PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThrough this weird, funny, deeply earnest book about a killer alien who doesn’t fit in on Earth, Min has crafted a queer novel about feeling out of place in one’s body and its surroundings ... Mumu’s deep desire for community — and the momentary burst of love they have with a particularly sensuous lover late in the book — are where the book achieves emotional depth. But Walking Practice is a slim novel and this arc is underdeveloped in favor of cultural commentary that, for all the alien’s layers and folds, stays largely flat, rarely deepening beyond what feel like somewhat predictable social observations. Still, the evident pleasure with which Min has drawn this character makes for a vibrant and memorable fictional encounter with an otherness that’s not, in the end, so different.
Sofia Samatar
Rave4ColumnsAn intimately diaristic travelogue, a stirring personal inquiry, and a captivating, meticulously researched history ... With its vibrant love of place, its deep concern with archives and histories—particularly colonial ones—and its thrill in the pleasure of language, this new book is of a piece with her stories ... She model[s] what it might look like to respectfully enter others’ stories ... The result is a book that resembles nothing so much as a magpie’s nest: that impressive mess of assorted twigs that is in fact most intricately made. In the end Samatar abandoned any precise formula for moving neatly into and out of others’ stories. Instead she built something far more alive: this extravagance of branches and threads and gleaming details, bursting with the kind of treasures yielded only by boundless curiosity.
Melissa Febos
Rave4ColumnsIn her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill ... Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence ... In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it ... Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed ... what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.
Olivia Laing
Rave4ColumnsGiven the vast, pervasive relevance of its subject, freedom, Olivia Laing’s new book about it is appropriately big—in scope, in reach, in feeling ... travels buoyantly through a rich swathe of cultural history to investigate bodily freedom and its curtailments: from illness and pain to the methods we take to relieve them, from state-sanctioned violence to the freedom movements that have emerged to resist it, from gender injustice to sexual liberation. It’s a formidable undertaking, one that Laing executes savvily, her plainly diligent research synthesized in lucid, coolly urgent prose ... These and other moments of autobiographical writing—including scenes of her life in the climate-justice movement—augment and personalize her analysis. But mostly, as she does in her other books, Laing focuses on the biographies of others ... For all its big-minded large-heartedness, Everybody advances with a curious, even endearing modesty. Though this book does both, Laing is more concerned with excavating insights from her subjects’ astonishing lives than she is with supplying us with a new framework for theorizing freedom. Indeed, she seems aware that her claims about freedom are rarely surprising ... a cool touch, compelling a stirring vitality.
Torrey Peters
Rave4Columns... vivacious ... a book that merrily skewers straight and queer orthodoxy alike. Savvily constructed as a breakout novel, Detransition, Baby is almost certainly the most buzzed-about book in the history of transgender fiction. And it’s terrific: smart, socially generous, a pleasure, a gift ... What initially seems like an absurdist Shakespearean gender-play plot isn’t that at all, it turns out. It’s instead a feasible proposition, certainly not the first alternative family structure ever dreamed up, but perhaps the first of its kind to appear in literary fiction. Peters explores the cross-cultural frictions it sparks with meticulous nuance and terrific wit ... challenges the anti-reproductive No Futurism of early-twenty-first-century radical queer politics ... Those who are already fans of Peters—author of two audacious novellas written explicitly for other trans women as part of a trans counterliterature—may balk, as I did, at the idea of bourgeois values and the domestic sphere intruding upon her fiction. But the other side of it is this: the installment of trans lives and trans concerns into the arena of women’s literature—and the nuclear family. In any case, this is the same Torrey Peters ... With precisely zero interest in making her characters paragons of respectability, Peters joins a school of novelists (e.g., Alissa Nutting, Ottessa Moshfegh) who revel in the unruliness of resistant women ... The novel’s concerns with trans futurity are centered within a feminist reproductive justice framework. Abortion, miscarriage, IVF, adoption, the history of forced sterilization—all are handled with agility and grace ... Equal parts loving and eviscerating, our narrator knows all and withholds little. If her knowingness can become at times overbearing, it’s a function of her role. Indeed, the novel is so rich with social commentary one could almost miss the soundly built plot whirring softly in the background ... Peters’s brilliant novel blasts through the gates to claim more space for trans futures in fiction.
Harry Dodge
RaveBookforumThe book is a brain! A peripheral brain that wonders about machine intelligence, consciousness, and itself. My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing sifts through a relentless stream of inputs, nestling experiences and ideas to discover what might magnetize what. Roaring with thinking, the text might like to rise up and reassemble itself into animate form ... Organized in loosely connected passages that skitter nonlinearly across Dodge’s life, My Meteorite, the artist’s first book, is webby and reliably weird ... The degree of pleasure one takes in this experiment will likely correspond to the degree of giddy thrill one finds in synchronicity ... He incites us to wonder when and how patterns become meaningful ... All this is, to some extent, a ruse, a device to make a pattern out of Dodge’s ruminations. It might get trying if the writing weren’t so viciously, animatedly good ...There’s a restless feeling throughout, as though the text wants to stretch beyond the obligations of cohesion ... I can’t say I followed all its threads, but Dodge’s mystical intimacy quest feeds back steadily and sustains.
Carmen Maria Machado
Rave4ColumnsMachado blasts her own experience with an abusive intimate partner into a sparking arc of story bits ... a fresh and unflinching interrogation of abuse in queer relationships ... Given the limited histories available, Machado’s hyperstoried memoir aims to fill in—even overstuff—this blank ... This book’s impact will be more emphatic, considerably, than a plink. In the Dream House arrives with a thunder that resounds.
Trisha Low
PositiveBookforum... a mostly earnest, always engrossing long essay that charts a personal quest for utopia in the form of some kind of home. If this second book is not, frankly, as fun as her first, its pleasures are of an altogether different sort. Low has traded in the no-futurism of her suicidal phantasies in favor of dreams of revolution. A quixotic, improbably sentimental work, Socialist Realism longs for a better world while celebrating the minor joys of this one ... That self—Low’s narrative persona—is somewhat removed, obscured by the frothy buildup of texts she thinks through. More commentator than character, Low is most present as a seeking, questioning I-entity ... may itself be a kind of posturing: autotheory as a new experiment in self-on-self drag ... a searching book; indeed, as the questions keep coming Low achieves a vertiginous effect. Written in an engagingly casual, millennial punk style, it is eminently quotable, yet has moments of glibness ... Staging an evenly matched tug of war between the utopian and the quotidian, Socialist Realism yanks us ruthlessly from one position to the other until the two collapse finally on top of each other.
