About Book Marks
Michele Filgate
Recent Reviews
Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
Positive The Los Angeles Times Her alienated perspective can be relentless at times, like a recurring nightmare in which you keep walking down the same narrow hallways, retracing your steps and making no progress ... Concerned with how people can communicate when options are taken away from them, and how vulnerability can open the door ... Kang’s latest isn’t a page-turner, and reading it can feel like being suspended in time, or sitting through a very long class, despite the book’s slimness. But that’s the effect of writing into discomfort ... Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable.
Ling Ma
Rave The Washington Post Most of these stories are uncanny and haunting ... The acts of looking and being seen come up repeatedly in these pages, as does the idea of concealment ... The genius of Ma’s stories is unearthed in how she stretches the boundaries of the world while zooming in on the details that matter most ... These stories use fantastical situations to address the isolation and absurdity of being confined by labels ... Bliss Montage is a powerful reminder that there is more than one way to see — and really know — a person.
Kerri Ní Dochartaigh
Positive Boston Globe How does a person contend with coming from a place where suffering is part of its legacy? For the author of this memoir, it’s through acknowledging the mysteries and beauty of the natural world and spending time in its liminal spaces, something she learned about through her grandfather, a natural storyteller ... It takes ní Dochartaigh many years to find her way back to the most important place of all: herself. Whether she’s meditating on moths or birds or the vivid colors of her home country, it’s her own perspective on the world around her that grounds her, soothes her, and offers solace ... Thin Places can be repetitive at times, circling back to the same reflections as often as a bird maneuvering in the sky, but in a way that feels purposeful, not random. Sometimes we need to cast a light on ideas numerous times in order to really see or comprehend them ... Thin Places is a book about the danger of destructive boundaries, and how crucial it is to inhabit the spaces in our lives and in ourselves where we can find a language for what is too often considered unspeakable.
Samantha Hunt
Rave Los Angeles Times In her expansive and inventive new book, Hunt uses her father’s incomplete manuscript as a vessel to communicate with him 20 years after his death ... To attempt to categorize The Unwritten Book is to diminish the effect of reading it. Hunt studied geology, and her fascination with the bedrock of the natural world overlaps with her elemental love of storytelling ... by turns mesmerizing, philosophical and funny.
Sarah Manguso
Rave The Washington Post It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it ... But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma ... Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice ... Ruthie’s short, vivid memories accumulate like snowflakes on a windowsill, many centered on her complicated relationship with her difficult mother, a woman whose coldness is its own distinctive parenting style ... Manguso captures both the repelling and beautiful aspects of girls’ bodies...what’s visible and what shimmers right underneath the surface ... What elevates Very Cold People above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso’s insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings ... Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.
Sara Freeman
Positive The Boston Globe In a book that surges and swells and sometimes dissipates...[t]he fragmented narrative reflects the littered and eroded interiority of a woman in duress, numbed and dulled by what she’s been through ... what’s most hypnotic is what’s revealed beneath the waves of language: the impossibility of leaving one’s past behind ... There are unsettling and disturbing moments in the novel that aren’t expanded on and given the space to unfold, but perhaps that’s Freeman’s point: the tides shift. All that is revealed can be obscured again.
Aysegül Savas
Positive The Los Angeles Times Although White on White can suffer from too much control at times, Savaş’ restrained style is a statement in itself, minimalist on the surface but more textured than what first meets the eye. Through it, the author questions the validity of the self, whether fully clothed or supposedly exposed. No matter how much one keeps hidden or shares with the world, there’s no controlling what another person will do with that. Humans will likely use the information to their own advantage, in the service of their own twisted judgments. Who knows that better than an artist?
Ann Patchett
Rave The Washington Post Read as a whole, it’s clear that Patchett is at her best when given the opportunity to write beyond the maximum word count dictated by most newspapers and magazines ... Patchett’s prose is as welcoming and comforting as the chickpea stew Sooki cooks for her ... Part of what’s refreshing in reading Patchett’s nonfiction is having a window into her discipline as a writer and her deep understanding of herself ... Whether she turns her gaze to her three fathers, her beautiful mother, her husband’s delight in piloting a plane, or her friendships, there’s a generosity in the way she not only looks at the world but invites the reader in to stay for a while.
Jo Hamya
Rave The Boston Globe ... timely and painfully observant ... an excellent evisceration of contemporary life, and Hamya homes in on how social media allows for groupthink ... offers scathing commentary on societal contradictions, including how easy it is to exist online, but how hard it is for so many women to claim their own views or root themselves in a physical space in real life. Without privacy and ample time for reflection, something that’s hard to come by without the right resources, it’s challenging to have a sense of self ... In dissenting, her narrator creates room for herself — if not, in the end, a room of her own.
Miriam Toews
Positive Los Angeles Times There’s a reason Ted Lasso swept the Emmys this year. After an exceptionally exhausting two years that felt more like two decades, people need to laugh and be reminded of what’s worth fighting for ... I was reminded of this while reading Fight Night, the latest novel by Miriam Toews, which can veer from endearing to obvious to moving in a single chapter. On the whole, it’s a touching tribute to the matrilineal bond among three women of different generations ... Darkness lurks in Fight Night too. But where Jansson’s story was leavened by vivid writing on the natural world, Toews’ is buoyed by a grandmother’s defiant sense of humor ... Toews’ greatest talent lies in creating messy and lovable characters — the kind of people you’d want on your team (or coaching your team) if you were in a fight. Not because they are the strongest, but because somewhere inside themselves they’ve found the energy to keep moving forward.
Deborah Levy
Rave The Washington Post Reading her prose is like looking at grains of sand through a microscope: Suddenly, you realize there’s so much more specificity to the story (and to the female characters) than meets the eye. What a particular pleasure it is to meet her nuanced work on the page through a voice that is witty and bold, masterfully drawing connections between the charged moments of her life ... Perhaps that’s what’s so freeing about Levy’s autobiographies: the ways in which she repeatedly challenges the status quo. We don’t have to stick with the same old stories about what a woman’s life should look like. We don’t have to own the house we yearn for in order to be fulfilled ... The way in which Levy associates one thought with the next has a hypnotic but clarifying effect.
Olivia Laing
Rave The Washington Post In this multilayered and masterfully structured book, Laing obsessively examines the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (a protege of Freud), drawing connections to other intellectuals, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, while including stories from her own life ... There’s no path Laing is afraid to explore. She writes about the sick body, imprisoned bodies, bodies that protest, the sexual body, bodies that have experienced acts of violence—illuminating the strengths and the weaknesses of the corporeal form ... Reading Everybody, it’s impossible to turn away from all the pain that has been inflicted on bodies ... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future.
Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
Rave The Boston Globe There are some writers whose sentences sting like a steady stream of ice-cold water from the tap, and others whose prose feels pleasurably warm as they gradually increase the temperature. The Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen managed to do both ... Loneliness is a major theme in these books, and while Ditlevsen’s prose is often straightforward and uncomplicated, the effect is a hypnotic longing, the pull between desiring the life of an artist and wanting some sense of normalcy ... These books are especially moving because of how accurately Ditlevsen writes about societal pressures on women artists, as well as issues regarding class, motherhood, and agency.
Dantiel W. Moniz
Rave The Washington Post Mortality is the undercurrent in Dantiel W. Moniz’s electrifying debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat, but where there’s death there is the whir of life, too. A lot of collections consist of some duds, yet every single page in this book is a shimmering seashell that contains the sound of multiple oceans. Reading one of Moniz’s stories is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing. The power in these stories rests in their veracity, vitality and vulnerability.
Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker
Positive The Washington Post ...concise but weighty and timely ... Rivera Garza’s approach is spare and kaleidoscopic, offering a poet’s touch to the unspeakable. The effect can be distracting, jumping from one subject to the next (many of the 27 pieces are only a few pages long). Yet within the destruction and devastation that threads the book together, there are glimmers of hope.
Kate Zambreno
Rave The Boston Globe Zambreno is a writer who doesn’t sit comfortably in one genre, but blurs the boundaries and makes the reader question why they have to exist in the first place ... a book that has the intimacy of a private notebook fused with the intellectual rigor of a brilliant mind ... This way of wandering through the author’s psyche is both dizzying and intimate, mapping her desires and her despair ... With the melancholic splendor of its prose, Drifts is the perfect book for the moment we’re living in; most of us feel some sense of isolation and heaviness as we stumble our way through the uniformity but instability of our days, and time seems to fold in on itself ... a stunning book that shows how life can be pregnant with possibility, even and especially when we feel isolated. All we have to do is pay attention.
Miriam Toews
Positive The Star Tribune At times Toews\' book falls into clichéd territory, with such statements as, \'Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we\'re surviving.\' But at its heart, All My Puny Sorrows is a bittersweet story about those who survive and those who can\'t fight the current.
Sigrid Nunez
Rave The Barnes & Noble Review \"...a wholly original novel about that sacred bond ... starkly honest moments give some texture to an otherwise simple story: woman loses a mentor she might have been in love with and finds solace in a dog ... Her unnamed narrator’s journey from solitude to a shared solitude with a dog is moving, for sure, but never in an overly sentimental manner. What makes the book work is the way The Friend reflects on loss, life, and creativity in such a straightforward and bold way.\
Jac Jemc
Rave The Barnes & Noble A young couple named James and Julie are haunted by their relationship and themselves, just as much as external forces … Fear dwells and grows in the unknown, and that’s something Jemc explores in her book. How are we supposed to go about living our lives when there’s so much uncertainty and deception in the world? And if we can’t completely trust our partners, how can we trust ourselves? The longer James and Julie stay in the house, the harder it is to make sense of themselves, and that confusion seeps into their surroundings. Even everyday objects lose their meaning.
Alice Hoffman
Mixed Newsday While the story is compelling, there are so many platitudes that the prose itself can be a distraction...During these moments, the writing is embarrassingly earnest and clichéd ... Although Hoffman repeatedly reminds the reader how deadened Shelby is, the overall effect works.
iO Tillett Wright
Positive The Washington Post Written in the present tense, Darling Days has a compelling immediacy. Wright is flinty and outspoken, offering a clear-eyed perspective on gender identity. He’s a narrator you want to root for, a person who is defiantly not defined by circumstances ... Wright has a dramatic flair that matches the dramatic subject but occasionally falls into some odd sentences that detract from the story ... 'Human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other,' Wright says in the opening of the TedxWomen talk 'Fifty Shades of Gay.' His art — and this book — compellingly shows the folly of that.
Angela Palm
Positive The Washington Post The juxtaposition of Palm’s fascination with landscapes and her coming of age as an author works nicely. Both strands of the story cross-pollinate ... Reading this tale, we can all remember lost loves and ponder the might-have-beens.
Anna Noyes
Positive The Portland Press Herald Short story writers have minimal space to make a reader care about the topic and the characters. There’s an economy to it, and Noyes is a master. Take this description, for instance, from 'This Is Who She Was': 'She wore her collarbones like jewelry.' I’ll never think of collarbones the same way again. These are stories that are built on everyday details told in deceptively simple ways, like this line: 'Winter was a tarped boat and the windows dark by three thirty.' Goodnight, Beautiful Women glimmers with the hopes and failures of the girls and women Noyes’ writes about.