PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGurba writes the personal and political with invigorating conviction ... This voice is so strong that it can threaten to obscure the truth. Some exchanges from her past are written with almost fictional simplicity ... And for all her humor, Gurba’s jokes — of which she is rarely the butt — belie a fundamental self-seriousness, directing the reader’s gaze away from her most compelling character: herself ... oth her earnestness and the urgent pulse of the material make for a narrative that is less certain and more tender. To read Gurba at her best is to feel both the triumph of defiant self-regard as well as the soft contours of the striving it takes to acquire, preserve and restore.
Jenn Shapland
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIntimate and well-researched ... t times her personal reflections feel overly constrained by a set of left-of-liberal, white anxieties, which Shapland attempts to interrogate yet cannot seem to move beyond ... Shapland is most convincing when she grasps hold of some tentative yet essential hope.
Lillian Fishman
MixedThe DriftThe trio is electric, their banter beating with the rhythm of the calculated and charming ... Fishman has achieved the notoriously difficult task of writing sex that is neither depressing nor painful to read, sex that strikes a balance between the erotic and the individual, often alluring in its specificity, the delight of strange, shared tendernesses. The quality of attention in these scenes easily sets the heart racing, not merely because it is openly erotic but because Fishman so clearly articulates the push and pull of a sexual encounter, the shape-shifting of desire as it moves between bodies ... is on some level yet another book about a bisexual woman besotted with a man she might otherwise find objectionable. For Eve, queerness is defined primarily through a slew of loosely held political convictions ... the bisexual mind is made out to be both uniquely conflicted and singularly perceptive, as if it were not innately human to interrogate desire. One would think, from this slew, that only bi girls ever worry over who and what we want ... at times, Eve seems a parody of the reflexivity-trapped narrator, churning out version after version of the cyclical chant \'I want him, but I shouldn’t, but I want him, but I shouldn’t ... The dialogue is strangely stiff, overly direct, awfully repetitive ... The portrayal of Eve’s absorbing anxieties would make for excellent satire if it weren’t taken so seriously, if any other character could pierce through her strange and moralizing ways. Yet even as Fishman needles us with awareness, her cast inevitably endorses Eve’s narrow view of the world.
Alyssa Songsiridej
MixedThe Drift... there is little truly new here, not much to grab hold of our attention. The story’s only friction comes from moments of reflexivity — Waldman’s trap in action ... It is hard not to read their exchanges as anything other than an extension of Caroline’s vast and anxious interiority, dictated by a set of mores it is implied the reader must share ... Precisely because there is so little friction — which, in a novel about desire, feels more than strange — there is nothing really so objectionable about Little Rabbit, nor is there anything particularly rousing. It’s a smoothly plotted love affair with inconsequential obstacles, an emotional portrait composed of qualms but few real crises, a novel that can’t help but seem thin and rushed.
Anna Quindlen
MixedNew York Times Book ReviewIt’s hard to take fault with a book that urges everyone, even \'civilians,\' to pick up a pen ... Write For Your Life makes the case for everyday writing in a love song to the private diary, the handwritten letter. As with the corniest ballads, its currency is nostalgia, a rosy view of the past paired with an irrational disdain for the present ... There are arguments to be made about the digital era’s effects on language, but Quindlen clearly fetishizes any time before our own. Write for Your Life views the modern world through a bizarre haze of fear and indignation, sapping Quindlen’s arguments of nuance and alienating readers who are eager to write, but not with quill and parchment ... More moving are the passages where Quindlen eschews argument altogether. Each chapter ends with charming exercises and advice ... Only after so many pages wasted on bygones do we get a sense, practically and emotionally, of what personal writing can actually mean.
Olivia Laing
MixedThe New York Times Book Review[A] well-intentioned yet ultimately exasperating book that would have been well served by the very thing it resists: clarifying constraints ... While Reich’s work is most relevant to discussions of illness and sexual repression, while his experiences in Vienna and with the F.D.A. shed some light on the power of the state over the masses, Reich simply isn’t speaking to everyone in these pages ... Without this connective tissue, much of Laing’s analysis relies on transitional phrases that quickly sum up the topic at hand in order to move along to the next. But with so many ends to tie, Laing oversimplifies, relying on tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase that are ill suited to the gravity of her subjects ... Laing has simply taken on too much for these 300 pages — too many subjects, too little space or structure within which to consider them. It is particularly disappointing because she is usually so adept at drawing together the subtle vibrations of individual lives and making them hum ... while Laing attempts to assemble the many voices she has marshaled, willing the chorus to sing a hopeful tune, she has so severed the bonds between them that their collective song fails to resonate. It’s as if they each sit, alone, in a room somewhere, waiting for the moment when we will all be free.
Caitlin Horrocks
MixedThe New York TimesHorrocks is adept at playing with perspective, delving into the minds of puzzling, sometimes troubling, characters. The loss feels greater, then, when her intriguing premises sap her characters of interiority and her stories of life ... treads into territory better ceded to Lydia Davis ... The title captures the collection’s breadth, its mixture of the strange and the mundane. One only wishes her stories were a bit stranger, or even more mundane, that Horrocks might dive deep in one direction, as the people of Bounty did, diving into sleep.
