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Recent Reviews
Lauren Elkin
Positive The New York Times Book Review The novel can feel like one long, Socratic dialogue between Anna and Clémentine, debating the value of such work, the ethics of sex and fidelity and childbearing and feminism ... Shrewd and satisfying.
Betsy Lerner
Rave The New York Times Book Review Lots of ambitious books announce themselves; this one doesn’t need to. The first novel by Betsy Lerner...it forgoes all fanfare and conceit as it refines a 20-year coming-of-age into an elegant thread of taut, perfectly paced milestones. The prose is controlled, but neither virtuosic nor spare; the plot, enticing but neither Dickensian nor minimalist. Decidedly un-trendy, crescendo-less and restrained, this tragicomic family saga is a Bach prelude to the Rachmaninoff of a writer like Jonathan Franzen.
Yasmin Zaher
Positive The New York Times Book Review A spiraling, hallucinogenic plot ... The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way ... The novel’s power is not in cohesion, but in chaos — in an ambience that is consistently murky, morally numbed, deceptively blasé. Throughout, her prose manages to be both deadpan and fertile ... Nothing about this book is meant to be subtle, not even its metaphors.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mixed The New York Times Book Review It’s a lot of terrain to cover, and the stretches of impersonal polemic are just that — so unspecific they risk banality ... Revelations offer little we don’t already know ... If Nguyen intended this as a memoir not so much of what happened as of how it felt, it turns out that in the past decade he has felt a lot of the same things the rest of America has, too ... Nguyen never acknowledges the possibility that even within this book, he dilutes the pain of personal experience: Those passages of well-worn social observation can feel like a retreat from self-examination into the safer distance of generality.
Hilary Leichter
Rave The New York Times Book Review Poignant and concise ... This story does not so much unfold as expand, mushrooming beyond linear time and space to encompass not just what happens, but everything else that could have, too ... Leichter delicately stretches...longing across all four sections, not just as the impetus for space-time expansion, but as space itself, cavernous and protracted, intoxicating but desperately lonely.
Heather Radke
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... don’t be fooled by the cheeky peach emoji on Radke’s cover. Despite her sporadic and careful sense of humor on the subject, the author’s account of the female butt is in many cases a narrative of physical suffering ... engaging, personal and necessarily cherry-picked ... The book goes deeper than it goes wide.
Laura Warrell
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... patchy but soulful ... Structured like a jam session, the novel favors a series of riffs over any one melodic theme. Warrell gives a supporting cast of women their own solos, through close-third-person chapters that detail their entanglements with the elusive Circus ... the reader longs for actual scenes showing who they were together, showing Circus’s capacity for love to counterbalance his fetish for leaving. Without that, his protestations feel thin...Other threads are left tantalizingly loose too...Warrell outlines fascinating satellite characters who beg to be filled in ... certain passages as elegant, unexpected and wrenching as the \'fierce\' sounds that emerge from Circus’s trumpet.
Leila Mottley
Positive New York Times Book Review Empathetic ... Mottley writes about Kiara’s serial abuse frankly, without blinking ... Kiara’s story is pure fiction, Mottley says, but her circumstances are disturbingly, statistically real ... Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon that reminds us she was once Oakland’s youth poet laureate. Some similes...land better than others ... A confusingly underdeveloped romance between Kiara and her best friend, Alé...feels unearned when it finally comes to fruition. But beneath this gratuitous embroidery, there’s a desperation — a reaching, through language, for some kind of salvation ... In a novel about sex work and displacement, there is somehow less pathos in all the moments of graphic violence combined than there is in a single, gutting passage of profound love.
Sanjena Sathian
Rave The New York Times Book Review Of the novel’s many plotlines, all are secondary to the wrenching, will-they-or-won’t-they love story between Neil and Anita...their final childhood exchanges, in person and via AIM are, for all this novel’s leaps of imagination, achingly real reminders of what it was like to be an adolescent in post-9/11 America, feeling the weight of your parents’ dreams on your shoulders, but mostly just wanting to drink and make out ... The tension Sathian builds is one of teenage insecurity swelling into adulthood, until disillusion overthrows the tyranny of American perfectionism ... This intimate glimpse of millennials who are second-generation Americans shows how history repeats.
Jordan Kisner
Positive The New York Times Book Review [The] \'in between state\' is the common denominator of this collection, the theme on which the 13 essays are a variation. Certainty, the book suggests, is an illusion. Real life exists in the gaps ... In a new-New-Journalist amalgam of reportage and memoir, Kisner tethers — more elegantly in some pieces than in others — her sociological dispatches to the realm of personal experience: her on-again-off-again relationship with God, her O.C.D., her mixed ethnicity and sexuality. Reading the book, one might picture a series of oppositions — religious/secular, straight/gay, native/foreign, self/other, even living/dead — with Kisner’s focus always on the slash ... Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in this book, bouncing nimbly between gravity...and comic relief, which she peppers in just when our heads are starting to spin. If she sometimes gets lost down rhetorical rabbit holes, at least she makes you want to go with her, pulling the reader along on her journey to excavate the intimate from the observed.
Kiley Reid
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... many lapses in credibility that beleaguer Reid’s plot ... an interracial love triangle whose convoluted dynamic lets some of the steam out of its worthy message ... Reid writes scenes and dialogue with a contemporary lilt that feels deliberately styled for a screen adaptation, inflected throughout with cringe-inducing \'holup holup\'s and \'ohmygod\'s, heavy-handed attempts to mimic millennial parlance. Over all, the characters’ melodrama is unwarranted; the final climactic event that Alix thinks \'felt like the plot twist of a horror movie\' is actually quite predictable. But the simple prose and story line belie a more nuanced moral hierarchy ... Out of Reid’s often cloying vernacular, then, emerge some surprisingly resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite.
Caleb Crain
Positive Vanity Fair Despite the allusions to Hemingway’s classic, Necessary Errors doesn’t lack in originality. Crain cleverly conveys the difficulties of expat life...the novel’s erratic pace and abrupt cuts between scenes envelop the reader in the same feeling of frivolity and aimlessness that the expats experience themselves ...Despite the novel’s looming socio-political backdrop—the parting Iron Curtain and the Velvet Revolution—its story is mesmerizingly personal ... There are no momentous acts of rebellion or civil unrest in Necessary Errors, and it’s certainly not the rambling plot of the characters’ comings and goings that drive Crain’s narrative. Instead, like The Sun Also Rises, this book centers on the psychological events of each well-crafted character. But Crain takes the expat-novel paradigm a step further, finding a poignant analogy between physical displacement—even if willful, in exotic Prague—and psychological change. Jacob starts off as a boy in Necessary Errors, and Crain starts with Hemingway’s canonical masterpiece. By the end of this unpretentiously perceptive story, whose quiet surface belies a storm of activity underneath, each arrives at a distance quite far from where he began.
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Mixed The New York Times Book Review There is the more conspicuous story about Rafiq and Layla—a Muslim-Indian immigrant couple in California—and their children ... But woven throughout this arc is a micro-narrative of a young man coming of age within that family and struggling to find his own \'place\' within it ... The result is a family epic that is textured and keenly felt, if at times meandering ... Mirza’s chosen structure...distracted from the otherwise convincing pathos of her characters’ emotional and moral plights. Indeed these plights and the themes they belie are often just as varied and frenetically sketched as the novel’s architecture. If Amar’s alienation can be identified as the book’s central tension (and given all the competing tensions, I am not 100 percent sure that it can), then the reasons behind it, the context that made it so, are muddied by the way Mirza eschews traditional plot development ... For all the novel’s deliberate disorder, however ... Mirza draws Amar’s lifelong struggle with the concept of unconditional devotion so poignantly that readers will find it exceedingly relatable.
Dave Eggers
Rave Vanity Fair As our starry-eyed heroine makes her way around The Circle, the reader begins to sense Eggers’s implicit denunciation of the company culture: boundary-less communication can cause paranoia and hypersensitivity among those who attempt it, and can give the people who facilitate it utter control. The social message of the novel is clear, but Eggers expertly weaves it into an elegantly told, compulsively readable parable for the 21st century … What may be the most haunting discovery about The Circle, however, is readers’ recognition that they share the same technology-driven mentality that brings the novel’s characters to the brink of dysfunction.
Christine Sneed
Positive The New York Times Book Review Snared by each of the collection’s ­tragic, comic, quirky and/or quotidian lives the reader tears through page after page and by the end feels not only bereft but ravenous, hungry for more. While it may be a classic sign of a story well told, that yearning also arises from the sense of irresolution that permeates Sneed’s fiercely meditative and unnerving short fiction ... Sneed never settles many of the questions that arise throughout the collection. Paradoxically, however, this uncertainty only serves to highlight the engaging power of her writing.