About Book Marks
Lauren LeBlanc Lauren LeBlanc is a writer, editor, and board member of the National Book Critics Circle who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Recent Reviews
Sally Rooney
Mixed The Boston Globe Rooney’s scope has expanded. She’s moved from the tight familiarity and steady pacing of her earlier novels to a larger narrative scale as her characters age and their worlds grow more complex, with bigger casts and slower pacing. Estrangement, as much as desire, is the overwhelming human condition in the book. Her characters lack mobility. The reader feels it as well ... Rooney skillfully keeps her finger on the pulse of characters ... Studded with shimmering moments of pastoral stillness that offer an alternative to life on an urban career track or a conventional path to domestic bliss, but there’s an overwhelming air of resigned doom in this novel ... Though Rooney is one of our most earnest and passionate contemporary writers, one hopes that this saga framed by lust and grief is an interlude between great acts.
Rachel Kushner
Rave The Los Angeles Times Buckle up: Known for her daring and cerebral work, Rachel Kushner knows how to take readers on a wild ride ... Using the framework of an espionage novel, Kushner creates a spellbinding story of intrigue and subterfuge that examines the limits of control and moral influence ... A sexy, physical novel of lies and caustic, increasingly harrowing choices tethered to ruin.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Rave The New York Times Book Review In Moreno-Garcia’s skillful hands, you’ll find the satisfaction of richly drawn characters, saturated settings and deftly constructed plot twists ... Salome is \"a chimera,\" Moreno-Garcia writes. \"Part lion, part dove.\" Her novel has that same quality.
Gayl Jones
Rave The Boston Globe [A] refreshingly idiosyncratic novel that manages to wear its seriousness lightly without ever losing sight of its significance ... Jones plays with language — as much as character and plot — to illustrate the restorative nature of imagination ... Jones reveals herself one of our most important American novelists.
Olivia Laing
Positive The Boston Globe Laing maps the ghosts of gardens and sacred spaces destroyed through war ... What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that \'paradise haunts gardens.\'
Rufi Thorpe
Rave Los Angeles Times Beyond Thorpe’s strong characters and tight plots, what sets her apart from her peers is the gnawing philosophical tension that rests at the center of her books ... Deploying a structural twist that also helps expand the way we understand her lead character’s experience, Thorpe gives Margo the liberty to shift from first to third person ... It’s exhilarating to find an author who wants to tell you a good yarn, but also ask a lot of complicated questions.
Kaliane Bradley
Rave The Los Angeles Times For a book that could also be easily described as witty, sexy escapist fiction, The Ministry of Time packs a substantial punch ... Kaliane Bradley proves that it’s possible to address imperialism, the scourge of bureaucracy, cross-cultural conflict and the paranoia inherent in a surveillance state through her utterly entertaining novel ... An edgy, playful and provocative book that’s likely to be the most thought-provoking romance novel of the summer.
Vinson Cunningham
Rave The Los Angeles Times Vividly rendered ... [A] heady tension of aspiration, charisma, optimism, unbelievable timing and intellectual curiosity as well as a yearning for connection ... Cunningham takes a cinematic, fast-paced story and infuses it with the texture of humanity.
Lucy Sante
Rave The Boston Globe With its focus on gender transition, this is a timely but timeless memoir ... A poignant but forceful portrait of a life liberated from shame and fear ... The book reads like one lengthy confession ... This structural choice carries the reader through the memoir’s bleakest moments. We’re better able to pay unflinching attention and absorb the bitterness of Sante’s life without any reassurance or handholding on the part of Sante. It’s also her frank and inviting voice that hooks the reader.
Benjamin Taylor
Positive The Boston Globe This succinct biography is a terrific introduction to the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize winner. But don’t come looking for radical new insights. Taylor’s thorough, thoughtful study is more of a sincerely informed primer or devoted guide than a vigorous cultural analysis ... Though Taylor’s vivid and fleet-footed biography is by no means exhaustive, he dispels any perception that Cather is a stale artifact of America’s pioneer past. Cather is a fascinating literary figure whose exceptional life and work spans a highly transitional period of American history ... Throughout his biography, one isn’t struck by a new discovery or pressing urgency to write this book. There appears to be no new source material to spur a new evaluation.
Jhumpa Lahiri, trans. by Todd Portnowitz
Mixed The Boston Globe Beyond these carefully detailed stories, marked by Lahiri’s stylistic containment, throbs a more menacing story ... A unifying concern across these stories is the fraught and complicated experience of foreigners in Rome that hangs overwhelmingly upon financial and immigration status ... Lahiri knows these parallel tragedies will one day collide, but unfortunately, in these tales, they do not. May her future work thrust her characters into more direct conflict with one another, emerging with hard-earned joy or an anguish equal to the city they call home.
Jonathan Lethem
Rave The Los Angeles Times Explores familiar territory from a new point of view in a style new to him. It unfolds through passages ranging in length from less than a page to a dozen, each labeled and dated. And it leaps between decades and then into liminal spaces that exist across time to cast a light on forgotten exchanges and actions. This kaleidoscopic, fragmentary quality is no lark; it is essential to Lethem’s project ... At first glance, the book’s stark title — coupled with Lethem’s frequent play with mystery tropes — signals that this is a genre novel. It is definitely not ... A brutal question to ask yourself: Was writing a book about your childhood friends and home turf an act of betrayal? ... Lethem lets the ragged edges remain visible. The story’s texture and pacing echoes his message ... The novel is also an endless declaration of love. Every neighborhood deserves such a discursive portrait, such ruthless devotion and such an audacious book.
Anna Funder
Positive The Boston Globe A book that dares to imagine lives beyond social conscription ... Here lies the book’s leap of faith. Are you a purist who believes that biography must never include conjecture much less imagined histories? Or do you think it’s more important to juxtapose a canonical life with the possibility of what could have been? ... Funder may read as indulgent to some, but her claims ask: Has history ignored a collaboration between husband and wife which created some of the boldest political literature of the 20th century?
Tessa Hadley
Rave The Boston Globe Impeccably literary, emotionally satisfying, yet unexpectedly unsettling ... Hadley always delivers fiction that cuts to the quick ... It could sound like a slight to be called dependably brilliant, but unquestionably, that’s what she is. She writes with an unrushed assurance and confidence that breeds comfort ... In her short stories, there’s less space to tone and then flex those literary muscles. It is essential to be nimble. While her novels are exquisite, knitted with plot and deep character development as well as a keen sense of space, her short stories lose nothing of that depth in their brevity. Hadley’s stories flicker vividly as powerful vignettes that compress personal histories, offering the reader entry into a brief period of time in which the characters upend perceptions.
Christine Grillo
Rave Boston Globe This acerbically funny and tender book about endurance is laced with tangible affection ... Hestia Strikes a Match could have been a solid exploration of contemporary politics or an amusing middle-age rom-com, but Grillo’s secondary characters make this a book about repair and unexpected community ... Grillo’s search for reunion extends in all directions in this supremely layered, emotionally and intellectually resonant novel for our time.
Sabrina Orah Mark
Positive The New York Times Book Review Reveal both the serendipity and treachery of contemporary life ... The essays evoke the intimacy of direct address and confession ... Mark, too, repeatedly asks questions, a device that grows thin over time. But fairy tales are inherently repetitious, and her questions and circular language...echo their stylistic rhythms ... Mark finds that instead of distorting reality, fairy tales bring the absurdity of life into greater focus with grace, humor and gravity. Her essays reveal the lessons they teach us well into adulthood.
Eleanor Catton
Rave The Boston Globe Bold, ambitious ... A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns ... Birnam Wood moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose ... Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands ... Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters ... I’ll unabashedly state that Birnam Wood is a brash, unforgettable novel.
Dan Kois
Rave The Washington Post This warm and witty book traces a tangled path of female friendship and creative work ... Like Colwin, Kois focuses on intimate conversations and atmospheric details. There are literary and pop-culture references throughout the book, but they aren’t out of proportion with the plot and the book’s emotional heart ... Balanced against the backdrop of East Village gentrification and Lucy’s bittersweet posthumous revival, Kois’s storytelling is both breezy and insightful. Where he shines brightest is in scenes between friends ... It is joyful and comforting to read a novel with loving, complicated characters who aren’t defeated by life — despite many reasons they could be.
Darryl Pinckney
Positive The Atlantic Ultimately, this is not only a book about the drama of these deep, lifelong relationships. What Pinckney seems to want to elevate is their best elements: enthusiasm, forgiveness, support, continuity.
Gayl Jones
Rave The Boston Globe ... a spartan work, set in the 1970s and grounded in the turbulence of competition in the late-20th-century art world ... don’t assume that the new novel’s slim size indicates a quieter book ... This is a brilliant and unsparing examination of the burdens we place on friendship and marriage, the way that creative genius is misperceived as madness, the clumsy way mental health is addressed, the scourge of racism, and the alchemy of folklore and legacy bound in the secrets we hide ... A Black woman working at the height of her powers, Catherine carries the projected burdens of being an activist as much as an artist. She’s also damned for those very expectations. Not Black enough for some, too Black for others, her work is scrutinized to the point of exhaustion. Her strain, though hyperbolic, possesses a certain gravity ... Curiously, this strikingly relevant novel is actually several decades old...What matters now is that, after a long silence, readers are enjoying a steady stream of her powerful writing.
A. M. Homes
Rave The Oprah Daily ... entwines political subterfuge and intrigue with a painful family saga. It’s a propulsive book of conversations and confessions that reveal brittle truths about the ways politics and history divide our country ... Using time stamps and locations to mark each chapter of the book, Homes dispatches her writing with an air of classified information ... With dialogue reminiscent of David Mamet, the scenes with these idiosyncratic characters snap with terse, data-driven, wildly imaginative verve. They’re so strange, you know that Homes has done her research. It takes a shrewd eye and a wild imagination to cook up these men of limited vision and limitless means ... But this novel isn’t just political satire. It’s a deeply felt family drama about the disconnect between spouses, as well as with their children ... a riveting political novel framed by family and devotion.
Ali Smith
Rave The Los Angeles Times It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith. No one else, I would argue, captures our ongoing contemporary nightmare in a manner that is both expansively imaginative and the perfect mirror of its abrupt absurdity ... Smith’s books often force one to think along such streams of consciousness before breaking the wave with a swell of emotion. Leaping from deep investigations of words and ideas to cultural references as lofty as Keats and as basic as Paul McCartney’s Wings, Smith is intellectually rigorous yet democratic, warm and — crucially — playful ... recognizing the capacity of any person or thing to become one’s companion, she draws from her well of wit and empathy to assemble a novel both enigmatic and inviting, begging to be read and reread ... With its sweeping and incisive vision, its proof that you can trap lightning in a bottle, Companion Piece shares the best qualities with the quartet to which it plays companion, offering a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.
Julie Phillips
Rave The Los Angeles Times ... tremendous ... Phillips moves deftly through key moments in the lives of her subjects and asks of them (and us): How do you make time for, much less nurture, creativity in the face of parenting? ... Phillips is an expert distiller. Instead of developing complete portraits of the artists and writers, she works to connect themes and ideas. She knows when to tread lightly and keep the expository writing tight; she pulls examples that illustrate her points, leaving the reader hungry to dig further into novels and catalogs on their own ... Phillips’ book is not just a cultural history; it is a testament to endurance and devotion. The entwined work of mothering and creativity is a volatile but illuminating gift. Would that everyone could see it that way.
Elif Batuman
Rave Boston Globe The book gallops along at a brisk pace, rich with cultural touchstones of the time, and one finishes hungry for more. I reread The Idiot before reading Either/Or and after almost 800 cumulative pages, I still wasn’t sated. Batuman possesses a rare ability to successfully flood the reader with granular facts, emotional vulnerability, dry humor, and a philosophical undercurrent without losing the reader in a sea of noise ... What makes a life or story exceptional enough to create art? What art is exceptional, entertaining, and engaging enough to sustain nearly a thousand pages? Selin’s existential crisis within the collegiate crucible haunts every thoughtful reader ... The novel stands on its own as a rich exploration of life’s aesthetic and moral crossroads as a space to linger — not race through. Spare me sanctimonious fictional characters locked in the anguish of their regretful late twenties and early thirties: May our bold heroine Selin return to campus and stir up more drama before departing abroad again.
Susan Straight
Rave The Boston Globe ... a big-hearted and often wrenching saga ... The act of listening and the powerful precision of language surface again and again in Mecca as the narrative shifts from Johnny Frias to Ximena, an 18-year-old undocumented immigrant whose journey from Mexico to California cost her the life of her brother and left her pregnant after being assaulted by a coyote, as human smugglers are known ... Throughout Mecca, Straight laces her stories with language in Mixtec and Spanish without translation for the monolingual English-speaking readers. While this may frustrate some, the sensation of mystery and the need to read around the dialogue for clues and tone placed me in the mind of those who are forced to submit to English at all times ... Straight never shies away from large themes and historical significance across varied time periods ... Here, as in all her books, she elevates the lives of extraordinary everyday people whose lives speak to a universal fragility and pride ... At many moments, the book’s cumulative impact made it necessary to set the book aside to collect myself before continuing. Without question, I’d pick it up again. Taking Johnny’s dictum to listen and wait to heart, one can and should pause to let the novel’s tremendous scope settle.
Chantal James
Positive Los Angeles Times In this deceptively slim book, she considers the layers of spirituality and history tangled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of one young man whose life reverberates with the beauty and horror of the city he calls home ... dense symbolism would be heavy-handed if not for James’ wry and intimate narration, which remains close to the bone and heart of its characters. James captures the simple kindnesses of a cup of coffee or a shared cellphone as though they were religious acts. Where a more ponderous writer might lapse into a lengthy stream of consciousness, James uses short chapters to weave a story of fractured time and uncharted space into the fabric of life after Katrina ... This is a book of faith aching to be claimed, of a land that dares to be redeemed, of souls searching to be free, of all spirits looking for a home. It’s a metaphysical book deeply rooted in ancient legacies of subjugation ... a deeply haunted novel that moves with calm and ruthless determination, like the eye of a hurricane.
Kathryn Schulz
Rave The Boston Globe Schulz’s mind flows beautifully on the page. While this book is classified as a memoir, it can also be read as a sweeping set of essays. Schulz’s prose is lucid and intentional, yet unexpected and compassionate. She doesn’t race to make her point and that expansive pace is what makes this book such a pleasure. Hers is a nimble and profoundly humane mind, capable of carrying the various threads of her thinking onward without losing the integrity of the fabric she’s creating ... Schulz uses her life’s stories as a launching point for an omnivore’s exploration of science, space, history, art, and writing in order to elaborate her points. Rather than dwell on her personal life, weighing the reader down with the operatic twists of some memoirs, Schulz treads lightly on the drama of her days. She’s not writing for her own personal catharsis ... While this memoir is no quest for healing or a chronicle of family secrets, there is great weight in Schulz’s most personal moments. Being privy to her budding romance is a window into intense tenderness and deep gratitude ... Where other memoirs concentrate on facts and family history, Schulz finds a way to subvert the genre, taking it to philosophical levels while maintaining a grounded intimacy.
Renee Branum
Rave The New York Times Book Review Branum is a taut storyteller who reveals and confides with great skill, in a narrative composed of addictive passages rather than conventional chapters ... This hypnotic and philosophical debut considers the act of defenestration as something more profound than an accident or a mere unfortunate end. Through the lens of memory, Branum refracts the layers of truth, tragedy and faith that break a cycle of lives most at home in free fall.
Lisa Harding
Rave New York Times Book Review The stakes in Harding’s Bright Burning Things, the Irish author’s U.S. debut, are stark and terrifying ... Grappling with the gap between faith and hopelessness, Sonya asks one of the institution’s nuns what prayer is. \'Think of prayer as a bridge between longing and belonging,\' Sister Anne replies. Harding straddles that gulf, making a well-worn narrative shine with a heroine whose dogged triumphs accumulate over the course of this fast-paced and intensely lucid novel.
Cathy Curtis
Mixed Los Angeles Times A biography whose disappointments often justify its subject’s skepticism of such efforts ... Today, readers want a rigorous biographer whose job isn’t to flatter—or flatten—the subject ... Alas, A Splendid Intelligence is no corrective in this sense. Curtis hews closely to a traditional format, keeping the biographer at a remove, occupying the role of an archivist who presents evidence on a timeline ... Curtis quietly and predictably asserts Hardwick’s place in 20th century American letters as someone far more than a spurned wife ... This choice strikes an oddly defensive chord. Drawing immediate attention to her relationship with Lowell merely reinforces this association ... I could think of countless moments that would speak more powerfully by example. Instead, Curtis moves from that brief introduction to a largely dry and linear chronicle of her life ... The book builds momentum in tandem with Hardwick’s career as her marriage with Lowell takes on a certain magnetic inevitability ... Curtis’ respectable impulse to downplay the period prevents her from examining what brought Hardwick to this point in her marriage after Lowell’s infidelities and mental health interventions — and, more importantly, what she was able to accomplish after she broke loose ... Where the biography picks up considerably is its final chapter ... A Splendid Intelligence is an admirable work that fills a glaring void in the 20th century American literary landscape. Yet there’s something in her project that cries out for a less conventional approach ... While it’s unclear whether A Splendid Intelligence will draw new readers to Hardwick, it’s a necessary and welcome biography, raising larger questions about literary influence and biography’s role in literary prestige — even if it doesn’t always answer them.
Mina Seckin
Positive New York Times Book Review The terrific rapport among Sibel, Cooper and her grandmother provides a needed antidote to the melancholic, layered family histories, laced with obfuscation. The book’s final third reconciles mysteries surrounding Sibel’s father, whose legacy ties these characters together; but it’s the living, with all their grievances and affection, who carry this humane and refreshingly astringent novel.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Rave The Boston Globe While reading this funny, deeply searching, and innovative novel, what surfaces is the pursuit of freedom as well as the act of recovering a fractured self ... Watkins’s structurally textured novel revels in a certain chaos that mimics the inner life of its protagonist, a woman who cannot look away from the panoply of raging interests and influences that surfaced in the wake of childbirth and motherhood ... Watkins plays with the mystery surrounding childbirth and postpartum bodies in order to reveal the ways women become foreign to ourselves, more animal than domestic goddess ... Readers may find it hard to forgive, much less empathize with, such a contradictory protagonist. But this disarming novel isn’t asking the reader to concentrate on redemption. Instead Watkins makes connections between taboo, shocking, and shameful states of being to create a more honest relationship to humanity and freedom ... This blistering, form-shaping novel may not connect with some, but guess what? It was never meant for everyone in the first place. That’s pretty liberating too.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Rave Los Angeles Times Time and again, Ruffin constructs a life’s history in the space of a page or two. His skill as a writer and his birthright as a New Orleanian equip him for the task ... Ruffin draws particular attention to ragged, flawed and unexpected relationships ... For all of Ruffin’s clear literary homages and influences, there are also, I sense, musical structures embedded in these intimate, often playful stories ... A sense of controlled improvisation allows him to lay claim to his city without resorting to either satire or pseudonym. It makes his book achingly truthful and incredibly accessible ... Ruffin knows that sometimes simply telling the truth isn’t enough to make a world familiar. It takes a chorus of stories, chaotic and loving, to bring a city to life. In this penetrating and energetic collection, as in the city it honors, the rhythm is as important as the details.
Olivia Laing
Rave The Boston Globe Laing steadily built her reputation as an editor and writer with an earnest sophistication. She doesn’t make her mark with arch observations or cool reserve. Her enthusiastic criticism is fueled by a political and humane connection as well as an aesthetic and intellectual one ... Everybody concentrates with exuberance on bodies as a means to riddle out the expression and performance of freedom. Through protest, suppression, illness, sex, and movement, human bodies are a battleground for freedom ... Through careful study of the lives and deaths of artists and activists such as Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone, Laing uncovers Reich’s influence beyond his lifetime into the civil rights movement as well as the gay and sexual liberation movements of the 20th century ... What surfaces are the mechanisms of shame and glory that inform radical engagement ... Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation.
Amanda Dennis
Rave The Washington Post ... spellbinding ... Dennis excels at delving into the psyche of these women, exploring their traumas and constructing wholly engrossing worlds ... Through Ella and Elena’s efforts to reconstruct a sense of self — outside family, beyond academia and expectation — through language, Dennis confronts the various ways we try to understand ourselves and others.
Alexander Nemerov
Rave The Observer ... sharp and vibrant ... offers a distinctive portrait of the sustained challenges of a woman with considerable advantages ... Nemerov seizes upon Frankenthaler’s ability to draw from private experience to articulate public feelings that create a more expansive and universal emotion rather than a personal narrative ... What’s curious is that Gordon Parks, the photographer, is the only person of color mentioned in this book. His struggle as well as his vivid use of color photography to convey life and emotion is less abstract but no less pure or potent than Frankenthaler’s painting. Here were two radically different people who knew how to best package art and emotion. It’s an overlap that a longer book could explore at greater length and marks a rare moment where I was disappointed by Nemerov’s disciplined and narrow focus ... Keeping the biography tightly drawn to the 1950s gives Nemerov the space to speak at length about her work as well as the theory and motivation behind it ... This slim biography touches upon considerable facets of history, art, and society in such a way that leaves you eager to read further and return to museum halls. It’s also a clear-eyed assessment. Based on a thumbnail biographical sketch, Frankenthaler possesses the potential of an Edith Wharton heroine. Yet Nemerov doesn’t slide into an easy narrative about an orphaned rich girl, striving to be an artist. Frankenthaler’s far too savvy and complicated for that. At the time of this biography’s publication, after years of waxing and waning interest in her work, the price for Frankenthaler’s work is rising as her auction sales climb dramatically. Yet, her life and legacy stands as a lesson that success, like fashion, comes and goes. What matters is the devotion you bring to your passion and your willingness to explore it.
Dantiel W. Moniz
Rave The Boston Globe Although her stories are as emotionally gutting as the wake of a hurricane, Dantiel W. Moniz deserves more than the easy weather metaphors that come to mind. A resident of northern Florida, Moniz is an achingly insightful and soulful writer who deserves more than that. Her blistering range is evident in the 11 stories of her stunning debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, all of which are set in the Sunshine State ... Moniz possesses a calm ability to capture unspoken yet palpable awkwardness and disconnect ... Throughout the book, it’s these sustained beats, reverberating with gravity, that give the book texture and depth ... Actions mean more than words, but as a writer, Moniz knows that words are the connective tissue that give us the faith we need to carry on. How she illuminates that reasoning through direct and unwavering language is downright magical ... Words punctuate the wrath and mystery of a natural and spiritual world in this tremendous and sensual collection ... With worlds collapsed into single words and answers found in emptiness, Moniz empowers readers to find potential in lack. There’s always trouble brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, but Florida is a rich landscape for characters who dare to endure despite the ravages of body and mind in Milk Blood Heat.
Gustavus Stadler
Rave The Observer ... through new research on Woody Guthrie in Haverford College professor of American literature Gustavus Stadler’s important biography Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, one finds greater depth and complexity in a man you may have otherwise considered a myth not unlike Johnny Appleseed ... Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life examines a more corporeal and personal side of the man behind the legend ... This biography offers not only a fresh portrait of Guthrie, but also participates in a more spacious and critical project—how self-expression evolves within the course of a lifetime in play with others to track a shift in society. Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life reimagines an American legend and creates space for emotional exploration and radical companionship.
Jenny Erpenbeck, Trans. by Kurt Beals
Rave The Observer ... very little about this book resembles a traditional memoir. We walk briefly among shadows and memories of her childhood in East Berlin, but there is nothing in the way of immersive personal detail save her granular memories of losing her mother and managing the inventory of her belongings and apartment after her death ... Artistic craft and influence occupy the bulk of the text ... A deeply deliberate writer in possession of a keen sense of tempo, it’s telling that she trained and worked as an opera director for years before concentrating on fiction, a detail that reveals itself in relation to her development as a writer ... Erpenbeck tackles enormous, complex topics in the memoir—freedom, citizenship, humanity, refugees, asylum, identity. But she’s in no way didactic. Rather, she takes these subjects presumably because she finds herself at an impasse ... A child of the Cold War as well as a survivor of the ruins of the Third Reich, Erpenbeck considers our contemporary moment with an especially sharp lens ... In so far as this is a memoir, it’s one that perhaps argues that all personal histories are significant when you consider lives through unifying perspectives. Concluding with a sharp focus on society, her memoir closes with a haunting look at individuals who are stateless, giving ample space to an obituary for Bashir Zakaryau ... Erpenbeck is a virtuoso whose eye for detail depends entirely on a refusal to write what’s easy or straightforward. It’s a perspective conditioned by losing one identity and watching an entire country disappear in the name of freedom.
Eula Biss
Rave Los Angeles Times Bliss enlivens her own critique of capital in the 2020s by delving into the trouble we all avoid discussing — and then staying with it ... A middle-age, middle-class white American writer and professor, Biss lays bare her own privilege from the start ... Loose in its greater arc but always tethered to an awareness of the insidious influence of capitalism, each essay originates in conversation or personal observation. This allows her to explore the candid ways we reveal our own biases around money, class, wealth, property and work ... If there is not an exact category for this type of book, that’s by design. Biss’ works of nonfiction expand the definition of personal essays. She is not afraid to disclose personal details, but she isn’t writing memoir; she is illustrating points. What guides her writing is careful attention to language and behavior, cause and effect ... In both her scrutiny and her style, Biss implies that the only way to address our complicity is full transparency ... It’s not uncommon for essayists to be \'in conversation\' with writers (like Didion) who came before them. But Biss takes that sense of collaboration further than most. She retains firm control over her own lines of inquiry, but — fittingly for a critique of capitalism’s warped and warping individualism — she allows others to amplify or shape her thinking...Biss drives the story forward, but she isn’t alone at the wheel ... I’d argue that Having and Being Had is a reminder that even discussing our contemporary chaos is an act of awakening and a call to action ... Ultimately, this is not a book that aims for catharsis or redemption ... Biss examines these stories of ideas in order to help us live with our fate — asking, among other questions: To what degree can we come to know our passions as something free from consumerism? How can we live a life of dignity — with flashes even of luxury and indulgence — without sacrificing ourselves through work without joy or income beyond purpose?
Ali Smith
Rave Los Angeles Times Smith manages to restore both a sense of community and something even rarer in the wired world: narrative ... One of the most powerful moments in Summer involves the mystery of connection ... a revelation of endurance and a balm even in the worst of times.
Masha Gessen
Rave Observer A relatively slim yet potent book, Surviving Autocracy is an essential read for anyone who says that all politicians are the same ... It’s a crucial book for our times. Staying abreast of the news is a daily challenge. It takes an even greater effort to telescope beyond the relentless news cycle to analyze the chaotic nature of civic and social life ... Gessen’s lucid explanation of the \'fog\' we live in, the behavior of those who hope to perpetuate that condition, and humane reparations to which we should direct our energy, make this a book that one should send to friends and family ... Gessen unpacks the source of this political and social instability in their potent book.
Jessica Anthony
Rave Observer ... a blisteringly innovative and outrageous novel ... If you’re searching for a sharp, looking-glass view into the far end of contemporary politics, look no further. Jessica Anthony’s second novel has the pacing of a thriller with satirical verve of Nathaniel West. Beyond a fabulist send-up of our current political chaos, it’s an examination of the fall out of masculinity’s rigid constraints, played out through sexual repression and relentless power dynamics.
Andrew Krivak
Rave Observer In this arresting, exquisite novel, time acquires a new quality. When human civilization is over and there’s no hope left for society, what Krivak imagines is a stillness ... Other authors (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Ling Ma’s Severance to name a few) focus on the catastrophe followed by its fallout. This is what makes The Bear so striking. Krivak isn’t interested in how or why human society is ending ... This respect for nature informs his choice to open The Bear at the point of human extinction. In doing so, he makes space for a meditation on stewardship ... Struck by the book’s peaceful pacing and meditation on nature, I read with a humble sense of awe rather than an ever-growing sense of dread ... Concentrating on nature as the guidepost for the book, Krivak reveals how much we’re losing when we fail to serve as good stewards of the planet. However, his tone is never didactic or melodramatic ... The Bear is more than a parable for our times, it’s a call to listen to the world around us before it’s too late.
Anna Badkhen
Rave The Star Tribune While politicians argue over a response to climate change, writer Anna Badkhen takes a different approach. The lives of fishermen may not seem like an obvious choice, but their daily struggles and triumphs illuminate a certain truth at the heart of these issues. No polemical treatise, Badkhen’s Fisherman’s Blues offers a critical take through subtle and beautiful methods of storytelling. It creates a remarkable snapshot of lives we’d otherwise never know ... Badkhen’s lyrical prose swells as she describes the pastoral beauty of life at sea ... Developing trust with subjects and truthfully rendering their life stories with great elegance, she achieves a level of poetic political action.
Sigrid Nunez
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"No heartwarming tale of pet ownership, The Friend presents a meditation on the raw experience of losing someone who is neither lover nor family yet who occupies a distinctive place in the lives of those left behind ... With enormous heart and eloquence, Nunez explores cerebral responses to loss — processed through the writer’s life — while also homing in on the physical burden felt by those left behind ... Nunez offers no easy solutions; instead, she offers the solace that comes from accepting change. Friendship comes with the possibility of great joy and deep sorrow. Surviving suicide throws us into a realm outside words. The Friend exposes an extraordinary reserve of strength waiting to be found in storytelling and unexpected companionship.\
Myriam Gurba
Rave BOMB Myriam Gurba’s Mean is the latest in a tear of recent autofiction that employ the genre to showcase the complications of modern women’s lives … With the familiar trappings of a traditional coming-of-age novel—school uniforms, the unwelcome smell of a neighbor’s kitchen, friendships gone sour, deep parental devotion—Gurba demands her reader recognize her dense life as one equal to any other, as valid as that of Sweet Valley High’s Jessica and Elizabeth. But unlike a series, unspooling through predictable and deeply sequential plot twists, Gurba condenses an entire girlhood march into adulthood into one slim novel … Bruised but exuberant, Gurba’s brash voice eschews any sanctimonious overtones.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch In the hands of a lesser writer, this scenario could devolve into melodrama. Instead, Erdrich’s lucid prose propels her nail-biting plot with passionate but precise movement. As one series of events unfolds, other complications present themselves. All the while, Erdrich’s incredible empathy for her characters allows them to shine as both wholly complex and warmly familiar individuals trapped by circumstance. This harrowing novel sinks so deeply into your subconscious, you cannot help but finish it with an incredible degree of dread ... Erdrich joins the esteemed ranks of Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and others who present a horrific fictional world that seems possible if we do not protect our democratic institutions.
Kapka Kassabova
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune A survivor of the latter political crisis, writer Kapka Kassabova returns to her native Bulgaria ...Kassabova carefully circles her former home to better understand the land through those who never left and the immigrants who struggle to survive during these unprecedented times ... Rich with a profound sense of the region’s political and cultural history, this travelogue moves at an often meandering pace, its narrative broken up by condensed musings on personal conflict, historical ephemera or folklore ... This indirect journey answers no specific questions, but it presents an array of evidence through which one may consider why this was such a crucible for horror and displacement ... Kassabova zeros in on the indiscriminate risk embedded in this purgatory that leaves one with very little to lose.
Zinzi Clemmons
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Zinzi Clemmons captures the dissonance of profound loss through her electric debut novel ... More than a story of a daughter’s grief for her mother, What We Lose sheds light on muddled historical memory as seen through the fog of loss. Born in the aftermath of apartheid, Thandi’s life demonstrates the varied ways in which one country’s history can be both known and utterly mysterious. Clemmons’ deft hand introduces cultural and national memories that many would prefer to leave in the past, a legacy that permeates the lives of those who will never forget.
Barbara Browning
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Through this addictive, brainy and vibrant novel, which straddles nonfiction and fiction, Browning celebrates an unabashed passion for art and togetherness in a world muddled by assumed intimacy and inherent skepticism … The book would succeed on its own as a unique meditation on creativity, but Browning introduces a collaborator whose troubling and muddied history challenges Andersen's notion of empathy … Despite the darkness that complicates Sami and Barbara's entanglement, The Gift is infused with humor and tremendous emotion. As Andersen falls deeper into a world of shared intimacies, she bravely explores the extent to which we can be honest with ourselves and others.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave BOMB In The Book of Joan, Yuknavitch creates a Joan free of Catholicism's trappings, but manages to maintain, and even elevate, the moral and ethical stakes that made her a compelling historical heroine to begin with ... What Yuknavitch does by reviving the myth of Joan in the face of utmost climate change, is center the female body as the site of destruction and also as the driving source of power for salvation. She endows Joan with powers that only men have in the Bible, subverting the myths of patriarchal authority that undergird it.
Lauren Grodstein
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Our Short History doesn’t traffic in platitudes or soft-focus farewell monologues. For that, we are all grateful. Instead, Lauren Grodstein has subtly written a cathartic and unexpectedly profound book that connects with an experience we all hope to put off as long as possible. It’s also impossible to put down ... Just as you think that Grodstein is steering her reader down a well-trodden road, she turns cliché on a dime. Her gimlet eye offers surprises throughout the book ... Our Short History delivers the emotional punch you expect it to, only it comes from an angle you didn’t anticipate. This letter from mother to son speaks to all.
Stephanie Powell Watts
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ...[a] stunning debut novel ... I found this book improves upon the classic through its modern interpretation. A far more wistful, eloquent, heartfelt and humane novel, Watts’ story creates a world empty of tycoons and swimming pools, but rich with characters working their way through the highs and lows of late capitalism ... It’s a testament to Watts’ steady vision and incisive language that she manages to convey the raw anger and loss felt by this tangled family. She channels Toni Morrison’s masterful direct address with great success ... The overwhelming power of this remarkable novel rests in its ability to face excruciating truths with optimism through its singing prose. A necessary retelling of an American classic made better through its contemporary perspective.
Mohsin Hamid
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch With great empathy, Hamid skillfully chronicles the manic condition of involuntary migration — more plainly labeled, the refugee crisis — without the remove of history or a specific location ... For such an intensely fraught novel, Hamid maintains a light remove from gritty quotidian details through his third-person narration. This dreamlike narrative provides the space for his characters’ uncertain course to float along without the overbearing tension of melodrama ... Exit West rattles our perception of home and denies us the ability to dismiss the likelihood of domestic chaos.
Patrick Kingsley
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Patrick Kingsley has written a lucid and unflinching book that captures the ripples of the largest wave of mass migration since World War II. The New Odyssey delicately grapples with the task of encapsulating the crisis without diminishing its sprawling horror ... After reading this wrenching account of the refugee plight, you will not question their motivations ... Kingsley’s steady reporting underlines his critical humanitarian message. While war and repression spurred this current migration, he predicts the situation will not abate.
Rachel Cusk
Rave The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Cusk weaves her narrative through stories that build upon other stories with no regard for transition or excessive internal narration. There’s nothing more steady than change in this slim, steely novel. No room for sentimentality, yet violence lurks beneath the surface ... Faye rarely reveals much about herself, but her vulnerability is never hidden. In its subtle way, Transit brilliantly empowers its readers to live and write boldly, aware of consequence, but with one eye always on the open road ahead.
Chloe Caldwell
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune In this slim collection Caldwell speaks squarely on her own behalf with great clarity and humor. She regales the reader with her experiences as a child of divorce, as a Manhattan shop girl, a heroin addict, a failed singer, a babysitter, a yogi. Caldwell isn’t trying to shock the reader. Rather, these stories are a means of locating herself in an ever-shifting world. She successfully maneuvers the tough practice of empathy.
Ruth Franklin
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Ruth Franklin painstakingly examines Jackson’s extensive correspondence, diaries and interviews, as well as drafts of her work. This biography is no critical reassessment. It strongly affirms the American author’s powerful collection of stories, novels and memoirs ... [a] magisterial and compulsively readable biography.
Angela Palm
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Riverine is an incredibly personal and eloquent book. Circling buried truths and confronting ghosts, this is a book that wrestles with issues of nature and nurture ... Palm’s memoir is lifeline and letter to the parallel universes we so often wish for.
Jensen Beach
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune In recent years, Scandinavian literature has become synonymous with thrillers. The pervasive cool detachment that cloaks those novels is deftly applied to Jensen Beach’s collection of short stories ... It seems a disservice to classify this skillful collection as one of interconnected stories. Rather, characters appear, recede, then resurface throughout the book.
Yasmine El Rashidi
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune Sacrificing action for atmosphere, Chronicle of a Last Summer slips the reader into the experience of a world aching for change yet struggling to hold onto familiar places and rituals. While El Rashidi struggles to create a convincing childlike voice, her narrative strengthens as her heroine reveals her desires and passions as a college student and then as an artist.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"The cycle of violence cannot be broken. It’s a fate that [Michelle] Cliff explored throughout her work, and Dennis-Benn carries the torch for another generation. Here Comes the Sun is a crucial book that commands attention. May this brave storytelling shine a brighter path for those who follow.\
Cathleen Schine
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...[a] hugely satisfying novel ... Schine turns the conventional “coming of age” novel on its head by examining the ways in which unexpected, late love upends identity. They May Not Mean To, but They Do confronts the simple-minded perspective that assisted living kills romantic love ... This richly empathetic novel embraces the fact that to live means to accept change. This may rattle those in middle age, but is understood best by the very young and the very old.
A. Igoni Barrett
Positive Electric Literature Barrett’s frenetic plot and pacing takes his characters to uncomfortable places that seem unbelievable and yet, in the moment of this novel, feel entirely plausible. When faced with the question of abandoning his personal history and family for his new life, Furo makes what seems like a shocking decision. For better or worse, his call speaks to the world we live in. Sometimes it’s only through the looking glass that we can honestly see the true extent of the damage inflicted by the world we live in.
Roberto Calasso
Positive Bookslut [Calasso's] latest book, The Art of the Publisher, a collection of essays, can be seen as commentary and rich observations centered around aphorisms that confront not only the art, but the challenge of publishing during a time of great transition.
Amber Sparks
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Sparks recognizes perverse mythology uncovers the most innate truths about human nature and connection. When the stories you’ve been told aren’t enough, make up your own. Forged in an evocative and sensual fire, these tales transcend tradition to shine new light onto timeless complications.
Ben Rawlence
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Rawlence's portrait of nine Dadaab residents offers a stark counterpoint to the rhetoric that too often speaks for refugees ... This is a vital book at a critical moment in global history.
Luc Sante
Rave Bookslut Altogether, this irreplaceable cultural history is not only a complete portrait of a beloved city, but a compulsive read.