\
Katherine Min
Mixed NPR \"Inspired by Lolita, but with an Asian fetishist in the role of Humbert Humbert and the objects of his objectification given voice, The Fetishist presents a tightly crafted examination of racial and sexual politics that is at once nuanced and no-holds-barred ... Min unspools the tale in short chapters, alternating her third-person omniscient narration primarily among Alma, Daniel, and Kyoko, whose perspectives we dip into and out of in moments of free indirect discourse befitting a Victorian novel. Long, winding sentences filled with wordplay unfold virtuosically ... It is Kyoko\'s white-hot rage that forces this confrontation, but her chapters are the weakest in the novel. Kyoko\'s perspective is blinkered and juvenile, her grief largely unexamined because it has \'twisted to hate, hate hammered to anger, until the anger, the hate, and the grief had become grotesquely fused.\' While Min does give Kyoko a brief moment of revelation toward the novel\'s end, it feels unconvincingly pat ... There is something ironic about a dead woman feeling like the missing center in a posthumously published novel.\
Paul Lynch
Rave NPR Harrowing ... I found the novel not so much propulsive as compulsive, carried forward by an uncontrollable force ... At times, the novel\'s relentless bleakness made it almost unbearable to read.
Lexi Freiman
Rave The New Republic Rollicking satire ... Not a novel that satirizes the Annas and Ayns of the world in order to sketch out a more compelling left-wing vision ... Freiman smartly sidesteps politics and polemics ... Both more and less transgressive than its title makes it seem; Anna’s provocative posturing serves as armor against pain.
Ben Austen
Positive The Washington Post A critical contribution to discussions of how to reform American criminal justice, illuminating how we might change the process of giving people second chances and re-envision the very purpose of our carceral system ... Construct[ed] around intimate portraits ... The structure makes for an elliptical and sometimes disorienting timeline, returning to key time periods, like the 1970s, again and again. Structural qualms aside, Correction provides a revelatory lens for examining mass incarceration.
Kyo Maclear
Rave NPR Poetic, elliptical ... By pairing the untangling of her family tree with an appreciation of the entanglement of the natural world, Maclear meditates on our desire to impose clear-cut boundaries on what comprises kinship and inheritance, and reminds us of our belonging to larger ecosystems ... Unique ... Bringing in the botanical allows Maclear to imbue her family\'s story...with a generous, open-handed perspective. The plant world reminds us of our interconnectedness.
Sarah Viren
Rave NPR Gripping in part because it combines a detective story with a Kafkaesque nightmare of becoming tangled in academic bureaucracy. Crucially, throughout, Viren reflects on the relationship between truth and facts ... She threads her storytelling with subtle commentary on truth, honesty, and narrative ... Engrossing.
Nicole Chung
Positive NPR Chung crafts a deeply personal reckoning with our country\'s entrenched inequalities and an elegy for her parents ... She had intended to focus on her father\'s illness and death, and how it embodies America\'s uneven burden of healthcare inequality. For about half the book, which proceeds linearly from her upbringing in Oregon to the present, this is indeed the shape the memoir takes — and where it is at its strongest ... Chung provides a rare record of the difficulty of supporting a parent through end-of-life care ... Pain suffuses the chapters ... The last several chapters of A Living Remedy feel loose as Chung wades through grief for both her parents. At times I wished she would return to some of the argumentation that grounded the chapters about her father\'s experience, especially when she mentions subjects like overwork without bereavement leave. But these chapters also contain striking reflections on living with absence.
Christine Kenneally
Rave The Atlantic \"...make[s] clear how both systems have largely disregarded the problem that most families within them face: not necessarily the death of parents, but poverty ... help[s] illuminate the repercussions of America’s broken child-welfare system and the ways it has failed to best serve kids and families—showing how urgently the country needs to reimagine it ... Though the experiences of St. Joseph’s survivors form the book’s backbone, Kenneally zooms out to develop a broader condemnation of Catholic orphanages across the U.S., and even worldwide. The result is a damning reckoning with a tragedy she calls a \'mass catastrophe.\'\
Idra Novey
Rave The New Republic This could be the start to a story about a family torn apart by Fox News, but Novey upends familiar platitudes on our country’s divisions in an odd novel about the ways that the people and places we love can become enigmas to us, and the ineffable impulse to make art. In Jean, Novey has crafted a character who refuses easy categorization ... Though Sevlick and its reactionary politics initially seem the source of Leah’s and Jean’s silence, as the novel progresses, Novey delves past this more obvious conflict to mine deeper sources of estrangement ... Grappling with the mysteries we present to one another, Novey pushes back against the fairy tales we’ve told ourselves about polarizing places like Appalachia, spinning a far more artful story.
Roxanna Asgarian
Rave The Atlantic \"...make[s] clear how both systems have largely disregarded the problem that most families within them face: not necessarily the death of parents, but poverty ... help[s] illuminate the repercussions of America’s broken child-welfare system and the ways it has failed to best serve kids and families—showing how urgently the country needs to reimagine it ... Asgarian forged remarkable connections with the birth families, both of whom were largely ignored in the aftermath of the murders ... By meticulously showing how social workers, legal officials, and other authorities repeatedly failed the families, We Were Once a Family powerfully uses this one story—though clearly an extreme case—to expose how what happened to these children is indicative of the classism and racism still baked into the institution.\
Dizz Tate
Positive NPR This isn\'t a book primarily concerned with finding Sammy. Instead, Tate sidesteps the missing girl trope and makes the far more compelling choice to focus her lens on a pack of 13-year-old girls who are used to blending into the background ... In plunging the reader into the girls\' collective perspective, Brutes makes for an original and stylistically ambitious take on the well-trodden subject matter of girls in peril ... Tate perfectly captures the simultaneous impatience and mercurial swings of girlhood ... Fast-forwards ominously color the action of the novel\'s present ... Tate adds depth and welcome weirdness to what might have been a more ordinary nightmare.
David Milch
Rave NPR An exigent reflection on a truly remarkable life, one that holds lessons about humanity and the power of art to make those lessons visible ... Conversationally related yarns — as well as insider baseball on the making of television from casting to cutting room floor — are major draws of Life\'s Work, especially for dedicated Milch fans like me ... But the real gifts of Life\'s Work are...his meditations on writing and how to live, and how writing has kept him alive.
Emi Nietfeld
Positive NPR With conventional framing, Emi Nietfeld\'s life story could be fodder for a Lifetime movie ... But Nietfeld\'s memoir Acceptance is not a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes tale. Instead, Nietfeld refuses silver linings and focuses on the toll of contorting oneself into a \'perfect, deserving\' victim who was \'hurt in just the right way.\' As such, Acceptance serves as a necessary corrective to what she notes is called \'the gospel of grit\' in discussions of hardship in America ... The first three-quarters of the book is dedicated to retracing that upbringing in an unsparing account that asks readers to bear witness without flinching.
CJ Hauser
Pan Gawker ... bloated, superfluous ... almost 300 pages long, with 17 essays across four sections — a length that wouldn’t be a problem if the book were not so repetitive ... On the one hand, Hauser’s voice as an essayist is eminently readable. She’s funny and conspiratorially conversational, though she does use the word \'fucking\' as a modifier about a dozen too many times (we get it). But in choosing to focus The Crane Wife on the societal expectations of romance and dating that she has bought into, and the gradual realization that she can resist them, Hauser writes herself into a corner. The topics that she weaves in serve largely to distract from the fact that she rehashes the same epiphanies about the kinds of mistakes she has made in her dating life from essay to essay ... These lessons feel stale even before they are recycled, and the constant recurrence of the same structural formula makes the book even more tiresome ... for all that these pieces appear on their surface to be candid and confessional, Hauser does not actually reveal much about herself or even the relationships that drive The Crane Wife. The few essays that are about her childhood and her family do not dig deeply into how her upbringing shaped her concept of romance — an odd omission, given how much The Crane Wife revolves around where Hauser inherited ideas about love and relationships ... Yes, even memoirists have a right to privacy and to control how much they let readers in. But eliding basic context can, at times, feel as withholding as the belabored braiding that stalls the essays’ revelations ... Like other writers whose viral short pieces landed them hyped-up books with big advances that inevitably fell flat, Hauser has been ill-served by a publishing industry that seems most concerned with engineering best sellers. The Crane Wife the essay did not need to turn into The Crane Wife the memoir — it is a gratuitous expansion that tries to pull off the same trick over and over again, with hackneyed lessons about thinly sketched men.
Alexandra Lange
Positive The Atlantic ... challenges the dominant narrative ... Lange’s book reminds us that the mall has helped shape American society, and has evolved with our country since the 1950s. And she posits that there’s still a place for malls in our society, as long as they adapt to better serve their communities ... Lange’s ultimate vision for reusing the space of malls might be one that largely repudiates a singular focus on commercialism, but she doesn’t discount shopping and what it can do for us.
Candice Wuehle
Rave NPR Irresistibly weird ... The kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page — not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self ... In the first half of Monarch, Wuehle conjures enthrallingly eccentric formative years for Jessica ... A far more interesting novel than the international espionage thriller it could have been without Wuehle\'s poetic, haunting touch ... Monarch is ultimately a story about stories.
Maud Newton
Positive NPR ... her vigorous book Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation deepens her investigation of both family lore (her maternal grandfather is rumored to have married 13 times, once to a woman who shot him in the gut) and our broader preoccupation with our forebears ... Newton\'s critical eye shines in another section on the interplay between nature and nurture, which delves into the debate on epigenetics—how experience and environment affect the expression of genes—and the possibility of inherited trauma ... Because Ancestor Trouble is structured less around Newton\'s own tracing of her family tree and more around broad categories of ancestral concern, we inevitably revisit the same biographic material multiple times across the book. Newton sometimes leaves readers hanging for many chapters before completely closing a loop of personal inquiry[.]
Chelsea Bieker
Rave NPR Heartbroke unfolds in a chorus of yearning and sorrow, told in 11 different voices that Bieker inhabits with perfect pitch. Most of the stories are told in the first person and feel like they\'re being spun over beers at the Barge, where Alma tends bar. Bieker\'s opening lines suck you straight into the narrators\' worlds ... The reader can always see the consequences of reckless desire before the protagonists, filling these pages with the dread that comes with yearning for the impossible ... While Bieker might not mend their broken hearts, she honors their pain and their undying longings, and will leave you aching for them.
Sarah Krasnostein
Positive NPR While Krasnostein spent a remarkable amount of time with each of her subjects, meeting with some over a period of years, we only spend a few pages at a time with them ... Initially, it is jarring ... But as The Believer progresses and harmonies accrue among what Krasnostein calls \'six different notes in the human song of longing for the unattainable,\' the brilliance of this approach reveals itself. I do not know that I would have had the patience to read 40 straight pages on the Creation Museum ... But in reading this story amid the others in small slices, I was better able to appreciate the commonalities underneath them that reveal aspects of the human condition ... Krasnostein doesn\'t just act as a microphone for her subjects\' beliefs; she pushes back against them at crucial junctures. Her approach is not to debunk, but to provide philosophical and personal interjections that allow a more profound look at why people believe what they believe, and the ways some beliefs can \'stunt us\' ... While it was the same curiosity and a desire to bridge distance that led Krasnostein to all these subjects, some are more compelling than others ... In the end, though, The Believer succeeds at its goal of bridging distances, of transcending the self to comprehend the other.
Séamas O'Reilly
Rave NPR ... a grief memoir that shuns sentimentality in favor of gallows humor ... I laughed out loud reading Did Ye Hear Mammy Died, especially at the bits that recalled for me the way my own family laughs to keep from crying ... forms a testament to the fact that losing a parent at a young age doesn\'t end your childhood ... In this, O\'Reilly gets something I wish more people would understand about my own loss — my parents\' deaths were devastating and I still had to go through my teen years after they died ... While it is billed as a straight memoir, it reads as more of a memoir-in-essays, 13 of them, most of which relate happenings in the early 1990s, when O\'Reilly — known in his large family as one of the \'Wee Ones\' — was still quite wee. Writing about early childhood can skew mawkish, but O\'Reilly manages to granularly depict the odd details of kid life as it was lived alongside a present-day perspective that treats his younger self with bemusement and tenderness in equal measure ... It\'s rare to read about good fathers in memoirs, and O\'Reilly\'s portrait, complete with bits about how his dad is \'God\'s one, true, perfect miser,\' who was nevertheless driven to \'make sure we never felt poorer than anyone else,\' is hilarious and moving ... It is this thread of refusal to be pitied, to have what happened to his family reduced to \'a tawdry bit of sentimental fluff for people to tut along to and say how sad,\' that makes Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? so rousing. That it is also deadly funny is an extra treat.
Olivia Clare Friedman
Positive NPR This set-up allows Friedman — a poet and short story writer known for exploring moments of vulnerability — the opportunity to elegantly drive home the importance of rituals for \'loving the dead with the diamond of the living.\' But it\'s a shaky premise. While Americans now largely treat death and mourning as topics to be acknowledged only through glancing euphemisms, the idea that the first step that a future U.S. government would take to combat climate change would be banning burials seems incongruous with human history...I kept waiting for further world-building to anchor Friedman\'s premise, to explain why a culture would become so hostile to mourning rituals, to make the climate change logic of closing graveyards make sense. But aside from more extreme weather and barer store shelves, the U.S. of 2042 is essentially the same as the U.S. of 2022, down to laws that ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — in Alma\'s mind, both these laws and those banning burial are simply about taking away people\'s choices ... Its flawed foundation notwithstanding, Here Lies provides a poignant portrait of the way grief can bring people together, uniting even strangers through a common pain and commitment to keep their loved ones alive in memory.
Ella Baxter
Rave Los Angeles Times ... by turns a comedy of errors and a profound meditation on how to find mooring in the world when you have lost your anchor ... Writing about kink could be gimmicky or cringey, but Baxter imbues the BDSM scenes with just the right proportion of levity and self-awareness ... What unites death and sex is the way they force us to confront our bodies; in bringing them together here, Baxter has really written a novel about the limits of the visceral and the need for the mind to sit with the hardest truths, the worst emotional pains, rather than trying to escape them ... Passages like these are some of the frankest and most resonant I have read about what death does to the bereaved. The author has clearly dedicated herself to grappling with death in a way that feels more akin to mourning in the Victorian era than the antiseptic conventions of Aurelia’s Funeral Parlor ... In considering her preoccupations in the form of a novel, Baxter has encapsulated the agony of loss and the necessity of contending with it to find the new person you will become.
Emily Maloney
Mixed NPR \'Cost of Living\' — an indictment of the exorbitant costs of staying alive in America, and the weight of being hounded by a debt that reduces your life to dollars and cents — opens Maloney\'s debut essay collection of the same name. It\'s a powerful opening shot, but in the essays that follow, which recount Maloney\'s experiences as patient, caregiver, observer, and pharmaceutical industry worker, she stumbles before regaining the clarity of purpose and rigor of probing that \'Cost of Living\' promises ...The six [essays] that follow the titular piece feel as though they are narrated from underwater ...Among the murkiest essays is \'Clipped\' ... Something is wrong here, but that something is never clearly identified; I found myself waiting for retrospection that never came ... It is clear that both the therapy and the drugs weren\'t the treatment that Maloney actually needed, but unclear where she places the blame ... That Maloney does not even engage in any kind of questioning in these pieces is what makes them lack tension, fall flat. Later essays, where she takes up the same sort of thinking on the page that gives \'Cost of Living\' its verve, are far more compelling ... Zoom out and sustained inquiry is what I longed for in earlier pieces ... At its best, Cost of Living offers insight into the subculture of medicine and incites the reader to think more deeply about what our health care system is costing us all.
Sarah Manguso
Rave The Baffler Sarah Manguso\'s turns of phrase have a way of instantly crystallizing into idiom. Ever since I finished reading her novel Very Cold People, shards of her precision keep surfacing in my head ... Chapters are organized less around major events that propel the narrative forward than loose themes—class tensions, maternal cruelties, middle school anxieties, the ubiquity of sexual assault and intergenerational trauma—illustrated by snapshots of Ruthie’s memory. That’s to be expected. You don’t come to a writer like Manguso looking for plot but for distillation, those moments of perfect capture ... Manguso’s character study of Linda is reason alone to read Very Cold People. She manages to make this woman both vilely self-centered and still somehow deserving of sympathy ... Manguso is an utterly unsentimental writer, and there is no true thawing of these cold people or this cold place. Which is exactly as it ought be in her first novel—a sharp icicle.
Kathryn Schulz
Rave NPR Lost & Found is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of Schulz\'s personal grief and love stories. It is that philosophical turning over of loss and discovery that makes this memoir extraordinary, for it unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life ... That Schulz can make a visit to the Oxford English Dictionary...compelling—surprising yet apt—is a testament to her capabilities as a prose stylist ... passages, where we learn about the person Isaac was...are rendered lovingly, making us miss him too. What makes the first section of this memoir piercing, though...is that beyond an affecting portrait of singular mourning, Schulz unravels universal truths about why loss guts us, and how it forces us to grapple with our place in the world and its workings ... Occasionally, all that awe grows tiresome, as when Schulz belabors her wonderment over the odds of chancing upon her partner ... Lost & Found is a prod toward amazement, a call to remember that \'we are here to keep watch, not to keep.\'
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Positive NPR Through a series of darkly comic vignettes with epigraphs from Woolf\'s essay framing each chapter, she uncovers the city\'s incompetent governance ... But Moore\'s project here is not just to illuminate the city\'s chaos and who profits from it. Gentrifier is also an investigation of the costs—monetary, psychological, ethical—of her free house, and an ode to the neighbors who gave her life there inflections of joy. Gentrifier\'s overarching structure is linear ... Each chapter, though, unfolds in nonlinear fragments that combine jokes, facts, and reflections, all in the present tense ... This approach reenacts the exasperating paradoxes of life in the city, giving the feel of a comedy of errors ... just as Gentrifier is a potent testament that it takes more than just money and stable space in order to write, it also proves that individual will alone cannot create a culture that values women in literature.
Sarah Ruhl
Mixed NPR Smile records Ruhl\'s coming to terms with her new face and the conundrums it presents, it is not limited to \'the story of a face,\' as the memoir\'s subtitle suggests. For much of the book, Ruhl\'s condition recedes into the background ... Smile proceeds linearly, and about two-thirds of it takes place in the two years after Ruhl\'s twins were born and thus after her Bell\'s palsy diagnosis, with interstitials that scatter away to abstractly explore smiling, symmetry and asymmetry, beauty standards, and loss ... Ruhl\'s writing on parenting and theater is engaging and insightful ... Later, Ruhl gives credence to the practice of physiognomy without noting that this pseudoscience was used to provide \'evidence\' for racism. These digressions — some of them belabored with explanation that does not trust the reader\'s intelligence (do we really need a primer on what gluten is in 2021?) — began to feel as though they served to avoid dwelling on Ruhl\'s personal experience of persistent facial paralysis and treatment thereof ... These insights allow for the reader to empathize, a crucial function of any illness narrative. But for much of Smile, she resists ascribing meaning to her decision-making around her Bell\'s palsy ... It is not until the last 50 or so pages of the book that she begins to grapple with why she evaded her own face ... Her mistake is that memoir does not require a single epiphany, but would do well to offer many moments of retrospective meaning-making.
Miriam Toews
Positive NPR Fight Night is narrated by Swiv, in the form of a letter to her missing father — a pair of risks that (mostly) pay off. Toews is a master of voice, and Swiv\'s, with its mix of precocious parroting of Mooshie and Elvira and exasperation with them, is one that I could read forever ... In Toews\'s hands, mundanity teems with comic detail ... The journey to this dark place is brief, and part of me wished for more dwelling in the hardest parts of these women\'s lives — a kind of reflection that a nine-year-old, even one who has seen as much as Swiv, cannot provide. But, as Elvira says, \'To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy.\' This is an apt mission statement for Toews\'s body of work. Fight Night makes an ardent, hilarious, and moving addition.
Kat Chow
Rave NPR ... while Seeing Ghosts would not exist without Chow\'s grief — while Chow would not be the person she is now without that grief — her project here aims for more than just mapping her primal anguish ... Chow was one of the cofounders of NPR\'s Code Switch, and her reporting background and deep interest in race, identity, and cultural history drives her memoir\'s larger project ... In writing about her mother\'s life and death, and what came before and after, Chow excavates her history and the ways that distance and longing refract across generations ... Memories like this, though startling, inject levity as Chow grapples with all she cannot know about her mother ... Chow has, in a way, preserved her mother, satisfied her request to be taxidermied. But she has also given up her ghost and released it to the world.
Mona Awad
Mixed NPR ... a surreal exploration of chronic pain, women\'s believability and visibility, and desperation that straddles the line between comedy and horror ... Awad\'s choice to narrate the novel entirely from inside Miranda\'s head forces the reader to witness that pain in visceral detail, even if no one else does ... It\'s a claustrophobic perspective, one flooded with staccato, fragmented inner dialogue that reaches for bitter humor but often feels just plain bitter. The style had me impatient for the moment of transformation that I knew was coming, but that doesn\'t give the reader or Miranda respite until about 100 pages in. The slow pacing, though, reinforces the indictment at the heart of the book — how we fail one another by choosing to look away from pain.
Daisy Hernández
Positive NPR Through piecing together her own family\'s story, the history of Chagas, and the stories of other patients\' illnesses, Hernández raises damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care ... By starting with the personal, Hernández allows readers to comprehend how a bug bite rendered a woman sick for most of her life ... Hernández is trained as a reporter, and she approaches the quest to learn about kissing bugs with journalistic tenacity ... While meticulously researched, this section of the book lags as we lose the thread of how these insects, and the policy decisions around this disease, impact patients ... hits its stride in the last section, when Hernández tells the stories of poor and uninsured Chagas patients who face barriers in receiving appropriate care ... reminds us that our work at balancing health inequities cannot stop with controlling COVID domestically.
Michelle Zauner
Rave NPR ... powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short ... Zauner\'s food descriptions transport us to the table alongside her ... a rare acknowledgement of the ravages of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be battled with hope and strength ...Zauner carries the same clear-eyed frankness to writing about her mother\'s death five months after her diagnosis ... It is rare to read about a slow death in such detail, an odd gift in that it forces us to sit with mortality rather than turn away from it.
Eula Biss
Mixed NPR If \'White Debt\' was about the ease of colluding in whiteness, Biss\' new book Having and Being Had maps out the ease of colluding in capitalism ... While Having and Being Had does reckon with race, Biss\'s project here is broader: an inquiry into the American value system of buying and owning, and what we trap ourselves in when we invest in the trappings of the middle class ... behaves less like a collection of essays and more like poetry, reminiscent of Claudia Rankine ... Toward the end of the book, Biss writes \'if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do...would be subject to the logic of this economy.\' This presents several conundrums that Biss, for once, does not scrutinize ... By rooting each meditation in lived experience, Biss captures the way that the capitalist value system has weaseled itself into our everyday. She implicates herself ... What Biss seems to yearn for is not an alternate economic system with an emphasis on public and common goods, or one that values making art, but what she calls the \'gift economy\' she lived in as a young poet ... Having and Being Had made me question my aspiration for capitalist comforts, yes, but if making a salary and owning a home is not the answer, scraping by and giving away art doesn\'t seem like a viable alternative ... Having and Being Had—which illuminates capitalism for what it is, and records discomfort with it—is a start. But it is enough to dismantle the narrative of the system without pushing for change, both on the individual and larger levels?
Sarah Gerard
Positive The Baffler It’s all funny until it’s not ... capitalism looms threateningly in True Love, compounding the pain ... women are unable to reach their potential, professionally and personally, because of the crushing grind of making rent in New York and the foreclosure of a livable wage for writers and academics ... By the end...I was anxious for [the protagonist] to take loans from daddy and get the hell out of New York, and depressed that I felt that way ... True Love is too much of a send-up to sting...but for all its excesses, the bleak vision it presents does, too, feel depressingly real: Nina can’t see a way out of her abusive relationship because she can’t afford to move or live alone ... It is heartening to see...characters want for more than what the world has to offer them, instead of reacting to their circumstances with yet more ennui and anomie. But...it is the women—and not the systems they operate in—that are ultimately painted to be the cause of their own problems ... True Love enact[s] what it feels like to be worn down, not just by the world and its economics but by the way we choose to move through it. That is a worthy function...to invite us into feeling each woman’s precariousness, to understand both its systemic and personal roots. If we are still waiting on a book about women living in this era where fixing, getting better, is more than just a fantasy, perhaps we are still waiting for a world where it’s possible to fix.
Lynn Steger Strong
Positive The Baffler The aspects of Want that make it so relatable stem from just how tired Elizabeth, a thirty-four-year-old white woman, is ... Where in a different kind of novel Elizabeth would stay numb—would want, more than anything, to feel nothing—Strong’s narrator desires more than her lot and acts on it ... Want, then, presents a recognizable vision of a certain kind of life under contemporary capitalism—one of downwardly mobile female exhaustion and thwarted dreams, yes—that still acknowledges the power of desire, and the danger of even the smallest desire for something better than the system has relegated to you ... Want draws liberally on Strong’s life...heightens its stakes and its appearance of reality. It is this quality that makes the impossibility of Elizabeth’s fulfillment, and the fact that her quest for it comes at a high cost for others, even more of a bummer ... It is heartening to see...characters want for more than what the world has to offer them, instead of reacting to their circumstances with yet more ennui and anomie. But in Want... it is the women—and not the systems they operate in—that are ultimately painted to be the cause of their own problems ... Want...enact[s] what it feels like to be worn down, not just by the world and its economics but by the way we choose to move through it. That is a worthy function...to invite us into feeling each woman’s precariousness, to understand both its systemic and personal roots.
Chelsea Bieker
Rave BOMB ... a propulsive, transporting read ... In Godshot, Bieker poignantly depicts the pain wrought by a living mother who has a become unreachable ... Bieker has crafted a uniquely vile cast of characters to surround Lacey, and the utter selfishness that undergirds the believers’ behavior keeps us rooting for Lacey’s burgeoning self-actualization ... Beyond her mesmerizing world-building, what Bieker ultimately captures so well in Godshot is how flimsy the stories we tell ourselves reveal themselves to be when we reckon with them critically. Lacey teaches us that our desperate search for meaning in something bigger than us can ultimately lead to finding salvation within ourselves.
Belle Boggs
Positive BOMB \"With this scarily plausible setup, Boggs nails the launching point for her satire of for-profit education and the unholy links between manipulation, money, and writing. But The Gulf is more than just a witty parody: Boggs uses the Ranch as a lens through which to examine our fractured country, where the inability to allow for ambivalence keeps us separated by a gulf. In Boggs’s ultimately redemptive novel, it is language—poetry—that bridges that gulf ... Boggs convincingly makes the case that the writing workshop can breed empathy ... Boggs gives Marianne more meaty matters to work out than will-she-or-won’t-she get back together with Eric—her primary dilemma before the students arrive—and thus lends The Gulf real depth ... Boggs makes us question who is worth signaling, and how.\
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Rave BOMB \"These stories magnify what it means to be black in America—wherein your very presence can be deemed threatening, and therefore worthy of capital punishment—through a satirical, uncanny lens, reflecting back just how absurd and dehumanizing our reality is. They force us to reckon with our country’s toxic racism and consumerism while being compulsively readable and somehow even funny. Adjei-Brenyah pulls this off partly through his characters ... Adjei-Brenyah’s sharp prose keeps [one short story] sinewy and darkly humorous while simultaneously allowing for flashes of tenderness ... America might be dehumanizing, Adjei-Brenyah seems to say, but we can still be human.\
Rosalie Knecht
Rave BOMB \"The distance between Vera’s backstory and her mission in Argentina sets Knecht’s novel apart, making it more than just a suspense-driven romp of Cold War covert ops. Vera is no James Bond, with his glamour and gadgets, nor is she the anti-James Bond, John le Carré’s George Smiley, the bland, bespectacled, and balding expert in tradecraft. Vera is a deeply lonely lesbian living in a time of vice squads, and her history is as crucial to the plot as any suspicious man in a trench coat ... What kept me turning the pages in Who is Vera Kelly was not so much a desire to find out what Vera’s spying would reveal about Román’s plotting and its relationship to the coup. Instead, I found myself drawn to the bildungsroman folded into the spy novel. Balancing those two elements in alternating chapters that read like Vera’s diary entries, Knecht imbues the novel with emotional depth that allows for meditation on human connection and the ties that bind us to life’s worth.\