RaveChicago Review of Books...[a] glorious debut novel...a smart and sometimes sardonic tale of queer couplings in the era of Grindr, obnoxious foodie culture, and millennial boredom ... Going Dutch is a feast for the senses. I found myself totally enthralled by its rich language and whip-smart observations. But the characters sparking off of one another—that is what kept me furiously turning the pages, hungry for more.
John Glynn
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... earnest and hopeful ... In a lesser writer’s hands, these moments of vulnerability might read as self-indulgent, diffuse, but Glynn grounds them firmly within the scope of his own experience. The scenes between him and Matt are rendered with such open-heartedness, such tenderness, too, that we are not only exalted by their chemistry but, at the same time, worried for Glynn, for first love as ephemeral and as delicate as this rarely, if ever, ends happily ... a sheer pleasure to read — and one of the greatest pleasures comes from Glynn’s ability to become our guide to the Hive, introducing us to a colorful cast of millennials ... A masterful storyteller, Glynn skillfully evokes this place and this summer on the page ... arts of Glynn’s memoir are written with the same clarity and ebullience as E.B. White’s Once More to the Lake, if said essay were also infused with equal parts vodka, millennial angst, and sexual longing.
Chip Cheek
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... exquisitely-paced, erotically-charged ... what unfolds in this compact novel is a strange and delirious exploration of power and sexuality that reads, at times, like a fevered dream ... Cheek deftly creates tension by depicting scenes where the five main characters are always speaking in innuendo and half-truths ... In the final fifty pages, these tensions are gloriously exploited to full effect, and the prose — always tight and spare — carries us along for the ride ... as a reading experience, is every bit a seduction in and of itself, and the novel, among its many delights, announces the arrival of a blistering new talent. Chip Cheek brilliantly explores the limits of marriage, of monogamy, and of a certain kind of staunch and superficial American masculinity that still persists today, more than half a century later.
Laura Van Den Berg
RaveChicago Review of BooksLaura van den Berg’s brilliant new novel, The Third Hotel, is a quasi-supernatural tale of loss and grief, told with an exquisite flair for language ... a surprising and surreal travelogue of emotional discovery that plumbs the depths of one woman’s unsettled psyche ... Passages in this novel demand to be read aloud and savored, paragraphs that, taken by themselves, could pass for poetry ... A dreamy otherworldliness haunts these pages, and will, I wager, haunt you, as it did me, long after you finish this slim and masterful mood piece.
