PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBall’s stripped-down surrealism gives way to stream-of-consciousness prose poetry from the point of view of the accused ... Both halves are expertly written, and the second is visceral and moving. But do the halves form a whole? ... Ball certainly caught something here. The Repeat Room is compelling, eerie and dreamlike, even if, like a dream, the parts don’t fully cohere.
Mark Anthony Jarman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page. \'Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing,\' opens the visceral \'Burn Man on a Texas Porch, the first entry in Burn Man, an anthology of 21 stories culled from Jarman’s four-decade career. The rest of the story is, like many of Jarman’s tales, a hallucinatory rummaging through the mind of a broken man. After receiving skin grafts that \'didn’t quite fit,\' the narrator fumes: \'Hate is everything they said it would be, and it waits for you like an airbag.\' In Jarman’s stories and sentences, things seem always ready to explode ... The archetypical Jarman narrator is a bedraggled man dragging around a big aching heart. He might be a petty thief, a hockey scout, an addict or a bloodstained soldier ... When I read these stories, I scribbled down two names: Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. Then I turned to the book’s introduction, by John Metcalf, which speaks at length about the influence of both on Jarman’s prose. But let me be clear: Jarman is no mere imitator. He may have the crackling syntax of Hannah, Johnson’s gift for shocking yet poetic images, and the penchant for loners and misfits of both, but Jarman’s voice rings unique.\
Sean Michaels
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTimely and lovely ... A loud topic, but Michaels’s novel is quiet and thoughtful ... Michaels has a poet’s eye for detail and ear for fresh phrasing ... A tender and moving character portrait full of sharp scenes and memorable observations. While the novel might have a timely premise, it’s a jumping-off point for timeless meditations on art, family, connection and the meaning of a life.
Nicholas Binge
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe novel is smartly paced, deploying twists and turns strategically to keep the reader moving ... Binge’s crisp prose moves well between science fiction concepts, Gothic terror and fast-paced action sequences. Some of the supporting characters, including, frustratingly, Naoko, remain as thin as the upper atmosphere. But the ideas are big and the journey is a whole lot of fun.
Sequoia Nagamatsu
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf you’re a short-story lover — as I am — you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft. If you crave sustained character and plot arcs, well, you’ll have to settle for admiring the well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts. Hardly small pleasures ... The reader might best approach the book like a melancholy Black Mirror season ... This is a lovely though bleak book. Humanity has long turned to humor in our darkest moments, but levity feels absent even in a chapter narrated by a stand-up comedian. That said, the somber tone unifies the disparate characters and story lines ... a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the \'speculative epic\': genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes ... Nagamatsu squarely hits both the \'literary\' and \'science fiction\' targets, offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits ... a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.
Anna Wiener
RaveInsideHook... terrific ... [Wiener\'s] prose is sharp and memorable — I found myself underlining sentences in every chapter — and the subject matter is timely ... Wiener highlights the strangeness of the tech companies that run our lives by avoiding naming them...It’s a move that lets Uncanny Valley feel less trapped in time, but it also highlights the absurdity of modern life.
Caleb Crain
PositiveBook PostThe plot is a little thin for novel’s length, but what holds it together is the thematic link between the literal surveillance of activist groups by the government and the interpersonal surveillance that the characters—and by extension all of us—do daily. Crain’s eye is especially attuned to the inner movements of the human heart and the way in which we all constantly size each other up and try to explain our actions ... reads more like a nineteenth-century social novel: Henry James at Occupy Wall Street ... Crain’s slow pace and intricate descriptions of the interactions of his group give the novel the space for these insights to bloom ... In a time when it’s said that social media algorithms can predict your decisions more accurately than your intimates, Caleb Crain might provide the sort of narrative we need. In the face of such encroachments, perhaps reasserting our irreducible humanity is the most radical thing we can do.
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
PositiveBOMB\"These twenty stories are polished and precise, but they are less sparkling gems than hunks of amber showcasing the bizarre insects trapped inside ... No matter how strange Schweblin gets, her stories are always gripping thanks to her understanding of tension ... Mouthful of Birds is like a drawer filled with strange, bizarre, and unsettling objects. If you are drawn to the dark and the weird, these are excellent stories to both make you think and keep you up at night.\
Ottessa Moshfegh
PositiveChicago Review of BooksOttessa Moshfegh’s oeuvre reads almost like an attempt to see just how \'unlikeable\' characters can get. To be clear, I mean that as a compliment ... While plot is not the primary driver of a novel like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the story does spin its wheels a bit in the middle ... About halfway through the novel, the scattered references to time make you realize the novel is building towards 9/11. This is a bold move for a book about being detached from everything, but without spoiling the ending, I’ll say it delivers ... My Year of Rest and Relaxation has more stripped-down prose than some of Moshfegh’s other work, though Moshfegh still delights in lyrical beauty even when describing the ugly.
Joy Williams
RaveBOMBThe Changeling is less about the story than the sentences, which are, in this reviewer’s estimation, enchanting. Not everyone agrees. In his infamous review, Broyard spent much of his time quoting sentences and calling them impenetrable. Your appreciation of The Changeling will depend on if you find appealing sentences such as (to pick two of Broyard’s targets), \'Oh to bring back the days when stars spoke at the mouths of caves,\' and \'She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.\' The great witchcraft of The Changeling’s prose is not in the individual phrase, but in the movement of its sentences. What makes Williams’s style so hard to pin down is her ability to shift register, style, and mood on a dime ... Throughout the novel, her sentences seem to absorb everything—darkness and humor, myth and mundanity, irony and pathos—and fuse them together by some strange alchemy. The Changeling is a novel where everything is shifting from the events to the language ... The Changeling remains Williams’s fullest plunge into the uncanny and the magical. Give it a try. Let it cast its spell on you.
Denis Johnson
RaveBOMB\"...five stories, most of them longer than thirty pages, that span a range of characters and situations, yet are unified by the aspect of Johnson’s work that towers over the rest: his voice. My god, that voice. Johnson somehow manages to be both conversational and poetic, simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious ... Like any Denis Johnson work, each page of this collection is peppered with one or two tremendous lines that reach out to grab your heart ... Johnson has an astonishing power to turn from one emotion to another in a line or two. His transitions between stories, sections, and paragraphs are worth the study of every aspiring fiction writer ... The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is yet another terrific book of heart, humanity, and humor. Read and treasure it. It is a final gift from a master.\
Osama Alomar, Trans. by C. J. Collins
RaveThe New York TimesIf Kafka had rewritten Aesop’s fables, the result might have looked like this thought-provoking new collection of literary allegories and aphorisms ... Timely and timeless, The Teeth of the Comb is a masterly collection by an urgent literary voice.
