RaveThe Star TribuneHas an eye-opening factoid or anecdote in practically every sentence. These facts are not just idle trivia; the pieces of information Kimmelman disburses have narratives behind them ... The stories here are embedded, and part of Kimmelman\'s substantial accomplishment is unearthing them from their sources again and again ... The dialogue format Kimmelman has chosen is a curious one ... At times his introduction of data might feel a little overaggressive. What\'s energizing about these dialogues...is that they\'re held within the perpetually shifting and challenging context of the city itself ... The depth of the research here, in which it seems like every detail has been plumbed and every corner has been trawled, is of course part of the book\'s magic ... This book is historical spelunking disguised as a series of strolls through New York City, and as such it is well with the descent.
Stewart O'Nan
RaveThe Boston GlobeThis story of a crime of passion in a small Rhode Island suburb is very much about what is not said rather than what is said, and about the violence that can explode out of a calm that would seem to be the opposite of turbulent. Despite the banal surface, this novel invites us in — we want to know these people, learn about their complexities ... O’Nan’s great gift is that we want to know more about every person he writes, no matter how unremarkable they seem from the outside ... It’s hard to tell why O’Nan left out the male perspectives, as at moments the novel feels like it is missing something without them. And yet the development of the book shows these women and their very separate voices singing in a bittersweet counterpoint that rises to an unforgettable shout and then subsides ... Through prolonged exposure to the girls’ thoughts, O’Nan builds the novel’s tension until it feels like the air right before a monsoon ... The entire telling becomes an act of empathy. It’s an invention, but one that drives home irrevocably and elegantly what you’d been feeling as you read but did not fully acknowledge: that there are as many different kinds of pain as there are people.
Rivka Galchen
RaveThe Boston GlobeKatharina is a remarkable creation. We know her, yet there are aspects that remain mysterious, such as her work ... Galchen shows us that life hasn’t changed, and neither has human suspicion of the unknown, and neither has male fear of women. There are comic moments...but other scenes are wrenching, such as when Katharina is hauled naked out of her house to meet judgment in court. One of Galchen’s great accomplishments is making us see, through Katharina’s boldness, how illusory and unstable our concept of \'society\' is, and how ultimately, looking upwards, at the stars, away from the earth, as her son famously did, is a pursuit more likely to have truth at its end.
Betina González, tr. Heather Cleary
RaveThe Boston Globe... unsettling, fantastical, and often hilarious ... It’s a strange motion this book makes; you could call it meandering but that undersells how consistently riveting it is ... One fascinating thing about this book, out of several, is the amount of detail and bearing down we find here, despite its myriad subplots; this book maintains the weight of its details, and comfortably ... The force driving American Delirium is González’s clear fascination with her fictional subjects. Her lens knows no boundaries, delving into the most minute parts of characters’ lives [...] When we do finally reach a conclusion, we feel less like we have been reading a novel than like we have been listening to a symphony. We understand the novel has to end here, even if we don’t know why — and our mystification becomes one of the book’s many satisfactions.
Cynan Jones
PositiveThe Boston GlobeSometimes real-world problems are best explained through fiction. BBC Radio Four must have had this in mind when they gave Cynan Jones the green light to write the tense, stark, and beautifully paced connecting stories in Stillicide, which describe a future Earth on which water has become an increasingly precious commodity ... The landscape of Stillicide encourages a powerful sense of isolation ... Jones presents his narratives in short bursts of prose, accumulating like drops of water ... If you weren’t reading too carefully, and saw the short paragraphs falling down the page, you might think he was applying the by-now-common fragmentation technique to create a grander image or scenario in the reader’s mind, but in fact the brief paragraphs serve mainly to move the events described ahead faster ... Calling these stories narratives is a stretch — they more closely resemble portrayals of psychological positions, places the characters have ended up.
Darin Strauss
RaveThe Boston GlobeAs in Strauss’s other books, the movement here is perpetual and multidirectional; it never stops, and it’s never driving exactly where you think it’s going. A close comparison would be to certain American filmmakers like Altman, Cassavetes, or the Safdies—always churning, developing ... Strauss takes his time ... the truth-telling is devastating ... The book could be conceived as a series of frames of reference that move around, sometimes containing each other and sometimes not ... One of the (many) painful lessons the book teaches is that we can’t ask questions...of human relationships because there are no answers that are comfortable for everyone. The book’s setting provides a broader frame of reference than either of the two marriages; we shuttle between Isidore’s world, the dawning suburban microcommunity in Long Island; the Desilu Ranch in California, where Ball and Arnaz fake happiness; and the various studios where Lucille thrusts and parries with suitor colleagues/male oppressors. Somehow we get a very clear sense of these places, down to their smell, with fairly spare description ... The author asserts himself, here as elsewhere in his books, through his rigorously playful approach to language ... as a document of history, both family and otherwise, it reads like a dream painted in bold and fearsome strokes.
Chris Ware
RaveFull StopThe work of Chris Ware is deeply sad ... What keeps me coming back, and what makes this work so remarkable, is the soul running through it: in characters’ wizened faces, in their faintly plump bodies, and in the all-too-believable nuances of their dialogues and monologues. This is humanity ... And yet, by virtue of its sheer size and expansiveness, this collection of strips is a leap forward from the species of sadness Ware has explored before. Viewed in retrospect, the work reads as if Ware were painting a mural in illustration of a series of philosophical issues: what it means to love, what it means to be alone, what it means to be part of a social construct, what it means to be an inanimate object, what it means to be a city, and even, at certain particularly poignant moments, what it means to be a color. And as such, the title is an understatement: the real story told here is the story of the world, and how we live in it.
Marie-Helene Bertino
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe story of a lonely 9-year-old girl’s quest to perform at a Philadelphia jazz club on Christmas Eve rolls along much like a piece of music — different story lines wind and unwind like musical themes, and these stories are all threaded together with a consistently energized brio like one of the tunes played at the club giving the book its title. Each sentence, as well, is composed with a poetic ear; no line is wasted. That’s rare ... Bertino lays out these interlocking stories in brief bursts, the transitions between them as smooth but also as dynamic and as effective as jump cuts in a film ... It would be easy to say, given the lyrical nature of the prose here, that Bertino is going too far, that she’s trying to poeticize difficult subject matter: bereavement, romantic frustration, lust, alcoholism, a child’s alienation. In the jazz club scenes, the language takes on a faintly bebop quality that edges toward Kerouac. But careful thought and another look at the words on the page give a different impression. Bertino gets inside people, objects and experiences in the novel, imagining them, exploring them and reporting her experiences.
Stephen King
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksJoyland is as genre-foiling as its author .... As you read the dialogue, the book becomes less a story about a summer’s mystery than a tale of entry into another, coexisting world, one with its own rules, codes, and language ...strengthens his storyline with a rich cast of supporting characters ...is quick reading, and its pleasures are simple ones. And yet it’s just complicated enough to force us to question the distinction between high and low literature.
