About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Nathan Englander
Rave Bookforum ... the Pulitzer Prize finalist’s most humorous and moving work since his best-selling debut collection ... Englander’s concerns move beyond those specific to his upbringing by focusing on larger questions about the permeable borders of modernity and tradition, morality and immorality, believers and non-believers, individuals and families—definitive themes in American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...While the basic story of his latest novel is well-charted territory for Englander, Kaddish.com does not feel like a hollow repetition ... Englander is a master at displaying the way a single decision, made in a private moment, can stay with us for the rest of our lives and haunt our future.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Positive BookForum \"From the onset, Dangarembga floods the novel with descriptions that foreshadow the terror to come. Tambu’s observations are full of unnerving tension; everything, even the most benign objects and scenes, are full of predatory menace ... Dangarembga is unflinching in describing what happens to someone like Tambu—educated, determined, and proud—when society does its best to break them.\
Lydia Millet
Positive Los Angeles Times In showing how the rich rely on \'lazy\' people to do the labor that makes their lives, particularly at home, possible, Millet hones in on an audacious and laughable incongruity ... The collection is linked through characters that reappear (as relatives, friends, lovers) as the book progresses, showing the ways in which we are living in simultaneous dimensions of pain, betrayal and forgetting. Yet as bleak as their situations may get, there remains a thread of dark humor.
Edwidge Danticat
Positive The Los Angeles Times Danticat’s descriptions of both texts and feelings are often unsentimental. She prefers sparseness and silence, refusing to offer herself or her readers closure ... Some of the most moving passages from the memoir take place as Danticat describes the anticipation of her mother’s death and the terror involved in such an immeasurable loss.
Amy Thielen
Positive The Los Angeles Times I wish Thielen included how re-planting herself back home after years of insisting on the benefits of living a peripatetic life help establish her career as a cookbook writer and Food Network host that highlights the regional Midwestern cuisine. Overall however, Thielen’s ode to living at the crossroads of culinary high and low offers thoughtful insights into the life of the chef, highlighting that when, 'you give a girl a knife,' as her mom did when Amy was young, you pass on a legacy: that she will learn how to use it, and someday 'consider that knife an extension of her hand, as wedded to her finger as a nail.'”
Hari Kunzru
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Hari Kunzru has written a timely novel that demands an examination of the toxicity and perniciousness of whiteness. With razor-sharp insights, White Tears depicts what Greg Tate calls 'everything but the burden' ... Kunzru has listened closely to the sounds most attuned to American life, and his novel pays homage to the legacy of the blues that permeates much of the American present ... As Kunzru demonstrates in the novel, the echoes of Charlie Shaw’s lyrics reverberate through history, into the present. Regardless of a willful refusal to know him and his experience, his song is omnipresent and will haunt us until we no longer disregard its existence.
Hisham Matar
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Hisham Matar’s book-length elegy is significant both because of the story and for the way the story is told. In this triptych of beloved country, father, and the art that survives, Matar moves us with the force of his compassion, grace, and fury ... Matar has created something rare and literary with The Return, his own prayer for the dead ... not simply an account of forgiveness: anger, suffering, and loss flow all the way through in Matar’s precise and lyrical prose ... The Return is one of the most notable memoirs of our generation, by one of our most elegant living writers. In his testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit, Hisham Matar has shown us what language can do.