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Recent Reviews
Gabriel Smith
Positive The New York Times Book Review Smith explores how this family navigates the disputed borders of its shared memories, pondering what it means to choose one story over another — as well as the consequences of refusing to choose, especially in the wake of grief ... Not every narrative thread is resolved as cleanly as Gabriel’s is, or even tied up at all, but that’s OK too. Perhaps those endings can only be found in another novel, or another world.
T. C. Boyle
Positive The New York Times Book Review The characters navigate a series of escalating ecological disasters ... Boyle’s tone grows increasingly elegiac, or perhaps only more satirical ... Less a novel about what might be done about the climate crisis and more an accomplished family drama with a climate-crisis setting ... Boyle doesn’t offer his own clear answer. Maybe he doesn’t need to.
Isabel Waidner
Rave The New York Times Book Review Waidner grounds their surrealism in the history of England’s bigotry against queer people and immigrants; in the ideas and images of other writers, artists and musicians; and in recognizable sci-fi tropes ... \'What it’s like to exist on someone else’s terms? In someone else’s violent fiction?\' If Sterling Karat Gold is a novel-length answer to these queries, it’s also an assertive repudiation of a world in which such questions must exist. That Waidner delivers such moral clarity with nonstop wit and invention makes their novel not just an admirable achievement but a pleasure to read.
Stephen King
Rave New York Times Book Review There’s plenty of fresh invention in Fairy Tale, but much of what Charlie encounters reminds him of something else he’s seen or read ... King’s portals — like his novels — have always been leaky apertures, prone to cultural exchange and playful cross-contamination ... Fairy Tale is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it’s also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action ... Despite the plot’s twists and turns, the biggest surprise Fairy Tale has to offer King’s so-called Constant Readers might be the book’s promise of a happy ending ... I’ll bet many readers hungry for a genuinely feel-good adventure won’t care what tactics King uses to deliver the goods: These days, some of us will take all the happy endings we can get, however unlikely they seem.
Margaret Atwood
Rave The New York Times Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood’s first collection since Moral Disorder in 2006, begins with three linked stories about women who have been romantically involved with a middling poet named Gavin Putnam ... Many of this book’s stories — or 'tales,' as the subtitle and acknowledgments insist — offer characters a chance to put their own understandings of gallantry, courage and revenge to the test, in ways both mundane and extraordinary ... An obsession with aging and dying unites much of Stone Mattress, and Atwood, more than 40 books into her career, has arrived here preoccupied not just with the churn of generations but also with legacy and reputation, with getting straight the story of one’s life — the tale about the tale — and with surviving what happens once no one is paying any attention anymore.
Marisa Silver
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...beguiling...a powerful exploration of the relationship between our changeable bodies and our just as malleable identities ... Silver’s storytelling tactics are finely matched to her themes, with her book’s structure frequently mimicking the dreamlike movements of memories and fables ... It’s a credit to Silver’s skill that before the novel ends she finds one more way to reopen its narrative possibilities.