About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Francine Prose
Rave The Los Angeles Times Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time ... She widens her lens on each intimate anecdote, narrows it on information-enriched passages that might otherwise feel dryly didactic. You’d have to read many, many books to deduce what Prose serves up here in just a few sentences: a revolution rendered as roux ... The era Prose profiles under the title 1974 produced crucial social advances, and did collateral damage to those, such as Russo, who were driven mad by the effort required. Fortunately for us, that period also yielded the best book yet by the wildly prolific, astonishingly talented Francine Prose.
Caroline Leavitt
Positive The Los Angeles Times [Leavitt\'s] gift for creating complex, unpredictable yet self-aware protagonists is on full display ... Leavitt infuses a much-told story with contemporary social issues that render the work fresh and provocative and deep ... As we hurtle toward an ending that somehow surprises despite its inevitability, Leavitt urges us to consider the tangle of social issues that her story unearths.
Anne Lamott
Rave The Washington Post In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux ... At times, Somehow made me huffy about — by which I mean envious of — Lamott’s gift for writing powerfully, deeply, often radically, while appealing to, well, everyone ... No matter one’s external descriptors, Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.
Stephen McCauley
Rave The Washington Post McCauley drops us into a real-life land, somewhat resembling ours now, in which sexual orientation is part of the landscape, not an unnatural disaster, and love is love (and mishegoss), no matter its form ... McCauley weaves a witty social critique from the interplay between his characters and the day’s breaking news ... Whatever your politics and predilections, McCauley’s gifts for prose, plot and provocation are likely to offer you a few fast-flying hours in his sunny, slightly futuristic world.
Kate Christensen
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Incisive ... Rachel’s deep observations, bitter and smart and sad, steer us through this coming-of-middle-age tale of a driven, wounded woman seeing her present self in contrast to her life of origin.
Caitlin Moran
Pan Los Angeles Review of Books Moran’s candid humor does the cause of gender equality more harm than good ... The framework she builds... is clever, and accessible ... The book’s problems, however, outweigh its entertainment value. For starters, the \"journalism\" on which she bases her shaky suppositions makes a mockery of the profession ... Unsurprisingly, the conclusion she draws, and spends 300 pages attempting to defend, is insulting to her own intelligence, and ours.
Aparna Nancherla
Rave The Los Angeles Times Super-smart, deliciously readable, achingly poignant ... A cogent mashup of studies and stats on self-esteem filtered through Nancherla’s personal experience ... Also much appreciated: Nancherla doesn’t offer the standard it-gets-better catharsis, which can insinuate that self-confidence comes standard with Nancherla-level success.
Caitlin Shetterly
Positive The Los Angeles Times I loved reading this book, which I gulped down in two otherwise busy days. I resisted and also relished its bizarro details of the day the world ground to a halt ... Some obvious pandemic markers are strangely absent from the narrative. We don’t see a single episode of a cold or a cough ... While Alice is as “woke” as a hedge fund manager’s frustrated wife can realistically be... she seems to experience little or no empathy for the 99% who suffer so much more than she does ... While I appreciate the author’s rendering of the psychological trauma inflicted by the pandemic even on the wealthy, Pete and Alice in Maine left me longing to read the pandemic stories of the rest of the population.
Ramona Ausubel
Rave The Los Angeles Times Love it I did. Devour it I did. Recommend it to everyone, I do ... Ausubel is a supernaturally gifted writer whose heart, soul, wit and intellect are evident in every wacky setting, character and plot line she weaves. Few authors can do what she does, seemingly effortlessly ... The Last Animal is many things. A mother-daughter love story. A global-warming warning. A fabulist fantasy. A sci-fi eco-scheme. A coming-of-age duet. A feminist critique of workplace misogyny. A study of grief. Even if none of these genres are your jam, I suggest you do what I do when approaching a work of Ausubel’s. Forget everything you think you know about your reading tastes, sink into her weird world and prepare to fall in love with a 4,000-year-old baby mammoth.
Hanna Halperin
Positive The Washington Post Compelling ... Convincing ... It’s a credit to Halperin’s craft that despite the plot’s true-to-life repetitiveness, the reader is mesmerized by Leah’s stubborn refusal to recognize Charlie’s demons, or her own ... A wrenching story that’s been lived and told before. Halperin does us a service by sharing her version of it, entertaining, warning and educating us with her all-too-accurate novel.
Laura Zigman
Rave The Washington Post \"...the deepest and most dramatic of Zigman’s six novels, is a profound reflection on her upbringing ... Showcasing Zigman’s emotional range, Small World is spiced by the gravity of its real-life provenance. The novel is as poignant as it is funny, as thought-provoking as it is witty, and searingly relatable.\
Kashana Cauley
Rave Oprah Daily In today’s America, what constitutes success? What are the obstacles to achieving it? How do race, class, age, and location affect the odds? These oh-so-serious questions are tackled with scathing, lol-inducing wit in The Survivalists, Kashana Cauley’s smart, sharp debut novel ... Like the novel itself, its smart, satiric opening line is right on point for the era into which the novel and its characters have been born. Cauley’s comedic and literary chops had this reader guffawing at her characters’ self-serving, oh-so-trendy ridiculousness, then flunking the mirror test. Wait a minute. That’s me.
Michelle Tea
Rave The Washington Post Whether Tea is writing nonfiction or cult-favorite fiction, her work is her own, ringing in her unmistakable voice: wry, witty, authentic, down-to-earth but also way-up-in-the-clouds. Above all, it’s the self-deprecating, self-aware and ultimately self-loving honesty that distinguishes Tea’s way of life and her irresistible, evocative and wise way of writing about it ... So it’s poignant, and very much in character, that Tea ends Knocking Myself Up with a painfully honest afterword.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Rave Oprah Daily To read The Latecomer is to be treated to a garden of literary delights. Thoroughly modern social satire! Tonally spot-on chapter titles ... What’s not to love about Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 11th book? Absolutely nothing ... Most novelists get something right. Many get some things right. Very few novelists weave all these qualities into a welcoming net its readers can fall back into with grateful abandon, trusting the book and its author have the strength of purpose to hold them ... One of the many delights of The Latecomer is its author’s adroit handling of the era, locations, and demographic in which the novel is set. Clearly, Korelitz has thoughts and feelings, strong ones, about the personal/psychological theme of her story: the ways in which parents are shaped by their own childhood traumas, and necessarily pass them on, despite their massive, often backfiring efforts not to. Korelitz seems equally passionate about the story’s social/political theme: the narcissistic hypocrisies of wealthy New York’s contemporary creative class ... not a plot-driven, action-fueled novel. The story line doesn’t gallop from start to finish; rather, it moves with the stolid intentionality of the hooves of horse-drawn carriages clip-clopping on cobblestones, returning to their feed bags near New York’s Plaza Hotel. The story line of this satiric, incisive, comical, 439-page New York novel hangs on the two tragedies that bookend it: the opening disaster that lays the groundwork for the plot, and the final, shocking yet inevitable tragedy that closes it ... There are many pages in between, but the masterful skills of the author ensure that the reader won’t be waiting impatiently for the next plot point. Rather, the reader is most likely to close the book disappointed that Hanff Korelitz hasn’t yet supplied another 439 pages of laughter, head-slapping, pure delight, and possibly self-recognition to savor.
Mark Rozzo
Rave Washington Post Wonderful ... A rollicking tale ... Which brings us to Rozzo’s greatest authorial gift. By centering his book on the juxtaposition of opposing worlds...Rozzo makes each world, each character and each reality both shocking and believable, both ridiculous and sublime.
Melissa Febos
Rave Oprah Daily A lazy categorization would describe Body Work as \'part memoir, part craft book, part literary treatise.\' But Febos’s work defies this kind of segmentation. Each of her books contains multitudes, seamlessly coalesced into a single truth-seeking missile. Her trademark magic is in the melding ... Febos offers a compelling rebuttal of the accusation that a memoir is simply a diary in print ... asks the fundamental questions with which our literature, and our culture, are currently grappling. Which version of the story is yours, which is mine, which is true? Is there room in our American house for more than one story, or more than one version of the same story?
Hilma Wolitzer
Rave Los Angeles Times ... the stories in Today A Woman Went Mad shine as brightly, cut as deeply and entertain as deliciously as if they’d been written today ... Wolitzer’s gifts for capturing time and character are on fine display in the title story ... Each of these stories is like a circus clown car, stuffed with more meaning than Wolitzer’s deceptively simple sentences seem able to contain ... the collection ends with \'The Great Escape,\' a ferocious COVID-19 story that could only have been written in the hideous year of 2020.
Kirstin Valdez Quade
Rave The Los Angeles Times Like her stories, the novel is sheathed in sensate layers of the Northern New Mexico landscape — the personal and social unrest that simmers in the Land of Enchantment, home of the author’s heart.
Anne Lamott
Positive The Washington Post Even now, during our culture’s most fractured time, Lamott remains a paragon of seemingly irreconcilable attributes and beliefs. A devoted grandmother and recovering drug addict, Jesus-loving Sunday school teacher and Guggenheim fellow, 12-stepping TED talker and small-town writer whose book sales currently top 4 million, Lamott is that rare bird, a progressive stalwart beloved in coastal cities and flyover hamlets alike ... Few writers can produce 12 advice books worth reading. But like its predecessors, Dusk Night Dawn delivers prose that satisfies literary as well as spiritual tastes ... Dispensing counsel cloaked in story, Lamott spins her self-deprecating ruminations into manna for the majority.
Francine Prose
Rave Christian Science Monitor You’ve got to read this new book by Francine Prose – and here’s why. The woman knows whereof she speaks ... Prose’s brain is no ordinary brain; her passion for the arts primarily but not exclusively literature – is no ordinary passion ... In each chapter, Prose curates her curation, telling us not only which books and authors to look at, but where in each of them to look for the choicest, most telling views ... Like the works it profiles, What to Read and Why has its flaws. Although most of her commentary is stunningly original, Prose sometimes tells us things we already know ... And like the works it profiles, What to Read and Why is a multi-faceted gem, appreciable on many levels.
Meg Wolitzer
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle \"Through it all the reader holds her breath and flips the pages, enraptured by the magic Wolitzer makes on the page. Born of equal passion for her message and the characters she crafts to deliver it, The Female Persuasion, like all of Wolitzer’s novels, is timely, but also timeless. Headlines notwithstanding, it’s not that Meg Wolitzer is catching up to the world. The world, as usual, is catching up to her.\
Peggy Orenstein
Rave Chicago Tribune The contents of the essays, each preceded by a new introduction by the author, fleshes the outline out. The conclusions Orenstein draws are often unexpected, always brilliant. The confessions she extracts from her subjects are stunning ... Some essay collections are like some greatest hits albums: blatantly greedy attempts to re-sell what’s already been sold. Although Don’t Call Me Princess consists of previously published essays stitched together by current commentary, the book is more concentration than compilation — a satisfyingly succinct handbook of Orenstein’s incisive, witty and necessary observations.
Tayari Jones
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle \"An American Marriage is that rare treasure, a novel that pulls you under like a fever dream, a novel whose pages you start to ration midway through, a novel you miss like a lover the minute you kiss its final page goodbye ... a searing, disturbing critique of America — the generational, geographic and gender gaps that rend even the most loving couples and families; the separate and unequal treatment of African Americans in the penal system; the lingering lash of slavery that still stings today. An American Marriage is a gripping, masterfully crafted message in a bottle.\
John Hodgman
Rave The Chicago Tribune \"On these pages, Hodgman is as funny and as self-deprecating as ever, but also, deeply and hilariously, for real. Although he is a very fortunate man, the dotted line he draws between growing older and growing up will be familiar to any gloomily aging person — which is to say, anyone older than 17 ... Vacationland is an ambitious departure from Hodgman’s previous authorial endeavors. It’s funny, but it’s no joke. The book is a cleverly composed meditation on one privileged American’s life — and, glancingly, on America — at a crucial moment for both ... Reading [certain] passages, one can’t help but wince at Hodgman’s self-involvement. And yet, one can’t help but give him props for being so unabashedly, so ironically, and so entertainingly who he is.\
Roxane Gay
Pan The Chicago Tribune Good advice, Bad Feminist. But — new advice? Not so much … I mention this not to preach ‘herstory,’ but to illuminate — constructively, not cruelly — the flaws that keep Bad Feminist from being the bigger, better book it could and, given its author's talents, should be … Also blunting Gay's points (and she does have points to make, important ones) is her seeming ambivalence about her own competence … There are scenes, pages, chapters in Bad Feminist that are so raw, so strong, so skillfully rendered, they make one wish the whole book was as good.
Pamela Paul
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Fortunately for this reviewer, and for Paul’s readers-to-be, My Life with Bob is greater than the sum of its parts: a rollicking, intimate expedition through a brilliant booklover’s heart, mind, and life ... All too many memoirists of the female persuasion seem determined to preempt accusations of self-absorption by crafting themselves as excessively self-deprecating protagonists. Paul is one of them ... Despite this minor annoyance, My Life With Bob is a fun, accessible, well-written bookalogue.
Dani Shapiro
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Thanks to Shapiro’s tender mastery of her story and her craft – knowing when to dwell in detail, and when the bird’s-eye view will better situate the author’s own small experience within the species’ – Hourglass yields a rare combination of lyrical writing and startling, sometimes disturbing insights. Reading Hourglass is like spying on the slow, intimate dance of two imperfect, well-intentioned humans, moving through their devotion and their doubts, riding the quotidian tides of passion and contentment and antipathy.
Jami Attenberg
Positive The Washington Post ...an inventive, funny, fragmented clutter. Billed as a novel, it reads more like a linked story collection, with plots, timelines and characters that swerve and fold into each other. At its best, this form makes an effective container for a life that’s painfully disorganized. At its not-so-best, it creates redundancies that annoy rather than illuminate ... A stalled-out protagonist can grow tedious. But Attenberg’s gift for reducing her generation to its lowest common cultural denominator, then drawing social insights from the roux, imbues Andrea’s travails with meaning ... It’s hard to love a book whose protagonist is as unlovable as Andrea. And yet, All Grown Up is a smart, addictive, hilarious and relevant novel. This paradox is a credit to Attenberg’s wit and scathing social observations, which offer up an affectionate, insightful portrait of her tribe.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
Mixed The San Francisco Chronicle The novel’s characters and settings are rich and resonant. Unfortunately, its structure and plot are thin ... Greatness we do not find here, but this smart, funny send-up of modern motherhood, San Francisco-style, succeeds nonetheless.
Nadja Spiegelman
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Paradoxically, the greatest success of this poetic, searing memoir lies in its universality ... Spiegelman’s memoir is beautiful, not perfect. In a book populated by so many unreliable narrators, the reader longs for the author to rise above the fray, pointing the reader toward the truth — if such a thing exists — when her progenitors’ memories clash. That said, I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This is a compelling first effort.
Kim Addonizio
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...[an] addictively compelling memoir-in-essays ... One expects a lot from a memoirist whose remarkable life is her art and whose remarkable art is her life, and Bukowski in a Sundress does not disappoint ... Addonizio's acerbic commentary on the business of writing is equally poignant and hilarious.
Alain De Botton
Mixed The Chicago Tribune The book is a two-fer. First and foremost, The Course of Love is a novel about the course of the marriage between Rabih, a Lebanese-German architect, and his Scottish surveyor wife, Kirsten — the classic, inexorable marital progression through infatuation, disillusionment and ultimate reconciliation. Also, the book is a kind of self-help course on love, administered via a series of philosophical meditations interspersed throughout the narrative ... Two hundred pages in, de Botton's italicized reflections become a bit tiresome, and their moralistic message contrasts unpleasantly with the unconditional love that the author (and, inevitably the reader) feels for his imperfect, well-intentioned protagonists. But there's no writer alive like de Botton, and his latest ambitious undertaking is as enlightening and humanizing as his previous works.
Sarah Hepola
Rave The Chicago Tribune [Blackout is] as lyrically written as a literary novel, as tightly wound as a thriller, as well-researched as a work of investigative journalism, and as impossible to put down as, well, a cold beer on a hot day.
Stephen O'Connor
Rave The Chicago Tribune Ambitious doesn't begin to describe the scope of the project O'Connor undertook. And successful doesn't begin to describe the wildly imaginative techniques he used to realize his authorial goal ... What makes these literary gymnastics work is, in a word, talent ... O'Connor takes a risky stance, characterizing a multi-decade sexual relationship between a slave owner and a slave as anything other than rape. What justifies the risk is his insistence on using a full palette and tiny brushes to draw these characters, rejecting broad brush strokes in black and white.
Paul Lisicky
Rave The Chicago Tribune If there's any justice in the literary world, The Narrow Door, Lisicky's fifth book and first work of nonfiction, will be the blockbuster that his talent deserves. It's as close to perfect as any book I've read ... a memoir that's a wide-open window to the complexities of love, loss, and being human.
Lauren Groff
Rave The Chicago Tribune \"Fates and Furies is not the first piece of writing to question how much two people, even a \'perfect couple,\' can ever really know each other. Groff is not the first writer to build a novel on an unreliable, even unlikable narrator or two. Nor is she the first to present a seemingly happy marriage from two conflicting perspectives. (Superficial, inaccurate, but understandable comparisons will be made to Gone Girl.) What\'s different and remarkable about Groff\'s third novel can be summarized in two little words: the writing. Groff is a prose virtuoso, and in Fates and Furies she offers up her writerly gifts in all their glory.\