‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Jami Attenberg

Positive The New York Times Book Review Attenberg is less interested in the mechanics of plot than in the emotional vectors between striving, imperfect people ... She does all this with wry, streamlined wit and almost ruthless efficiency, distilling the essence of her characters and sometimes sealing their fate in the same paragraph. Even minor players are so sharply sketched that they feel immediately familiar ... But the episodic nature of the narrative can also serve to distance and sometimes disengage the reader. Major moments...are deftly, often movingly captured, and then a few pages later, they’re (literally) old news. It’s a testament to Attenberg’s gift for world-building that even the lovely, most likely temporary grace note that arrives in the final pages...somehow feels like a loss. From her, I’d take 10 more chapters of unhappily ever after.

Liane Moriarty

Mixed The New York Times Book Review Moriarty’s signatures are still reassuringly present, if somewhat diluted across these pages: her way of conjuring believable characters from a few short sentences — they may be archetypes, but they’re well-drawn ones — and the gentle humor and unshowy emotional intelligence that undergirds it ... As easily as it goes down, though, “Here One Moment” too often misses the tug and wallop of a good, taut thriller. In a way, the book itself feels like a generous sketch, less a fully realized novel than a work in progress still searching for its final form.

Britney Spears

Positive The New York Times Book Review What Spears fills in, in prose that is chatty and confiding and occasionally salty, is the ongoing thrum of family dysfunction and fear ... Throughout the book, Spears repeatedly portrays her relationship to creativity as a kind of pure soul connection, a private communion with godliness independent of outside forces and opinion. Details on the actual salient process of music-making, though, are scant ... The mostly linear narrative in “The Woman In Me” tends to treat these moments and many other well-documented highlights of her career as passing or ancillary, a distant cacophony muffled by the much louder noise of her personal struggles. Still, the facts of it are presented so cleanly and candidly that Woman seems designed to be read in one sitting. It’s nearly impossible to come out of it without empathy for and real outrage on behalf of Spears ... As freely confessional and often furious as it is, The Woman in Me isn’t quite the blazing feminist manifesto that some witnesses to history may have wanted Spears to write, nor the kind of granular, completist portrait-of-an-artist autobiography that others have dutifully supplied in the past. It could be argued, though, that she never stopped telling us who she was.

Christine Mangan

Mixed The New York Times Book Review [A] slippery slow burn ... An odd, languorous piece of work: ostensibly a Hitchcockian thriller and teasingly, tangentially a love story, steeped in the fitful melancholy and low-grade paranoia of postwar Europe and North Africa. What it all adds up to is something more than glossy international intrigue but less, perhaps, than a full-fledged affair ... As a travelogue and a mood piece, The Continental Affair is undeniably beguiling and transportive; as a mystery, it drifts.

Megan Abbott

Mixed The New York Times Book Review The book spends much of its time trapped in the drowsy, malevolent bardo of its heroine’s increasingly sinister confinement, every hour a slow drip of impending calamity ... In a genre that can be numbingly formulaic and indifferently composed, she remains a masterful builder of mood, her voluptuous prose heavy with sex and weather. But as Jacy dithers and stalls in the July heat, so does the story, even as it wends toward the feverish, improbable rush of its climax. Woman, beware; these are the signs you were looking for.

Jess Row

Positive The New York Times Book Review Even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row’s sprawling metafiction The New Earth, display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages ... It’s all richly imagined, reflexively neurotic and frequently quite dazzling. It’s also more than a single book, even one guided by a keen and careful hand, can adequately contain ... Row seems to go almost subcutaneous in his examination of the damage that the nuclear unit of spouses and siblings, parents and offspring can do ... The New Earth quickly becomes a sort of panopticon of interconnected story lines, hopscotching through time and geography ... The music here is very much turned up, a symphonic chorus that can be undeniably stimulating but also wearing ... This is a book of warty, messy things, intractable and strange — but stumbling, maybe, toward a state of grace.

Kate Atkinson

Positive The New York Times Book Review Atkinson vividly conjures the post-Great War London of a century ago, a vast stinking metropolis still teetering between the old world and the new ... At the same time, Shrines tends to reduce a city of millions to the neatly sealed aperture of its two dozen or so players, many of whom meet in back alleys and grand townhomes alike with improbable frequency. Stood beside her previous novels, the book can seem like a minor work in a catalog already stacked with greatest hits; a kind of fond genre exercise the author has undertaken simply because she can. Even her descriptions of sex and transgression, the orgies and dead girls and opium dens, remain reassuringly bright, almost cozy ... That tangible warmth suffuses her storytelling ... For all its dips into sentiment and cliché — Atkinson has a weakness for wordplay and extended nautical metaphors — she remains a keenly sympathetic observer of human foibles, one who can sketch a character in one quicksilver sentence ... doesn’t surprise in the thrilling sui generis...no thunderclap revelations à la Case Histories arrive in the flurry of postscripts and ever-afters that make up its final pages. It lands instead as light refreshment; a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured.

Tess Gunty

Positive New York Times Book Review [There are] many bold moves in Gunty’s dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing debut, a novel of impressive scope and specificity that falters mostly when it works too hard to wedge its storytelling into some broader notion of Big Ideas ... The Rabbit Hutch smartly reframes the depressing clichés of a vulnerable teenager and an older authority figure, in part by making them each so constantly aware of the roles they’re playing. One of the pleasures of the narrative is the way it luxuriates in language, all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life. Gunty’s writing is so rich with texture and subtext it can sometimes tip over into the too-muchness of a decadent meal or a Paul Thomas Anderson film. As with many new novelists, and a lot of veteran ones too, her longer monologues tend to come off less like the cadences of ordinary speech than the workshopped thoughts of a star student ... But she also has a way of pressing her thumb on the frailty and absurdity of being a person in the world; all the soft, secret needs and strange intimacies. The book’s best sentences — and there are heaps to choose from — ping with that recognition, even in the ordinary details ... The Rabbit Hutch’s vibrant, messy sprawl can seem that way too, but its excesses also feel generous: defiant in the face of death, metaphysical exits or whatever comes next.

Terry Alford

Positive The New York Time Book Review ... a well-sourced if slight piece of sideways biography that often strains to justify its thesis, but makes a lively study of two wildly disparate clans nonetheless ... even Alford never really roots out the source of the mania that turned a celebrated performer of no particular political will or creed (though he really seemed to hate house cats) into a foaming radical willing not just to die for the Southern cause, but to unseat democracy. Booth’s fanatical conviction that Lincoln had kingly designs on a dictatorship — and that he alone could stop it — somehow managed to pass, it seems, as one more quirk of an artistic temperament ... Alford’s slim, meticulously referenced account, for all its talk of drawing-room conjurers and necromancers, is far less fanciful than that, if hardly dry and academic: a lighter kind of summoning, teased from the footnotes of history.

Paul Fischer

Positive The New York Times Book Review Fischer lays out his case meticulously and with many footnotes, though he takes pains to entertain. Those two aims don’t always jibe, particularly when his more poetic flights of prose come up against the granular realities of R&D ... Unsurprisingly, it’s the human elements, not the halides, that register most vividly ... Thanks to historical records, Fischer can say with assurance whether a particular day in 1883 was cold and clear or mild with an easterly wind. But when the Le Princes lose one son as a toddler and another child later under murkier circumstances, the page, as it were, goes blank. Who can know how deeply that affected the pair’s psyches, their work habits, their marriage? Barring some improbably rich paper trail, no conscientious biographer can presume to know for sure, and that’s a hazard Fischer has to navigate: the editorial line between strictly available truths and making a dead man come alive. His eloquent, sometimes excitable writing style goes a long way when it doesn’t wander off into the celluloid weeds. And the final pages offer, if not hard conclusions, a bittersweet postscript and even real catharsis — too late for Le Prince, maybe, but some kind of justice nonetheless.

Jennifer Egan

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... calling it science fiction sounds far too chilly and grim for the winding metaphysical mystery ... Here again are extravagant characters—the Malibu music moguls, murderous dictators, and flailing actresses of Goon Squad, but also suburban tennis moms, late-blooming anthropologists, and agitated tech workers whose inner worlds are no less rich and strange ... Candy, for all its dips and spins and cul-de-sacs, its brain-weevil gadgets and future shocks, does what only the best and rarest books can: peel back the thin membrane of ordinary life, and find transcendence on the other side.

Lily King

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... the 10 short stories collected here have the immersive feel of longer fiction, shrunk down to snow-globe miniature ... Beyond the tenderhearted midlife romance of the title story, Tuesdays\' outcomes tend to lean more bitter than sweet. But the book\'s surreal closer, \'The Man at the Door,\' goes out on a high note—spinning a nursing mother\'s domestic drudgery into a small triumph of magical realism, with a tidy side of vengeance.

Shruti Swamy

Rave Entertainment Weekly The Archer often reads more like a lucid dream than a novel, oceans of wild feeling roiling just below the surface ... Swamy writes about the imperatives of an artist\'s life with bright, furious poetry: the singular will of a body that burns to be in motion, and a mind set free.

Sally Rooney

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Beautiful is the first of her works to be at least in part about that — \'that\' being money and fame and what it feels like to live inside the blast radius of your own sudden, life-obliterating success. And if those disclosures offer sometimes startling insight into its author\'s deeply rattled state of mind, they do not, alas, always serve her story ... The romantic roundelays and betrayals that ricochet between the foursome form the backbone of the book\'s scattered plot, such as it is ... Alice and the rest of Beautiful\'s restless youth are exactly the kind of fervent, clever truth seekers that Rooney has made her signature; at its best, the clarity of their presence slices across the page like a hot knife through butter. But the book\'s millennial cri de coeur can also tip into navel-gazing indulgence.

Nawaaz Ahmed

Rave Entertainment Weekly Fugitives teems with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for—a genuinely radiant debut.

Clare Sestanovich

Positive Entertainment Weekly Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity that Taylor\'s more elliptical prose tends to lack. But both tap into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there.

Brandon Taylor

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...promise[s] all the perks of great literature - drama, atmosphere, indelible characters - but little else in the way of comfort ... Through it all, Taylor returns again and again to the love triangle between a suicidal math major and two tempestuous dancers, a tangled pas de trois of race, identity, and perception ... B+

Maggie Shipstead

Positive Entertainment Weekly [A] sprawling new doorstop of a novel ... Shipstead (Astonish Me) has more than enough raw material in her muse to sustain the nearly 600 pages that follow ... Great Circle offers more than just wanderlust; it feels like a liberation by proxy, too.

Rachel Cusk

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...beguiling if uneven ... slender, tricky ... In Second Place, Cusk (Outline) traces the arrival of a well-known painter to the isolated guest house of a woman who seems to hunger for some proximity to his art, or just his presence ... Place thrums with an inner life only teasingly hinted at; one more mystery that age and wisdom can choose to conceal.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... as the book delves into their long history, old and new dramas emerge. Company is less immediately grabby than Sweeney\'s great 2016 breakout The Nest. But her warmth and wit refresh a tale as old as time.

Dawnie Walton

Rave Entertainment Weekly Walton\'s debut novel uses oral history as the form for her kaleidoscopic tale, though she can hardly be contained by it. The book bursts with fourth wall breaks and clear-eyed takes on race, sex, and creativity that Walton unfurls in urgent, endlessly readable style.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Positive Entertainment Weekly Whereabouts wanders through the small ordinary days of its protagonist, a writer and professor who considers her half-chosen solitude \'a condition I try to perfect.\' She attends drab academic conferences and ventures out to the occasional regrettable dinner party, though most hours drift by in a state of quiet unsettlement ... her muted prose conveys a sort of spare poetic melancholy. But her cool conversational tone can also feel too restrained, slanting less toward transcendence than the mere marking of time.

Abigail Dean

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... macabre ... Dean\'s [book], despite a late-game twist, often reads more like a slow-burn character study, though it\'s richer for it ... vividly...play[s]...parental misdeeds not just for literary intrigue but real, nightmarish resonance: mothers of invention till the end.

Melissa Broder

Rave Entertainment Weekly In her wildly readable prose, Melissa Broder (So Sad Today) has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year: a harrowing, exhilarating, and frankly obscene exploration of all the ways we endeavor to make ourselves disappear — and the untold liberty that comes when our appetites are freed at last.

Joan Didion

Rave Entertainment Weekly Let Me Tell You What I Mean arrives with the uncommon weight of expectation, and not a little bit of fear — in the purely morbid sense that this could be her last, yes (at 86, she\'s only mortal), but also that her legendary instincts might have faltered, a late-game blot on her legacy ... slim but satisfying ... In nearly every paragraph, though, are hallmarks of what Als calls \'the Didion gaze\' — the callbacks and repetitions, the clean snap of a telling detail, the almost pathological aversion to sentiment and cliché ... a visionary who for more than half a century has shown us how to look through a glass darkly, and see anew.

Jonathan Franzen

Positive Entertainment Weekly A new Jonathan Franzen novel...feels like a banquet ... His latest is no exception ... As the narrative weaves across six decades and three continents, some threads inevitably become more compelling than others. The book is at its heady best when it takes on two of Franzen’s favorite subjects: the strange compromises of modern life and the more timeless mysteries of human behavior. But it can be exhausting, too, in part because—not to beat a dead literary mare—of his often shockingly ugly take on women. To be fair, his so-called Female Problem may be more a function of general misanthropy than misogyny ... the book’s comparatively gentle treatment of Pip begins to feel less like kindness than mere disinterest in her inner world. Maybe Franzen did grow tired of his creation; the book ends suddenly, somewhere between a bang and a whimper. It’s as if after more than 560 enraging, engaging pages he’s pushed his chair away from the table, finally full—whether or not his reader feels the same.

Ashley Audrain

Positive Entertainment Weekly Blythe Connor, the fraught narrator of Ashley Audrain\'s The Push, hails from a long line of what you might call maternal malpractice: distant, damaged women whose moods and preoccupations have become their unlucky daughters\' legacy ... Audrain\'s book, propulsively scripted as it already reads on the page, should lend itself well to movie length (as did another novel it echoes, Lionel Shriver\'s We Need to Talk About Kevin) ... not just for literary intrigue but real, nightmarish resonance: mothers of invention till the end.

Don Delillo

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Don DeLillo has been writing about imagined dystopias for nearly half a century; it just took this long, apparently, for reality to catch up with him. So it’s all the more disappointing to see such a master punting the subject as perfunctorily as he does in The Silence, a cool, fragmentary slip of a novella centered around some sort of vague catastrophic event ... DeLillo’s shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel when he wants them to; Silence, though, settles mostly for paper cuts.

Rumaan Alam

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"... a zingy dystopian exercise whose blooming absurdities (the less about which you know going in, the better) would seem frankly unbelievable if they didn’t ring so true ... Alam has both a golden ear and a gimlet eye for the Sturm und Drang of the city\'s ever-shifting social\'s strata; a way of slyly dinging its self-delusions and virtue-signalling without turning cruel or petty ... Unsurprisingly, the book\'s rights have already been snapped up by Netflix...The plan is to present it as a feature film, though the full length of a limited series might better serve the busy tangle of ideas on race and class and consumerism and 21st-century malaise contained within Alam\'s wild World; until then, his bright, audacious words will have to do.\

Martin Amis

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... a giant octopus of a book spritzing out regular inky puffs of lit-world gossip, historical digressions, romantic confessions, and vintage score-settling, with footnotes. It is also, nominally, a guide on how to write ... His great Martin-y mind is still a thing to marvel at, all the clever wordplay and synaptic leaps, but it’s the tender, ordinary moments—watching old movies with a gently addled Bellow, eating Tex-Mex near the Houston hospital where \'Hitch\' spent his last days—that stay.

Lee Conell

Positive Entertainment Weekly Like so many social chroniclers before her, Lee Conell has a keen eye for the grand delusions and small daily hypocrisies of a \'classless\' America; if her take isn\'t quite a revelation, it\'s still brisk, canny fun—an upstairs-downstairs for the modern age.

Ingrid Persaud

Rave Entertainment Weekly Like Nicole Dennis-Benn\'s Patsy, one of the best books of last summer, Love After Love offers both a window into Caribbean literature and a wider lens on immigration, race, and sexuality. Mostly, though, it\'s just a great story: funny, tender, and true.

Raven Leilani

Positive Entertainment Weekly Raven Leilani’s long-form debut, and that newness sometimes shows; after a wildly beguiling start, the novel telescopes inward, often forsaking narrative momentum for mood and color. Sentence by sentence, though, she’s also a phenomenal writer, her dense, dazzling paragraphs shot through with self-effacing wit and psychological insight ... By almost any metric, Edie is a mess: damaged, adrift, a maestro of self-sabotage. You want to shake her sometimes, or just wrap her in a warm blanket and tell her to go home. But Leilani also makes her pain specific and real — not as a symbol or statistic, but as a young woman in the world, trying hard to solve the mystery of herself.

Lynn Steger Strong

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... spare, cool-toned ... Strong\'s unadorned prose aptly captures a certain kind of queasy millennial unease, though its very plainness can also place a pane of glass between her voice and the reader; a diary of desire, once removed.

Laila Lalami

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... sharp, bracingly clear essays ... By fusing deep research with lived experience, the book doesn’t just ask you to consider that the personal is political; it makes you marvel that anyone could still presume otherwise.

Stephanie Danler

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... can feel both piecemeal and blinkered by its own privilege (private schools, last-minute trips to Spain), but it’s powerful, too: a raw, often lyrical portrait of pain, loss, and learning to let go.

Anna Solomon

Rave Entertainment Weekly Each [protagonist] takes up roughly equal space in Anna Solomon’s deftly interwoven round-robin of a novel, their stories both compulsively readable and thrumming with deeper cultural themes ... it’s [Lily\'s] frank, self-deprecating voice that often anchors Book of V. as it toggles back and forth through time ... Much like Michael Cunningham did in The Hours, though, Solomon...has the gift of making you sad to leave each protagonist as her respective chapters end, before plunging happily into the next. Like Cunningham, too, she manages a great novelistic trick: blending real history and radical fiction into one enthralling whole.

Rufi Thorpe

Rave Entertainment Weekly Through Michael’s clear-eyed gaze, Rufi Thorpe unfurls a coming-of-age tale that feels both fresh and familiar: a shrewd exploration of all the ways people find to pass on the hurt and anger they’ve been given and a tender, furious ode to the connections that somehow still endure, despite everything.

Blake Gopnik

Positive Entertainment Weekly It always seems to depend, more or less, on who’s asking. He could be The Man Who Wasn’t There, and also everywhere; a lightning rod, a walking Rorschach blot, an art star of both the highest and lowest order. All of those Andys exist — sometimes simultaneously over a single paragraph — in Blake Gopnik’s Warhol, a frank, gossipy, but not unacademic chronicle of one of the 20th century’s most foundational and confounding figures ... Seemingly no biographical detail is too big or too small for his 976-page colossus ... Gopnik’s background as historian and critic can sometimes lead him down esoteric paths, and he tends to give his subject more credit for certain creative choices than might be due; the sheer volume of material, too, can be both exhaustive and exhausting. But the book also grounds its mad whirl of sheikhs, freaks, movie stars, and tweaked bohemians by the steady anchor of its muse: a man who, through the fond eyes of his biographer, comes off maybe as wholly, maddeningly human as he ever has — both sweet and strange, mercenary and tender-hearted.

Elizabeth Wetmore

Positive Entertainment Weekly Odessa in 1976 is the kind of Texas oil town where the men work as hard as they drink, the women carry pistols in their pocketbooks, and tumbleweeds are what pass for local greenery ... Elizabeth Wetmore\'s sunbaked prose can read more like a writer\'s rich imagination than real life, but as the story goes on it becomes a monument to a sort of singular grace, and true grit

Emma Straub

Positive Entertainment Weekly Inevitably, some of these threads turn out to be more compelling than others, and the piling on of certain strenuously 2020 topics (trans kids, gentrification, late-in-life sexual fluidity) can feel a little too tidily invoked. But mostly, Straub is in her sweet spot; Like Celeste Ng or Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, she has the gift of finding freshness in familiar narratives through cleverly tweaked archetypes and small, clear observations ... If Adults hardly feels like the strongest of her offerings so far, there\'s still something undeniably pleasing about the low stakes and easy resolution of it all — a kind of thinking-person\'s beach read that\'s maybe all the better for arriving in these strange, landlocked times.

Hilary Mantel

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...maddening, fascinating ... At 757 pages, it’s also easily the longest of the three novels, which Mantel seems compelled to fill with more of everything: not just people, history, and policy, but poetry, too. Sometimes her deluge of facts overwhelms ... Even with reams of research, of course, many details of that distant past are dust now, if they were ever tallied at all; what Mantel does, often brilliantly, is put movement and muscle on the bare bones of what’s known ... B+

Chris McCormick

Rave Entertainment Weekly Don’t read The Gimmicks’ jacket copy, which nearly gives it all away; just trust that this brilliant, kooky book touches on everything from the Armenian genocide and the arcane rules of backgammon to the spandexed underworld of semiprofessional wrestling in 1980s Los Angeles. And that hardly a page will go by that you won’t marvel at McCormick’s tender, surreally comic study of two brothers bonded in fierce loyalty, then pulled apart by ideology, the forces of history, and, of course, a girl. It’s all stranger than fiction, and too fantastic not to wish it were true.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...flawed but deeply compelling ... Castillo’s Children has the much sharper ring of lived experience ... A profound sense of disconnection follows him on both sides of the border; as do his struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, substance abuse, and estrangement from his father ... B+.

Miranda Popkey

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...bracingly unsentimental ... as she explores her own history through a shifting lens of female rivalries and friendships, the book’s surface coolness begins to peel away, revealing the raw, uncommon nerve of a radically honest storyteller ... A-.

Garth Greenwell

Positive Entertainment Weekly It’s those rules of engagement that seem to intrigue Greenwell most; the intoxicating and almost painful honesty of his unflinching gaze on desire ... B+.

Colum McCann

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...a kaleidoscopic, wildly ambitious hybrid of fact and fiction ... McCann’s storytelling radiates outward to include everything from meditations on Middle Eastern geography and the history of birds to the last meal of a French president and the lost operas of the Holocaust ... he’s also woven something tensile and beautiful out of terrible pain ... B+.

Olaf Olafsson

Positive Entertainment Weekly The latest from Olafsson...feels at first like a classic study in Scandi noir, that austere genre of frosty characters and snow-flecked mystery. But something more tender and ephemeral lurks beneath Sacrament‘s bare outlines ... Moving in clean declarative prose between ’60s Paris, ’80s Iceland, and the modern day, the novel’s core temperature sometimes runs too cool; there’s real devastation, though, in the revelations of its final chapters, and freedom, too.

Jeanine Cummins

Mixed Entertainment Weekly ...a novel whose premise could have been stripped from a CNN news crawl ... flawed but deeply compelling ... Dirt will likely be considered the more accessible of the two and arrives, accordingly, with the bigger megaphone ... Cummins’ cleanly drawn tale of a woman and her young son fleeing cartel violence in the once-idyllic resort town of Acapulco speaks in the universal language of mothers and children, grief and perseverance (though her actual prose dips, early and often, into vivid fragments of Spanish) ... That Cummins (A Rip in Heaven) has approached her subject with extensive research and clear empathy can’t quite mitigate the discomfort that, as a white woman so far removed from the migrant crisis, this story isn’t strictly hers to tell. Screen reader support enabled. ...a novel whose premise could have been stripped from a CNN news crawl ... flawed but deeply compelling ... Dirt will likely be considered the more accessible of the two and arrives, accordingly, with the bigger megaphone ... Cummins’ cleanly drawn tale of a woman and her young son fleeing cartel violence in the once-idyllic resort town of Acapulco speaks in the universal language of mothers and children, grief and perseverance (though her actual prose dips, early and often, into vivid fragments of Spanish) ... That Cummins (A Rip in Heaven) has approached her subject with extensive research and clear empathy can’t quite mitigate the discomfort that, as a white woman so far removed from the migrant crisis, this story isn’t strictly hers to tell.

Scarlett Thomas

Positive Entertainment Weekly Thomas has a perfectly pitched ear for human cruelty and self-delusion ... and all the wild tortures young girls subject themselves to just to feel pretty in the world. B+.

Kate Elizabeth Russell

Positive Entertainment Weekly Russell spools out her fractured narrative like a sort of feverish memory play, with Vanessa as the defiant, furious defender of something she still insists, even at 32, on labeling a romance. It\'s a tricky line to walk, strung somewhere between outrage and empathy, and My Dark Vanessa\'s workmanlike prose — no flights of Nabokovian fancy here — sometimes falters. But it\'s the kind that stays with you, too: the story of a girl whose life becomes the answer to a question she never really had a chance to refuse.

Bernardine Evaristo

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... deserves every accolade, and more ... a creative and technical marvel ... a book so bursting with wit, empathy, and insight, it can rarely pause to take a breath, let alone break a paragraph (or at least put a full stop at the end of one) ... indelible characters, all plugged into Evaristo’s ever-expanding web, come and go within Girl‘s pages, each one immediately, recognizably human but still somehow far from archetype. Maybe the book’s most ingenious trick, though, is that its reflections on race and feminism hardly ever feel like polemics; there’s just too much pure vivid life on every page.

Daniel Woodrell

Rave Entertainment Weekly At a slim 164 pages, it’s tempting to call this tale...a novella — until you read the first dense, dazzling paragraph. It’s almost as if Woodrell, the master of celebrated Ozark-gothic reveries like Winter’s Bone, writes his sentences in clotted cream, where other authors work in skim milk. In just a few curlicued lines, dozens of West Table’s citizens — bankers and derelicts, brimstone preachers and good-time girls — are brought vividly to life ... Maid’s is a whodunit, but really it’s the who and not the dun that stays with you: Characters are drawn with such skill and sympathy that every fate resonates.

Carmen Maria Machado

Rave Entertainment Weekly If there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them, Carmen Maria Machado has found a way to do exactly that, ingeniously ... a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs ... a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat — not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.

Kevin Wilson

Rave Entertainment Weekly There’s hardly a sentence in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here that feels like anything you’ve read before; that’s how fresh his voice is, and how willfully, wonderfully bizarre the book’s plot ... Wilson unfurls all this from Lillian’s point of view: witty, confiding, breezily profane. And tender, too ... That the supernatural elements of Nothing feel so right is a testament to Wilson’s innate skill as a storyteller. But it’s the humanity in his words, and in All This, that stays: the unmistakable tenor of real life, too ludicrous not to be true.

Zadie Smith

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... eclectic ... Inevitably, some are stronger than others ... Pieces that garnered a lot of attention when they first appeared elsewhere hold up gratifyingly well, though the experimental efforts that work best tend to be the ones that wear their humanity on their sleeve ... There’s some cognitive whiplash, too, in toggling so quickly between so many styles. But taken all together, the book does feel like a kind of grand union: the lucky synthesis of everything swirling inside Smith’s big, beautiful brain.

Jami Attenberg

Rave Entertainment Weekly Toggling back and forth through perspectives and time, Attenberg gives each character their own rich history, making even tertiary ones — a Pilates instructor, a CVS clerk, a world-weary coroner — come fantastically alive, sometimes in just a single line. New Orleans, too, is its own protagonist: a place of sticky booze and Spanish moss and endless, swampy heat that also knows its own clichés, inside and out.

Lara Prescott

Rave Entertainment Weekly The whirl of trench coats and cocktails and midnight meetings on park benches has the heady whiff of classic old-fashioned spy storytelling, but filtered, too, through Prescott’s thoroughly modern lens. And the result is something like a protofeminist Mad Men transposed to the world of international espionage—all excellent midcentury style and intrigue set against real, indelible history.

Candace Bushnell

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Two-plus decades after Carrie Bradshaw & Co. became avatars of modern singledom, pop culture has inevitably evolved — though it’s not clear, in Bushnell’s latest, that the woman who created them has ... At 60, Bushnell’s voice still has the cigarette-tipped kittenishness of a sort of graying Holly Golightly ... for every welcome moment of vulnerability — she addresses with unvarnished honesty all the ways that society tends to erase a woman over 50 without a partner — there are odd digressions that feel dragged too soon from the drafts folder: meandering thoughts on five-figure face creams, errant houseguests, and, perhaps inevitably, shopping for shoes. She dispenses with the end of her decade-long marriage in approximately a paragraph, which is less space than she allots to the death of her dog, and delivers tales of close friends’ misadventures as if they were cocktail-party anecdotes, not the genuine crises they often honestly seem to be. By the time she gets to her own cautiously optimistic ending, even a faithful reader couldn’t help but wonder: Isn’t there more to sex than this City?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...[a] richly mystical fiction debut ... Dancer feels like...the product of a lot of carefully considered passion, too. Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary ... Though it’s easy to get lost in the lushness of Coates’ language, Dancer sometimes misses that particular novelistic trick of telling a story that truly sweeps you up; the kind so compelling it almost makes the pages turn themselves ... the plot gets lodged in digressions and cul-de-sac—leaning heavily on blue-mist atmosphere and characters who speak less like humans than oracles in long, lyrical turns. Hiram’s supernatural gifts, too, feel a little bit apart from it all, and maybe even unnecessary. There’s already so much ordinary magic in his world.

Amy Waldman

Positive Entertainment Weekly ... thoughtfully cautionary ... Waldman brings inborn knowledge to her storytelling and she writes about the clash of cultures and ideals here with clean-lined, eye-level empathy. Though Parveen stays credulous far longer than she should, Door still manages to make the political feel personal in a way that only the finest reporting — or the best kind of fiction — can.

Emma Donoghue

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Donoghue draws a vivid picture, but Akin never quite gels, either in its central relationship or its underdrawn mystery

Helen Phillips

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... what presents at first as a straightforward thriller is quickly revealed—in a series of short, sharp chapters—to be a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality ... Even as the book takes an unsettling turn toward the supernatural, a glassy Black Mirror shimmer on the plot, The Need never abandons its domesticity ... What Helen Phillips builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review. Even the vaguely unfinished ending, less a full stop than a sort of pregnant pause, feels somehow right; a fitting coda to her spare, eerie marvel of novel, both beautifully familiar and profoundly strange.

Nina Stibbe

Positive Entertainment Weekly Stibbe...is a pitch-perfect observer: clever, confiding, sublimely weird; and there’s unexpected resonance, too, in the story’s final, bittersweet pages. Her Reasons might not have much reason, but it has a lot of heart.

Lisa Taddeo

Rave Entertainment Weekly Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women reads like a nonfiction novel in the deeply embedded, richly detailed vein of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air ... In another medium, these dilemmas could easily come off as a certain kind of erotic cliché, sensational filler for advice columns and daytime talk shows. It’s Taddeo’s deep, almost feverish commitment to detail and context that elevates the stories, making them feel not just painfully real but revelatory ... By peeling back the layers with such clear-eyed compassion, Taddeo illuminates the essential, elemental mystery of what it is to be a woman in the world.

Mary Beth Keane

Positive Entertainment Weekly Keane...writes about mental illness and substance abuse with acute sensitivity, and her characters are consistently, authentically lived-in. But they can also feel like less than the sum of their struggles: A late flashback to Anne’s native Ireland offers an enticing but too-brief glimpse of the formative pain in her past; Peter works so hard to tamp down his own trauma that he becomes a sort of cipher. It all makes for a tale smartly and solidly told, without ever quite piercing the veil that separates the reader from the human puzzle pieces on the page.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Rave Entertainment Weekly ... [a] hip-smart, gleefully scatological debut ... Brodesser-Akner...aims a perfect gimlet eye at [New York City\'s] relentless self-regard ... her best trick may be the novel’s narrator: An elusive presence identified at first only as an old friend of Toby’s from their study-abroad days, she turns out to be both the book’s Trojan horse and—in a brilliant third-act pivot—its greatest gift, transforming a fizzy comedy of manners into something genuinely, unexpectedly profound.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Positive Entertainment Weekly City does bubble and fizz, a sort of Drink, Dance, Flirt set amid the glamorous greasepainted swirl of 1940s New York’s theater-world bohemia ... Girls takes a few darker turns as [the protagonist] stumbles toward adulthood, though Gilbert stays true to her pledge that she won’t let her protagonist’s sexuality be her downfall, like so many literary heroines before her. That may be the most radical thing about a novel that otherwise revels in the old-fashioned pleasures of storytelling—the right to fall down rabbit holes, and still find your own wonderland.

Julie Orringer

Rave Entertainment Weekly There’s all kinds of fraught swashbuckling and subterfuge in Orringer’s meticulously researched recounting...And a gorgeous sense of place...But it’s the sweeping gay romance at its center, and the daily moral quandaries of Fry’s job — how is one life more worth saving than another? — that make the book’s more familiar elements feel new; it’s classic storytelling through a transgressive lens. Portfolio offers a testament to something nicely old-fashioned, though, too: the enduring transformative power of art, and love, in any form.

Karen Russell

Rave Entertainment Weekly [Russell\'s] stories spill over with ghosts and devils, lost souls and dark magic. But they’re too feral and deeply textured to file under something as simple or straightforward as fantasy ... There’s hardly a traceable through-line in Orange World, other than a constant foreboding sense of the surreal. Nearly every sentence is infused with strange magic, but still rooted in enough reality to resonate ... If there’s any flaw here, it’s that Russell’s endings can feel abrupt and sometimes emotionally remote — almost as if having created worlds so intoxicating, she doesn’t know how to leave them behind either.

Ian McEwan

Mixed Entertainment Weekly \"... uneven but intriguing ... [McEwan] goes on longer and shaggier here, digressing into tech-manual esoterica and secondary dramas ... when the narrative clicks, it hums; a searching, sharply intelligent, and often deeply discomfiting pass through the \'Black Mirror\' looking glass — and all the promise and peril of machine dreams.\

Candice Carty-Williams

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Plotwise, Carty-Williams tends toward certain tropes: missed cues, unlikely coincidences. But her unvarnished takes on depression, gentrification, cultural taboos, and casual racism — from the cringey sexual-chocolate puns of OkCupid prospects to the colleague who briskly dismisses \'all that Black Lives Matters nonsense\' in a meeting — cut to the bone. And her debut reads a lot like its smart, sensitive protagonist: full of flaws and contradictions, and urgently, refreshingly real.\

Chris Rush

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Most people stretch to find enough material to fill a memoir; not visual artist Chris Rush, who only reaches his early 20s by the end of The Light Years — another blond Alice tumbling headlong into the kaleidoscopic wonderland of American counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s ... There’s a lot of darkness in Light, but Rush is a fantastically vivid writer, whether he’s remembering a New Jersey of \'meatballs and Windex and hairspray\' or the dappled, dangerous beauty of Northern California, where \'rock stars lurked like lemurs in the trees.\'\

Patti Smith

Rave Entertainment Weekly The reckless, splendid circus of New York’s royal bohemia in the 1960s and ’70s—rock idols, cowboy poets, Warhol Superstars—surrounds Smith in her heady recounting of a halcyon era ... a captivating memoir ... In her inimitable, lyrical style, Patti Smith [pens] a poignant requiem...and a radiant celebration of life.

Bryan Washington

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"... Lot spills over with life — funny, tender, and profane ... Much like Tommy Orange or Junot Díaz, Washington takes characters often consigned to the literary margins and drags them to the center — not as exotic objects of curiosity but as whole human beings, messy and defiant and drawn in full, vibrant color.\

Amy Hempel

Positive Entertainment Weekly Amy Hempel’s Sing to It trails its author’s vaunted reputation behind it like an airplane banner ... [Hempel is] rightly famous for the clarity and impact of her lean, declarative prose ... Many of the entries here are only a few spare paragraphs, often not even enough to fill a single page. \'The Orphan Lamb\' is a tiny jewel of brevity — a perfect snapshot, everything clean and sharp and necessary ... Mortality runs through nearly every story — illness, injury, catalogs of lost and broken things — but there’s a cheerful fatalism to it all, too; a sort of so-what serenity prayer.

Whitney Scharer

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Whatever reams of research Scharer put into excavating Miller’s story she distills here into clean, consistently evocative prose. The glittering bohemia of 1930s Paris, the pastoral boredom of mid-’60s Sussex, the hollowed-out carnage of postwar Europe; all come equally alive on the page ... But none breathe more vividly than Miller herself: Fiercely independent but racked by self-doubt, desperate for affection and approval even as she chafed at sentiment, she spent decades fighting to find her voice. It was worth the wait.\

Dana Czapnik

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"... electrifying ... a frank, bittersweet coming-of-age story that crackles with raw adolescent energy, fresh-cut prose, and a kinetic sense of place ... And Czapnik, a seasoned sportswriter, has written exactly the book that every smart, strange, wonderful teenage weirdo like Lucy deserves.\

Jen Beagin

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Beagin’s storytelling runs episodic and almost willfully odd — like a Jim Jarmusch movie dipped in Windex and adobe dust. But there’s light in the darkness too, and some true eccentric soul in her Vacuum.\

Valeria Luiselli

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"However we decide what defines a Great American Novel in 2019, it must feel a lot like what’s inside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive ... the search for selfhood and manifest destiny seems so freshly recast in the frank intelligence and imagination of [Luiselli’s] telling ... Packaged like a sort of impressionistic scrapbook scattered with song lyrics, sketches, and Polaroids, the novel drifts almost dreamlike between the personal and political, finding beguiling detours and cul-de-sacs as it goes. By its feverish climax — the last 20 pages spill out in one single, streaming sentence — Luiselli isn’t just giving us a story, she’s showing us new ways to see.\

Leila Slimani Trans. by Sam Taylor

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Slimani observes [the book\'s turns] with a coolness that’s almost clinical, even as the feverish spark of obsession licks at the corner of nearly every page. Because Adèle’s appetites, of course, can’t really be sated — they’re as vast and shattering as this fierce, uncanny thunderbolt of a book.\

Kristen Roupenian

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"... a catalog of brutal truths and bad behavior that peels back the thin veneer of human sociability like so much cracked linoleum off an old bathroom floor ... While occasional swerves into a kind of nightmarish magical realism can feel less than fully realized, it’s the stories told in the viscerally intuitive vein of \'Cat Person\' that linger; pithy, raw-nerved explorations of shame and desire and monumental self-loathing ... You Know You Want This is a spiky, ruthless little book, as confrontational and ugly-honest as its title.\

Sally Rooney

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Few contemporary novelists have achieved the kind of rock-star status that Rooney has found with her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends, and now Normal. Her writing is deceptively simple: cool, declarative, almost clinical. But it’s hypnotic too, shot through with a quiet impact and subdermal intimacy that feels both universal and thrillingly new.\

Liane Moriarty

Mixed Entertainment Weekly No shortage of secrets, lies, and social intrigue ... While it all hums along like a well-calibrated engine, Nine Perfect Strangers never quite hits the narrative heights of past work like BLL and The Husband’s Secret — though it does feel much more immediate and enjoyable than her last, the disappointly drawn-out Truly Madly Guilty. Moriarity has a way of nesting inside her characters’ heads and bringing them to life in a way that’s not just relatable but illuminating; we know these people not because they’re archetypes but because they’re so specifically, universally human ... the book’s innate breeziness often makes way for deeper reflections on grief, trauma, and recovery, and more than one surprisingly topical angle, too. But it’s also just good old-fashioned storytelling, full of feeling and well-wrought lines.

Anna Burns

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Let us now praise difficult books: the ones whose refusal to play by the conventional rules of form and storytelling confound and dazzle us, and maybe even aim to drive us a little bit mad ... Milkman is a strange animal; it asks a lot, but gives something back, too: the electric jolt of a voice that feels utterly, sensationally new.\

Rosellen Brown

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Though Fire licks at the edges of something it never fully ignites, it’s still a sharp study in class, politics, and manifest destiny — a story that somehow never grows old, no matter how many times it’s told.\

Jonathan Lethem

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Lethem is in his element writing about this far-out West — ruthless, sunbaked badlands culled from the strange brain confetti of Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo ... More problematic to the story is Phoebe — both as a woman written not always successfully by a man, and as a protagonist you want to spend time with. Set against Heist’s cowboy cool, she’s a sort of chatty, maddening mosquito, buzzing with unfiltered thoughts and bad ideas; too often, their mutual attraction feels less like true romance than willful plot contrivance. But Feral’s desert politics and dystopian wit still cast a sort of spell: a wild-goose mystery not so much about why or where people died, but how.\

Tana French

Mixed Entertainment Weekly \"Stepping outside her Dublin Murder Squad series for the first time, French has constructed a sort of discursive, densely layered family drama disguised as a mystery ... The final revelations in The Witch Elm are startling, even if they don’t quite justify its 500-page length; a whodunit far more memorable for the why than the who.\

R O Kwon

Positive Entertainment Weekly R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries... [is] hardly the first...to wrestle with the strange confluences of fate and consequence ... But...[the book does it] with such shrewd insight and graceful economy that the result feels gratifyingly new ... If Kwon’s often intoxicating prose has a fault, it’s that her characters all tend to speak in the same feverish, convoluted syntax of an M.F.A. grad. (These are smart kids, but still; Will’s an econ major.) In the end...[the] book... [doesn\'t seem] especially interested in definitive answers or happily-ever-afters. What...[it] offer[s] instead are stories that don’t try to outline or erase otherness but illuminate it, beautifully.

David Chariandy

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"...hardly the first novel to wrestle with the strange confluences of fate and consequence—or even the first to frame [its story] through the eyes of characters whose identities lie at least partly on another continent. But [it does] it with such shrewd insight and graceful economy that the result feels gratifyingly new ... Chariandy (whose previous novel was released only in Canada) traces that loss in paragraphs so clean and pared down, every sentence feels like a polished stone ... [a story] that [doesn\'t] try to outline or erase otherness but illuminate it, beautifully.\

Ottessa Moshfegh

Rave Entertainment Weekly To sleep, perchance to hardly dream at all, until days turn into weeks and months and eliminate the need to be awake for anything more than a snack, a little light housekeeping, and maybe a change of underwear. That’s all the unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s strange, exhilarating My Year of Rest and Relaxation wants ... If this all sounds grim or claustrophobic, it isn’t; it’s more like one long, unbroken conversation with your smartest, most self-destructive friend. Moshfegh writes with a singular wit and clarity that, on its own, would be more than enough ... But the cumulative power of her narrative—and the sharp turn she takes in its last 30 pages—becomes nothing less than a revelation: sad, funny, astonishing, and unforgettable.

Tommy Orange

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Tommy Orange drags Indian identity into the 21st century with raw, electrifying immediacy ... Though their struggles aren’t necessarily new, they never feel less than real ... If anything, there’s too much intrigue here to truly do justice to them all, but what remains is the fierce drive \'to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive.\' ”

Judy Blundell

Rave Entertainment Weekly Blundell (who has spent most of her career in YA, often under the pseudonym Jude Watson) casts her net wide: Season teems with angst-riddled teenagers and twentysomething grifters, townies and trophy wives and eccentric billionaires. But she weaves them all together seamlessly, landing somewhere in the smart, breezy sweet spot between Meg Wolitzer and Elin Hilderbrand.

Jessica Knoll

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Knoll’s 2015 blockbuster, Luckiest Girl Alive, earned inevitable comparisons to Gone Girl, though American Psycho seems like a better fit here. Her take on the collision of celebrity and fourth-wave feminism — with its hunger games and anxiety and self-conscious branding — is wickedly sharp, but it’s coldhearted, too. Knoll would probably just say clear-eyed, and she may be right, though that feels like a hollow victory: Beneath their buttery highlights and Instagram smiles, her women are all cold metal and calculation; Real Housewives dipped in Nietzsche. Still, they’re good, nasty fun to spend time with for a while — even though they would probably never deign to appear in a review like this if they knew they’d have to share the space with another woman, and come in second place.\

Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Jennifer Croft

Rave Entertainment Weekly [Tokarczuk] seems to pour the contents of her incandescent mind onto the page; an endless, only tenuously connected series of synaptic flashes and sparks ... Taken all together, Flights has the quality of a dream, in both the best and most maddening sense; you almost feel as if you have to bend your brain sideways to follow its trail ... when her prose lifts off, it’s magical: electrifying, strange, and sensationally alive.

Michael Ondaatje

Positive Entertainment Weekly Woven into Warlight’s pages are the fragments of several fascinating half-stories ... Ondaatje approaches most of them at a kind of lyrical but inscrutable remove.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Positive Entertainment Weekly The title of Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes from its second story ... In it, two parents who socialize casually at their children’s shared school activities begin a private game to alleviate the boredom of another interminable soccer practice or bake sale. The only rules are wild speculation and brutal honesty ... It’s nasty and thrilling and it leads to trouble, at least for one of them. It’s also exactly the kind of scene Sittenfeld (Prep, Eligible) excels at: People smart enough to know better, and human enough to realize they can’t help it ... The majority of Think’s 10 tales (which have already been optioned for an Apple series produced by Reese Witherspoon and starring Kristen Wiig) center on a certain kind of Midwestern middle-class ennui — characters soured but not completely defeated by the Grand Canyon-size gap between expectation and reality.

Clare Mackintosh

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Let Me Lie’s Anna Johnson (oh, for an unusual surname, just once!) is less confused about the source of her pain [than other 'damaged' recent protagonists]. At 26, she’s freshly orphaned by her parents’ near-joint suicides, and a new mom to her own first child — conceived with her grief counselor, no less. But did her mother and father actually take their own lives? The answer...leads, eventually and inevitably, to a sort of piñata of sociopaths, a wicker basket full of crazy. And how much water can wicker hold? Not much, really, though the current ubiquity of novels like these seems to demand that the outcomes grow more outrageous with each new wave, as if we’ve become too saturated to accept anything less than a bonanza from our big reveals. And Mackintosh and [Alice] Feeney — both shrewd, skillful writers — obligingly deliver, even if the end reward feels a lot like diminishing returns.

Madeline Miller

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Circe’s tale lacks the sweeping arc and central romance of Achilles. Her narrative is more episodic, a string of feuds and love affairs occasionally bisected by myth’s greatest hits (Prometheus, the Minotaur, Helen of Troy). But Miller, with her academic bona fides and born instinct for storytelling, seamlessly grafts modern concepts of selfhood and independence to her mystical reveries of smoke and silver, nectar and bones. And if the Circe that emerges from her imagination isn’t exactly human — technically, she can’t be — she is divine.\

Meg Wolitzer

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"It’s not wrong to say that Wolitzer writes \'women’s fiction,\' in that she draws fully formed female characters who speak to each other and have faceted ambitions and inner lives. But she’s also a keen humanist with a singular gift for social observation. And though Greer’s story may be ripe for timely 2018 hashtags, it’s not really just hers. Persuasion has three other often more compelling narratives inside it: Cory, Zee, and Faith, supporting players who become, in their own ways, the book’s thrumming heart.\

Tom Rachman

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Rachman draws his characters with a specificity so sharp it borders on cruel ... after several hundred pages that seem like sad checkpoints (albeit wonderfully written ones) on a trail of beta-male woe, Teacher finds a lovely and unexpected grace note, a left-field redemption made even sweeter by its long and winding path.\

Luis Alberto Urrea

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...a big, messy, warmhearted epic, so overflowing with color and character its strands are sometimes hard to follow without keeping a homemade flowchart in the margins ... But Urrea’s Angels carries them all — good and ugly, broken and beautiful — without judgment, generous to the last breath.

Amy Bloom

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"Amy Bloom’s radiant new novel is rooted in extensive research and actual events, but her goal is less to relitigate history than to portray the blandly sexless figurehead of First Lady as something the job rarely allows those women to be — a loving, breathing human being. And she does it brilliantly ... an indelible love story, one propelled not by unlined youth and beauty but by the kind of soul-mate connection even distance, age, and impossible circumstances couldn’t dim.\

Tayari Jones

Rave Entertainment Weekly \"It would be easy to file Tayari Jones’ freshly anointed Oprah’s Book Club pick in the eat-your-vegetables domain of the Issues Novel, a timely polemic on race and justice. Instead it delivers something much warmer and subtler and more human — a deeply felt, fully lived-in love story ... it’s impossible not to feel altered by Marriage — not gladly, exactly, but still for the better.\

Dave Eggers

Rave Entertainment Weekly ...the McSweeney’s founder and prolific author does manage to illuminate the more arcane bits of history and production without devolving into Guy You Wish You Hadn’t Started Talking to at the Party. It helps that, as a writer who moves consistently between novels and nonfiction, he’s able to harness his considerable storytelling powers to shape Alkhanshali’s real life into such a compelling cinematic narrative. And that his muse somehow comes off as both a relatably messy kid and a modern-day swashbuckler, flawed and funny and refreshingly real. It wouldn’t be wrong to call Mokhtar an entrepreneur or an altruist, but he feels like much more than that, too: a living distillation of the enduring, endlessly elastic power of the American dream.

Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Mixed Entertainment Weekly A slick puzzle box that seems to take the tropes of every Lifetime lady-in-peril movie and toss them in a Vitamix at a rough chop … The brief chapters go by quickly, with one true hand grenade tossed in midway, but there’s something faintly airless in the machinations of its paper-doll players; trapped in their toxic pas de trois, they can’t quite seem to transcend two dimensions.

Andy Weir

Mixed Entertainment Weekly How you feel about [Weir's] follow-up will probably depend a lot on how much you enjoyed his talky, utilitarian style of left-brained storytelling the first time ... Nominally, Jasmine 'Jazz' Bashara is entirely different from astronaut Mark Watney: She’s Saudi Arabian, defiantly self-educated, and of course, female. Though those things are only strictly true because Weir says so; his character traits are effectively a thin skin stretched over narrators who feel less like recognizable human beings than fun, unusually chatty lawn-mower manuals with physics degrees ... Weir has an undeniable gift for bringing NASA-level knowledge down to earth; you may not close Artemis’ pages feeling particularly enriched or awed by the wonders of the cosmos, but at least you’ll know exactly how to weld an airlock in lunar gravity.

Louise Erdrich

Positive Entertainment Weekly Certain parts of Future Home feel both rushed and incomplete, maybe because the original 500-page manuscript was reworked so quickly on the heels of last year’s epic LaRose. But Erdrich operating at less than full capacity is still a stunner: a writer whose words carry a spiritual weight far beyond science, or fiction.

Jennifer Egan

Positive Entertainment Weekly There are at least three or four Great American Novels pressed between the pages of Manhattan Beach: moody gangster noir; sweeping WWII romance; classic New York immigrants’ tale; timeless story of the sea … Fans who fell in love with Goon Squad’s tricky brilliance might find the narrative here almost too familiar; some moments channel the hard-bitten prose of Raymond Chandler, others the sea-dog flintiness of Hemingway. (Egan’s period research is impeccable, even if it sometimes distracts as much as it illuminates.)

Celeste Ng

Rave Entertainment Weekly Little Fires echoes several themes from Ng’s lauded 2014 best-seller, Everything I Never Told You, tracing the fault lines of race, class, and secrecy that run beneath a small Midwestern town. And again, calamity shatters a placid surface on the first page (that title is more than a metaphor). But here, she moves the action up from 1977 to the Clinton-era ’90s and widens her aperture to include a deeper, more diverse cast of characters. Though the book’s language is clean and straightforward, almost conversational, Ng has an acute sense of how real people (especially teenagers, the slang-slinging kryptonite of many an aspiring novelist) think and feel and communicate. Shaker Heights may be a place where 'things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.' But the real world is never as far away as it seems, of course. And if the scrim can’t be broken, sometimes you have to burn it down.

Jesmyn Ward

Rave Entertainment Weekly ...the book’s Southern gothic aura recalls the dense, head-spinning prose of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. But the voice is entirely Ward’s own, a voluptuous magical realism that takes root in the darkest corners of human behavior ... Ward has emerged as one of the most searing and singularly gifted writers working today. Absorbing the harsh beauty of her writing isn’t easy; reading Sing sometimes feels like staring into the sun. But she also makes it impossible to turn away.

Gabriel Tallent

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...there’s no doubt that Gabriel Tallent is a phenomenally gifted writer (it will probably be hard for any reviewer to resist a reference to his appropriate surname here). But Darling is also a difficult and often deeply unsettling read, the kind that overused phrases like 'trigger warning' were actually made for ... Tallent’s voice — particularly the way he writes about the natural world, in prose so dense and dazzling it feels almost hallucinogenic — is unforgettable, but it sometimes fails him when it comes to actual human dialogue; his characters tend to speak in either clipped monosyllables or grand peculiar paragraphs, oddly untethered from something they said or did two or 200 pages previously. And the book’s graphic depictions of physical and sexual abuse sometimes exhaust the limits of endurance and credulity. But Darling is a remarkable piece of work by almost any metric: Brutal, lyrical, and, for both better and worse, unforgettable.

Ellen Ullman

Rave Entertainment Weekly Life in Code is a consummate insider’s take, rich with local color and anecdotes ... Ullman has a pure passion for computing that doesn’t stop her from recognizing all the ways it can isolate and intimidate — or how unconscious bias works like a sort of snow blindness on the striving (and yes, still overwhelmingly white and male) dreamers who would call themselves disrupters. Like all great writers, she finds the universal in the specific, mixing memoir with industry gossip (cameos by Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, a wry Microsoft dig) and ancillary tales of house cats, dairy farmers, and Julia Child. Code is illuminating and unfailingly clever, but above all it’s a deeply human book: urgent, eloquent, and heartfelt.

Emily Culliton

Positive Entertainment Weekly Like a more acid Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Misfortune gleefully torpedoes the saintly ideal of motherhood; the good ones may go to heaven, but the bad ones go everywhere.

Sarah Schmidt

Rave Entertainment Weekly See is the product of 11 years of that obsession, and it’s a prickly, unsettling wonder: a story so tactile and feverishly surreal it feels like a sort of reverse haunting ... The table of misery is set, but is there motivation enough for murder? It would spoil Schmidt’s literary game to say too much. What she does do, in dense, swooning paragraphs, is build an indelible mood ... Schmidt’s style has its quirks. She drops definite articles, repeats phrases like incantations, and has a habit of turning unlikely nouns (termite, critter) into verbs. The vast gaps in her characters’ education and experience somehow still allow them to share the same distinctive voice. But her protagonist comes more fully alive than almost any character in recent memory, and the final pages are a wild, mind-bending revelation.

Alissa Nutting

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Made for Love doesn’t so much unfold as spill out, a crackpot piñata of sex dolls, dolphin coitus, and droll postmillennial satire. Nutting’s surreal style is both manic and tender; her characters — the hapless Hazel, her coolly malevolent ex, a leathery, nippleless outlaw named Liver — read like demented refugees from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, dragged into the 21st century and deep-fried in Florida sunshine. But they’re endearingly human too: kooks and misfits who fail at love over and over, and still, against all evidence, try again.\

Fiona Barton

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Barton‘s unsettling 2016 best-seller The Widow artfully toed the line between two high paradigms of British mystery: the cozy-crumpet kind, all village intrigue and old-timey secrets, and the Ripper-style savagery of much darker crimes. Her Child, released a scant 16 months later, does the same (and returns several characters, including Kate), though its impact is diminished some by conventional prose and plotting—an enigma that reads less like a true riddle than a slow-burn portrait of loss and survival wrapped, like that small body, in well-worn words.

Liane Moriarty

Rave Entertainment Weekly The Husband’s Secret is a sharp, thoughtful read — a sneaky sort of wolf in chick-lit clothing...Liane Moriarty weaves Cecilia’s story in with those of two other women in crisis … But Secret isn’t all Down Under noir, either; even as these three women’s lives are blown apart, they still have jobs and families and mostly intact senses of humor, and they carry on … Moriarty ultimately can’t resist wrapping up her story lines with a bow that will probably feel too shiny and pink-petal neat for some. But you don’t need a husband or a secret to feel for her characters’ very real moral quandaries, and to want that shiny bow for them a little bit, too.

Maile Meloy

Positive Entertainment Weekly Because Meloy follows every character, it’s not a mystery where they’ve gone, though knowing hardly alleviates the tension. Alarmed’s sensational plot turns sometimes veer toward the innocents-in-peril machinations of a Lifetime movie, but Meloy has a keenly intuitive ear for family dynamics, first-world privilege, and all the ways that human nature can adapt to the unthinkable.

Roxane Gay

Positive Entertainment Weekly Hunger wears its identity politics—fat (the term she prefers), female, Haitian-American, queer—proudly, and Gay is a fierce, if not always focused, critic of the casual cruelties and willful ignorance obesity still elicits. Her writing can feel circular and sometimes contradictory, but the book’s short, sharp chapters come alive in vivid personal anecdotes ... And on nearly every page, Gay’s raw, powerful prose plants a flag, facing down decades of shame and self-loathing by reclaiming the body she never should have had to lose.

Weike Wang

Rave Entertainment Weekly ...one of the year’s most winningly original debuts ... Nearly every page is marked by some kind of breezy scientific anecdote or aside — pithy, casually brilliant ruminations on everything from meiosis and mitochondria to what makes rockets fly. That it’s all so accessible and organic to the story is one of the book’s most consistent pleasures. So is the texture and tone of Wang’s language, a voice so fresh and intimate and mordantly funny that she feels less like fiction than a friend you’ve known forever — even if she hasn’t met you yet.

Liane Moriarty

Rave Entertainment Weekly Moriarty is a fantastically nimble writer, so sure-footed that the book leaps between dark and light seamlessly; even the big reveal in the final pages feels earned and genuinely shocking … Praise for Moriarty seems to come with a faintly condescending asterisk, probably because her books do, in the broadest sense, fit the label ‘chick lit.’ But more than anything she feels like a humanist.

Paula Hawkins

Mixed Entertainment Weekly The book’s piled-on storylines lack the feverish, almost subdermal intimacy of Train, and Hawkins’ pulp psychology has only the soggiest sort of logic. Still, buried in her humid narrative is an intriguing pop-feminist tale of small-town hypocrisy, sexual politics, and wrongs that won’t rinse clean.

Omar El Akkad

Positive Entertainment Weekly El Akkad, a Cairo-born journalist, has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia; if only his grim near-future fantasy didn’t feel so much like a crystal ball.

Ariel Levy

Positive Entertainment Weekly As a journalist, Levy has delved into wild tales of 1970s lesbian separatists, South African marathoners, and modern ayahuasca disciples. In these keenly intimate essays, she turns the lens inward, recounting professional highs and personal lows (the brutal ruin of a marriage, a harrowing miscarriage) with lucid, unflinching immediacy. If Levy comes off as self-lacerating and self-regarding in equal measure, well, you can’t spell memoir without a 'me' and an 'i'…and her 'me' is still more interesting than most.

Nickolas Butler

Positive Entertainment Weekly Butler captures the rites and rhythms of young manhood in intimate, clear-eyed detail, shifting nimbly between multiple perspectives, several generations, and two wars overseas. If a sudden swerve into melodrama in the final pages feels oddly off-key, it’s not enough to derail the story or diminish the impact of this distinctly American tale: a potent exploration of friendship, betrayal, and all the markers of masculinity that can’t be measured by badges and trust falls.

Mohsin Hamid

Rave Entertainment Weekly Nadia and Saeed take the chance, and begin a new kind of adventure—one that Hamid unfurls in deceptively simple prose, as spare and dreamlike as a fable. But Exit West’s mystical spin isn’t a gloss on geopolitical reality; nearly every page reflects the tangible impact of life during wartime—not just the blood and gun smoke of daily bombardments, but the quieter collateral damage that seeps in. The true magic of the book is how it manages to render it all in a narrative so moving, audacious, and indelibly human.

Yiyun Li

Positive Entertainment Weekly Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her—from the flowery Chinese verse of her youth to the brilliant parade of poets, novelists, and Danish existentialists who helped see her through multiple hospitalizations for depression. (The heart wants what it wants; sometimes all it can stand is Kierkegaard.) Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.

George Saunders

Rave Entertainment Weekly Saunders has finally produced his first full length novel — though that word hardly begins to convey the literary wonder contained within its pages, an extraordinary alchemy of free-verse ghost story, tender father-son devotional, and backdoor presidential biography ... Slipping between hallucinatory fragments of dialogue and real historical accounts, Saunders weaves a wild high-wire pastiche. He’s always been a dazzlingly clever voice in fiction, but Bardo is something else: a heartfelt marvel, sad and funny and surreal.

Joyce Carol Oates

Mixed Entertainment Weekly ...[a] fierce, provocative, and often maddening novel ... In Martyrs‘ best passages, she is mesmerizing—unleashing feverish streams of prose in great, incantatory swoons and laying her subjects bare without judgment or pity. But her enduring stylistic tics—the circular echoes and repetitions, the heavy italics for emphasis, the often 'arbitrary' scattering of 'quotation marks'—also begin to wear after nearly 750 dense, relentless pages ... One of Oates’ greatest gifts is her ability to extract universal truths and resonance from even the thorniest subjects. So when the book’s final paragraphs offer sudden, sunny resolution, it feels not just incongruous but strangely unsatisfying: a firebomb diffused in a wisp of smoke.

Kevin Wilson

Positive Entertainment Weekly Wilson’s Perfect Little World finds its bliss in the vast disconnect between people’s best intentions and where they land—and all the spectacular ways they manage to sabotage and misdirect themselves in between ... Though heady concepts of nature and nurture dance around the edges, they never quite penetrate Wilson’s Little World. Instead, his story is like the Project: snug, quirky, and engagingly imperfect.

Emma Flint

Positive Entertainment Weekly Inspired by a real-life case, the outlines of Emma Flint’s debut summon every classic noir chestnut: the vixen, the patsy, the shady detective, the cub reporter determined to set the record straight. Her actors are strictly familiar, and rarely surprising; they come and go and mostly play their parts. The exception is Ruth: In lean, palpable prose (Flint is British, though her New York vernacular never slips), she comes vividly alive—a flawed, complicated woman with thoughts and demons and desires that the prescribed world she lives in offers hardly any framework for, and even less forgiveness. As a whodunit, Little Deaths is standard-issue. As a character study, it’s a killer.

Michael Chabon

Positive Entertainment Weekly Hardly a shade of human intrigue—or a pivotal moment in 20th-century history—goes unexplored in Chabon’s vibrant, sprawling latest. Inspired by his grandfather’s deathbed confessions, Moonglow is a feast for fans of the Pulitzer winner’s magical prose but less satisfying for lovers of linear narratives. Following its leaps can feel like trying to reassemble a scattered pack of cards; you’ll find all kinds of aces, but never quite the full deck.

Laura Jane Grace

Positive Entertainment Weekly Tranny—which pulls heavily from a decade of tour diaries— is actually a traditional rock bio in a lot of ways, full of road-dog debauchery, studio tales, and score-settling with ex-bandmates and managers. The physical transition, which doesn’t come until the last few chapters, feels almost like a postscript, and the prose swings between blistering and banal. But the book is also a powerful, disarmingly honest portrait of becoming.

Zadie Smith

Mixed Entertainment Weekly Swing Time doesn’t have the electric jolt of WhiteTeeth’s Technicolor rhythms, but it does offer more insight—an emotional acuity that radiates through a series of small, beautifully crafted revelations. What it can’t do is make the central character come fully alive, or even feel crucial to her own narrative as the story begins to list and wander toward its shaggy end.

Jade Chang

Positive Entertainment Weekly Chang packs her pages nearly as tightly as the Mercedes, piling on wry observations of everything from Asian immigrant culture and faded Southern gentry to fashion-blog etiquette and the boho bourgeoisie’s obsession with authenticity. If it all feels a little overstuffed, her breezy tangents and keen character sketches are also half the fun, and each Wang comes alive in their own memorable, messily human ways ... [Wang's] brash, bighearted debut smartly recasts what the definition of a quintessentially American story can be in 2016.

Gary Younge

Positive Entertainment Weekly In thoughtful, evenhanded chapters stacked with footnotes, Younge works methodically to uncover the unique patterns and hypocrisies of his adopted second home. (Though British, he has an American wife and spent a dozen years reporting from the States.) Another Day doesn’t offer solutions, because it can’t; it just makes it impossible not to care.

Nathan Hill

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...[a] sad, funny, endlessly inventive debut ... At 600-plus pages, some of those threads inevitably snag or run on too long, but Hill weaves it all into the wild tragicomic tangle of his imagination.

Imbolo Mbue

Positive Entertainment Weekly If the book ultimately falls short of the emotional impact its sweeping premise and seven-figure advance portend, it’s still a fresh, engaging entry in the eternally evolving narrative of what it means to be an American—and how human beings, not laws or dogma, define liberty.

Colson Whitehead

Positive Entertainment Weekly [Cora's] America is a still-new nation full of memorable color and characters, but it’s also raw and vicious, a place that punishes the best intentions on a whim and rewards the ruthless over and over again. While supporting players come and go, Cora remains at the center of it all yet just out of reach—less the heroine of her own story than a witness to outrageous, extraordinary history.

Heather Havrilesky

Positive Entertainment Weekly At her best, [Havrilesky] is part Buddha and part Amy Schumer: wise, whip-smart, and profanely funny. Less dynamic, though, are Polly’s askers; overwhelmingly young creative types living in large coastal cities and struggling with romantic self-doubt or career ennui, they mostly seem interested in How to Solve a First-World Problem.

Liane Moriarty

Mixed Entertainment Weekly [Moriarty] loves to tease out a mystery, and it takes Truly nearly 300 pages to arrive at its relentlessly foreshadowed central event ... The book devotes so much energy to aftermath before reaching its big reveal that it begins to feel like a very special, very frustrating episode of CSI: BBQ. The last twist, though, is nearly worth the wait, and what sets Moriarty’s writing apart in the genre generally dismissed as chick lit has as much to do with her canny insights into human nature as her clever plotting.

Justine van der Leun

Positive Entertainment Weekly Van der Leun obsessively immerses herself in the case, combing court transcripts and police records, tracking down witnesses and friends and far-flung associates. Of the dozens of sources she finds, she grows especially close to convict-turned-advocate Easy Nofemela, who emerges as one of the most compelling figures in a story steeped in extraordinary characters and circumstances. And We Are Not Such Things—the title is taken from Nofemela’s pained response to a prosecutor’s portrayal of him and his codefendants as 'sharks smelling blood'—is an extraordinary book, if sometimes also an exhausting one: a dense and nuanced portrait of a country whose confounding, convoluted past is never quite history.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"...[a] harshly beautiful debut ... In saturated paragraphs and rich patois, Sun lays out the stark realities of an island whose entire economy relies on natural beauty, cheap labor, and limited resources—and explores what it means to live in a place where, as one character says, \'nobody love a black girl. Not even harself.\'\

Annie Proulx

Rave Entertainment Weekly Even though it’s 713 pages, it often recalls some of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s best short stories, including 'Brokeback Mountain,' given her ability to infuse loss and heartbreak and beauty into the sparsest of sentences ... Pages melt away as readers zoom through the decades. Proulx’s story is bigger than any one man, one death, or even one culture: It’s about the effect civilization and society have had on the land. In her magical way, Proulx leaves the reader with an impression of not only a collection of people, but our people and the country that shaped us as we shaped it. This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice.

Yaa Gyasi

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...[a] lyrical, devastating debut ... Toggling between two continents, Gyasi traces black history from the Middle Passage to the Great Migration and beyond, bringing every Asante village, cotton plantation, and coal mine into vivid focus. The rhythm of her streamlined sentences is clipped and clean, with brilliant bursts of primary color ... As each character cedes their allotted chapter to the next, some emotional impact is necessarily lost, but it’s done in service to the larger sweep of the story—and the luminous beauty of Gyasi’s unforgettable telling.

Emma Cline

Rave Entertainment Weekly Emma Cline’s fierce, gripping debut is much less interested in the stock answers to what motivates a man like Russell or Charles Manson (ego, insanity) than the deeper impulses that tug an ordinary girl like Evie toward that kind of madness—and how she can come so close to breaching it that she still wonders, decades later, at the thinness of the line that held her back, how arbitrary it might be that her hands are clean.

Stephanie Danler

Positive Entertainment Weekly An endless roundelay of rivalries and crushes—she is enthralled by both a taciturn tattooed bartender named Jake and his best friend, Simone, a sophisticated older server—propel the story forward, though those intrigues ultimately resonate less than Tess’ sensual awakening to food: creamy, ash-dusted cheeses; anchovies drenched in olive oil; dense, fleshy figs like 'a slap from another sun-soaked world.' That’s the book’s true romance—the heady first taste of self-discovery, bitter and salty and sweet.

Anton DiSclafani

Positive Entertainment Weekly DiSclafani gorgeously evokes Party’s midcentury setting, and the narrative unfolds much more elegantly than her dense 2013 best-seller, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. We learn Joan’s secret eventually, but for the reader she remains what she’s always been to Cece: a siren and a cipher.

Emma Straub

Positive Entertainment Weekly Various discoveries, betrayals, and romantic complications follow, though nothing in Modern’s meandering plot moves with any particular urgency. Instead, Straub lets her characters fall apart and come together in their own messy, refreshingly human ways—always older, sometimes wiser, but never quite done coming of age.

Hanya Yanagihara

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"A Little Life is not a little book—at 720 pages it’s a massive, sometimes maddening read—but it is a little bit of a bait and switch: Roughly halfway through, the other characters move to the margins, and Jude’s story takes over. Yanagihara pulls back the black curtain of his childhood slowly and with great care; by the time every dark corner is illuminated, it’s devastating. But she begins to lean too hard on his tragedy and let Life’s other compelling narratives slip away ... It’s a shame to say that the final chapters sometimes feel like a slog when the book has so much richness in it—great big passages of beautiful prose, unforgettable characters, and shrewd insights into art and ambition and friendship and forgiveness. Flaws and all, it’s still a wonderful Life.\

Lucia Berlin

Rave Entertainment Weekly Life (and a long battle with alcohol) prevented her from publishing regularly, but it’s all here in 43 autobiographical stories that read like one long, fascinating conversation full of switchbacks and revelations. Every detox ward, dingy Laundromat, and sunbaked Mexican palapa spills across the page in sentences so bright and fierce and full of wild color that you’ll want to turn each one over just to see how she does it. And then go back and read them all again.

Adam Johnson

Rave Entertainment Weekly Fortune’s six stories are mostly grounded in more familiar settings, but strangeness thrums beneath them all. The characters—a UPS driver in post-Katrina Louisiana, a cancer patient, a self-loathing pedophile, a mismatched pair of Korean defectors, the former warden of a Stasi prison—are all displaced in some way, exiled or lost or just gone astray. The best story may be the first: 'Nirvana,' a beautifully calibrated near-future fable about a Silicon Valley programmer who reanimates an assassinated president to help him cope with the illness of his young wife. But every one carves out its own little corner of weird, indelible humanity.

Adam Haslett

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...Michael is one of five narrators in Gone and by far the book’s most vivid. If other characters recede in his wake, it also feels true to the impact of mental illness, and Haslett’s writing is at its best when he illuminates not just madness but what it means to witness it, too.

Hope Jahren

Positive Entertainment Weekly [C]entral to the book is [Jahren's] friendship with an eccentric colleague named Bill who becomes her fellow plant-obsessive, platonic soul mate, and (sometimes literal) partner in crime. Her accounts of their ongoing dialogues can feel more clumsy than profound, but Jahren’s singular gift is her ability to convey the everyday wonder of her work: exploring the strange, beautiful universe of living things that endure and evolve and bloom all around us, if we bother to look.

Dominic Smith

Positive Entertainment Weekly Marty and Ellie’s subsequent entanglement—interwoven with vivid glimpses into the life of the enigmatic Dutchwoman whose work gives The Last Painting of Sara de Vos its muse—is the narrative’s heart. And if the book’s more current segments don’t resonate quite as fully as the ones set earlier, it mostly feels like a testament to Smith’s singular gift for conjuring distant histories. In his hands, the damp cobblestones and canals of 1600s Holland and the shabby gentility of Eisenhower-era New York feel as real and tactile and tinged with magic as de Vos’ indelible brushstrokes.

Dana Spiotta

Mixed Entertainment Weekly As a novelist, Spiotta is cool in both senses of the word: Her books, including the prizewinning Stone Arabia and Eat the Document, are praised for their taut modernity and lauded by literary supernovas like Don DeLillo and George Saunders. But she can also be chilly emotionally, and it’s not until late in Innocents’ disjointed narrative that her remove falls away.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Positive Entertainment Weekly It’s easy to see why Sweeney’s debut earned her a seven-figure advance and early praise from fans including Amy Poehler and Elizabeth Gilbert. Her writing is like really good dark chocolate: sharper and more bittersweet than the cheap stuff, but also too delicious not to finish in one sitting.

Fiona Barton

Positive Entertainment Weekly ...a taut reconstruction of a crime and a ruthless examination of marriage, told from the multiple viewpoints of not-always-reliable narrators ... The Widow is the kind of book you can zoom through on a long flight or a lazy Sunday: a smartly crafted, compulsively readable tale about the lies people tell each other, and themselves, when the truth is the last thing they really want to know.

Han Kang

Rave Entertainment Weekly ...in dreamlike passages punctuated by bursts of startling physical and sexual violence, Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.

Alexander Chee

Positive Entertainment Weekly Alexander Chee details Queen’s reams of source material in the endnotes, and the richness of his research is evident on every page ... If the novel has a real flaw, it’s that Lilliet’s interior world never comes quite as alive as the three-dimensional one she moves through.

Elizabeth McKenzie

Positive Entertainment Weekly McKenzie has a pitch-perfect ear for a certain kind of California kookery, and even when she veers twee (your tolerance for anthropomorphized rodents may be tested), it’s hard not to be charmed by Veblen’s whimsy.

Mary Louise Parker

Positive Entertainment Weekly What does a busy, successful actress with half an EGOT and two young children at home do for fun? Apparently she writes a book—a really good one, full of funny, poignant, sometimes surreal missives to men she has known.

Tom Hart

Rave Etertainment Weekly Hart’s graphic memoir is his attempt to process the crushing pain of his daughter’s loss, and it’s as harrowing and profound as any literary novel. In scratchy black-and-white panels, he traces the strange parabola of grief: 'You’re walking and falling. You’re hurtling and collapsing. You’re here and not here.'

Hannah Rothschild

Positive Entertainment Weekly Rothschild knows her subject firsthand; she comes from one of the world’s wealthiest families and has spent decades moving in the rarefied circles depicted here. That gives the novel its insidery spark and smooths over some of her sloppier narrative tricks.

Carrie Brownstein

Rave Entertainment Weekly [H]er honesty is disarming, and buoyed by the same dry wit that makes her scenester-lacerating IFC series Portlandia so good. That’s how she artfully manages to transcend the backstage tropes of the rock-bio genre, and why Hunger should become the new handbook for every modern girl (and yes, boys, too) looking for the courage to pursue a life less ordinary.

Lauren Groff

Positive Entertainment Weekly \"Groff is a fantastically vivid writer, though baroqueness can get the best of her, and her protagonists’ flowery self-regard wears thin. Still, it’s hard to stop reading. Lotto and Mathilde may be exhausting, but they’re also almost as fascinating as they think they are.\

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November 8, 2024