RaveNew York Times Book ReviewEngaging ... The Sentence covers a lot of ground, from ghosts to the joys and trials of bookselling to the lives of Native Americans and inmates doing hard time. And that’s just the first half of the story, before the pandemic, before George Floyd. The novel gets a little baggy after a while, as Erdrich struggles to juggle multiple plotlines. But the virtues here so outweigh the flaws that to complain seems almost like ingratitude ... The Sentence is rife with passages that stop you cold, particularly when Erdrich...articulates those stray, blindsiding moments that made 2020 not only tragic but also so downright weird and unsettling ... There is something wonderfully comforting in the precise recollection of such furtive memories, like someone quietly opening a door onto a little slice of clarity ... The Sentence testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives ... There are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of The Sentence, that’s plenty.
Masha Gessen, photographs by Misha Friedman
RaveThe Daily Beast\"[Never Remember] will trouble your sleep for a long time ... Of late, the Putin regime has disguised the horror of the camps behind the fabricated belief that Stalin was an exceptional leader responsible for the success and power Russia has as a country today. Gessen and Friedman depict the truth behind the walls of these camps through a collection of documents and photographs that taken together offer a searing rebuttal to Russian revisionism.\
Mark Z. Danielewski
RaveNewsweekAs big as the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, it takes the form of a book-length essay by a mysterious blind man named Zampano, writing about a 1993 documentary film called The Navidson Record. In the late '80s, Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, moved his family into an old Virginia farmhouse that proves to be five sixteenths of an inch longer inside than it is outside … There are two and sometimes three narratives going on at once. Concurrently, the book's text moves backward, upside down and diagonally, sometimes on the same page. There is even an index. Both daunting and brilliant, the novel is surprisingly fun to read, a sort of postmodern fun house where the reader becomes the author's partner in putting the story together.
