About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Adam Thirlwell
Positive The New York Times Book Review Sweeping yet tentative sentences ... Thirlwell has a history of cultivating lightly adversarial relationships with his readers ... To read a Thirlwell novel is to be forced to stroke one’s chin.
Maggie Shipstead
Mixed New York Times Book Review Running the gamut between parodic faux-autofiction and historical fiction narrated by a bevy of marooned, increasingly dissolute Frenchwomen, the stories here are almost studiously varied ... There is a generous spirit beneath Shipstead’s controlled, sometimes finicky style, but her most immersive stories are the ones that seem to escape her ... Shipstead’s less successful stories tend to be either too self-conscious of their status as short fiction...or plainly unfinished ... Dutiful short works like these can make readers ask beside-the-point questions like, \'Should this have been a novel?\'
Sheila Heti
Positive Bookforum There is much more to this novel than daddy issues, including: art criticism, the narcissism of large differences, the end of the world, and Manet ... The new book marks a welcome return to an earlier, more improvisational sensibility of Heti’s, one more concerned with princesses and giants than the warts-and-all realities of birthing artworks and babies ... Pure Colour changes tack and narration often, and there can be a deus ex machina feel to the weightiest scenes ... For a novel that seems at the outset to run on clashing worldviews, there’s a lot of accretive world-building ... [An] oddly baroque book ... [Mira] \'hadn’t meant to kiss Annie on the back of the neck, so sensually, the first time they were alone together, outside.\' The commas here, the appendments, the unmistakable oops—this is headlong syntax, and lovely. Typically, Heti’s plain language—feverish punctuation or not—matches the documentary aspect of her work, but here it has found its truest calling: shepherding secondhand embarrassment ... Heti lingers on the clarifying properties of loss as the novel’s pace slows ... Pure Colour requires trust in what is preordained without demanding hard answers.
Lauren Oyler
Positive Bookforum Oyler all but invites us to read the novel through the lens of her criticism. Sometimes that feels like an exercise, or a test, or a hunt. I won’t list all the times Oyler plays with the ruminative cliché about things that signify both \'everything and nothing\'; readers can decide for themselves whether they’re meant as satire. Looking for an overarching theory would put us in a category that Oyler has conveniently dismissed. Fake Accounts closes with a hasty twist that undermines the narrator’s entire project. She sees this, in part, as a failure to close-read the now obvious evidence. Looking back, we can be certain only that her version of events is—to borrow a favorite, maddening formulation of hers—reliably unreliable. This caveat is nothing new. The actual surprises in Fake Accounts are the minor ones. You think you know someone—and then she enrolls in German lessons.
Emma Cline
Positive The Nation These stories suffer from bad timing in that they’re about men who date much younger women, sweet-faced teens just discovering porn and that their own bodies are perhaps wonderlands, old men living in the past, and girls who say things like, \'Men love that.\' These characters and their wrongdoings are best understood as parts of a larger project, united by Cline’s persistent interest in sidling into the minds of the guilty, the complicit, the canceled ... Narrators who would be considered survivors elsewhere think of themselves as perpetrators; predators regard themselves as victims. Characters tend to hover just outside themselves (written falsehoods remain a solid medium for conveying disassociation), their innermost thoughts appearing as truth-booth questions that require a witness to mean anything ... Detractors will say that Cline has a weakness for humanizing despicable men. Actually, she said that herself ... Cline lingers on stale remnants and dated, embarrassing details. Or the golden days in the minds of her myriad fathers ... Cline identifies the imaginative gaps necessarily left by reportage but is in no hurry to fill them. These stories read like freshly broken news, not least because of their familiar subject matter but also in their delicacy and euphemism.
Andrew Martin
Mixed Bookforum In Cool for America, Martin yields further to the times—one might say he shares his platform by all puny means available, by which I mean more of his narrators are women ... Martin’s writing cuts close to his own bone ... Existential dramas play out in bleak sentences that delight in the same ways a good bra or jockstrap might ... Martin invites all this settling to devastate us with its smallness ... He’s a deliberate writer, so it’s worth asking why his narrators could all use the same attitude adjustment ... Again and again, Martin favors the same defects and charms in his characters, who harbor both superiority and inferiority complexes, and might even think this makes them unique. Martin seems intent on demonstrating by repetition that it does not ... These stories have me champing at the bit for what one narrator calls \'a less mediated life.\' Compared to Early Work, these stories pay more mature shrift to the question of why a proto-writer might not write ... I suspect he wants readers to wonder whether the narrators here are proxy targets for self-loathing. That’s one explanation for why they all sound the same, for the choice words and preemptive digs so precise and pervasive they seem, on some level, to be self-directed. Is Martin grooming himself for an elaborate and circular neg? It’s a better look to humiliate your darlings than to kill them. Especially if you have trouble making up your mind.