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Recent Reviews
Olivia Laing
Mixed The Atlantic She demonstrates her ability to correctly identify plants (admittedly impressive) and describes the gratifying transformation of the garden from unruly catastrophe to sculpted idyll. These passages, and Laing’s delicate bouquet of language, are certainly reason enough to read The Garden Against Time. But there is little here for those interested in specific ideas about how investing in green spaces might bring about a better, more equitable future ... Perplexingly, Laing does not meaningfully acknowledge the paradox of relishing her private garden while insisting that we would all benefit from more public access to more land ... Her historical lens enfeebles her overall project.
Julie Myerson
Mixed The Atlantic Affecting and winkingly titled ... The ethical dilemma of writing about the self is both the core tension of Nonfiction and what beckons it into existence ... Poignant, if subdued ... A feeling of triumph glimmers between the lines ... Yet the confines of Nonfiction grow perplexingly and frustratingly narrow as the book progresses. The narrator may be flayed open, but the other characters are held at arm’s length, vague and bloodless ... I wanted Myerson to step back from the mirror at times, to more fully engage with her other characters. But Myerson seems most interested in parsing the act of writing about one’s personal experiences ... These are the novel’s animating questions. Given all that she has endured, Myerson had the opportunity to offer fascinating answers. Instead, she supplies noncontroversial defenses of artistic expression.
Natalia Ginzburg, trans. Gini Alhadeff
Rave The New York Times Book Review A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut; it demonstrates Ginzburg’s perceptivity to the details that compose our individual plights, and, in our distress, unite us. The novella lacks the more pointed outrage of Ginzburg’s later works.
Vigdis Hjorth, trans. by Charlotte Barslund
Rave The New York Times Book Review Harrowing and propulsive ... Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies ... Precise and affecting.
Marlen Haushofer tr. Shaun Whiteside
Rave The Atlantic ... brutal and absorbing ... seems to belong among the gaggle of contemporary books that examine the isolated life in our pandemic era, and it does. I have not encountered a more apt metaphor for the sudden shearing away of my own hyper-social, bare-faced, pre-pandemic life. But The Wall is also a resonant and realistic account of a widowed, middle-aged woman, disenchanted and depressed with the sum of her days, who is presented with the opportunity to enact what has previously eluded her: a life of her own imagining. In this way, Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century ... Perhaps what makes reading The Wall so often thrilling is that the narrator faces the challenges of survival and fights every day to stay alive. The novel is propelled by possibility and adventure, a curiosity about what a woman becomes when she is freed of the obligation of family and gender—not only for a moment, but permanently. What new pleasures might she discover; what peculiar ideas might she explore? ... offers a feminist alternative to contemporary life, it’s thoroughly austere, defined by constant toil, unending solitude, the ever-present threat of danger. Still, every woman I know who has read it has been gripped by it. It’s exciting to encounter a subversion of the conventional survival story—a genre generally considered to be the province of men and masculine attitudes. In places, The Wall suggests a feminist alternative that cherishes nature. It also orients women as the primary forces of change in our own lives, especially when the future flickers with peril.
Claire-Louise Bennett
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... enthralling ... if you’ve had your fill of autofiction, thanks — don’t lose interest just yet. If much of the genre can be fairly criticized for its narrowness, Checkout 19 suggests it perhaps hasn’t yet been fully explored. True, Bennett shares a similar biography to that of her narrator, but the life she describes is one blown open by imaginative writing, by the work other writers have fashioned from their own lives, and by the transformative and transportive nature of reading ... Bennett gorgeously conveys the embers from which every story begins.
Laura van den Berg
Positive Book Slut Van den Berg relies heavily on reactions to the present conflict to build character, and requires the reader to participate in their unraveling ... Like any strong storyteller -- both Carver and Hemingway come to mind --Van den Berg lays out the pieces of the past, leaving the reader to put them in place ... Writing disconnected characters is no easy feat -- how to explain the reaction of someone who appears to not actually be reacting? -- but van den Berg succeeds, deftly capturing the complexity and range of her characters\' emotions ... Too many of the men in these stories are so inadequately realized that they act as mere objects in the story, coat racks on which the women hang their blame and misery.