RaveThe Washington Post... thrilling and devastating ... In its representation of the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, American Dirt is as powerful as last year’s Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, though the two novels have fashioned their storytelling from very different cloth ... Cummins’s straightforward account relies on intimate, relatable realism ... offers both a vital chronicle of contemporary Latin American migrant experience and a profoundly moving reading experience. If only we could press it into the hands of people in power. If only a story this generously told would inspire them to expand the borders of their vision of America.
Amy Waldman
MixedSF GateMost novels about 9/11 tell intimate stories of families affected by that day and its aftermath ... The Submission engages us in a broader political conversation, outlining fictional events of national significance that one could easily imagine taking place ... To spend time with these diverse characters and see how their individual experiences and group loyalties, ambitions and heartaches affect American democracy is satisfying - the novel stages a political debate in a way that\'s neither preachy nor overly clever. The problem here, though, is that the worlds of the characters are circumscribed by the events at hand. There\'s nothing extraneous to the story, and it\'s the nonessential details - the idiosyncratic thoughts, the irrational desires - that tend to make us care about a character. I wanted to feel something for Mo beyond sympathy for his entrapment in post-9/11 politics. Sadly, I didn\'t.
Lauren Groff
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle\"When I finished reading Lauren Groff’s \'Dogs Go Wolf\' in the New Yorker last year, I had two simultaneous reactions. One was immense relief that this devastating story about two little girls left alone on an island was over. The other was the compulsion to teach it immediately to the students in my introductory creative writing class, because it was that good — so precisely detailed in its strangeness, so beautiful in its atmosphere of dread, so fine an example of what a story can do and be ... Groff’s desire seems to be to show — in a frequently funny, sometimes painful and always deeply sensitive way — that women and children are often stronger than we tend to think, and that the Earth is more fragile than we usually allow ourselves to understand.\
Sheila Heti
RaveSan Francisco Chronicle\"And this deeply thoughtful and candid narrative reveals that choice to be not a negative at all, but an affirmation of Heti’s freedom as an individual, a romantic partner, an artist and a woman ... The book is both meditative and playful (weighty questions are asked and answered via an \'I Ching\'-inspired coin toss), layered with both social commentary and accounts of intimate, quotidian moments ... Motherhood treats the question of whether to become a mother and what it means to take on that responsibility with the seriousness and complexity it deserves. This feels more revelatory than it should be. All too often, in life and in literature, wanting children is taken as a given for a woman, and giving birth to a child — within a heterosexual marriage — represented as the joyous culmination of feminine fulfillment ... Heti’s important book is a positive assertion that motherhood is not an obligatory sacrifice, a glorified institution, the cornerstone of a woman’s being. Motherhood is — or should be — a choice, with each woman accorded the freedom to decide what it means.\
Daniel Alarcón
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...the world of Daniel Alarcón’s The King Is Always Above the People is one of lonely, disaffected men. Familial discord, particularly between fathers and sons, and a gloomy sense of rootlessness pervade the lives of these characters... Though the characters and their circumstances can feel elusive, this is perhaps fitting. The collection offers a portrait of men who cling to the illusion that, as one character hopes, \'one can start over in any number of places, right? Any number of times?\' In Alarcón’s elegant prose, this assumption is interrogated to bracing effect.
Tom Hanks
MixedThe San Francisco Chronicle\"Tom Hanks’ first published book, Uncommon Type, left me with few questions about who his characters were or what was driving their actions. And that’s too bad. It felt as if the people in these stories stepped right up, proffered a nice firm handshake, announced the basic tenets of their existence, and then returned to their mostly unruffled lives … The problem is that the characters here tend to come across as types — common ones — lacking in psychologically nuanced interior lives. Potential satires don’t satirize enough. Potentially conflict-rich situations fizzle out … These stories have their pleasures: descriptions of food, objects, and rituals that gratify in their careful attention to humble delights.\
Carmen Maria Machado
PositiveThe San Francisco Chronicle\"Carmen Maria Machado’s debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, makes impossible things feel enchantingly, troublingly real … The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, and the realities of gender inequality make them so … Though the stories draw on elements of horror fiction, they’re fueled by tenderness rather than cruelty, and the imagery is beautiful, not grotesque.\
Danzy Senna
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna’s previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn ...as an embodiment of the ways in which liberal-minded folks may not recognize their own blind spots when it comes to race, Senna’s seeming contrivance is perhaps painfully astute ... New People is not a beautiful novel, not the kind of book I finished reading with a deliciously mournful sigh. It is relentlessly grim — about the constructions of race in America and the consequences of those constructions, and about what constitutes bourgeois success — and it is this grimness that bestows its harsh ring of truth.
Eric Puchner
RaveThe San Francisco ChroniclePuchner’s affecting collection explores the endings of things — relationships, childhood, the illusion that one is a morally upstanding person — as well as what endures for the sympathetic characters in these nine stories. Puchner is especially good at depicting adolescent boys mystified by adulthood and adults flummoxed by children ... This is top-notch realistic fiction, sensitive to the complexities of more or less ordinary lives.
Heather O'Neill
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe jaunty narrative tone conveys an atmosphere of airy loveliness that lends disturbing events an aura of unreality. A critique of the novel might contend that it keeps us swirling in the clouds of pretty language, rather than planting us down firmly into the characters’ difficult experiences ... Representing the power of other arts in writing is a tricky matter — can you convince the reader who has purchased, say, a $27 hardcover, that, for these few chapters, she has front-row seats at a Broadway show? O’Neill pulls this off, in part, because the nature of the theatrical spectacle Rose and Pierrot and company have created speaks to the mesmerizing effects of the novel itself ... The mournful ending of The Lonely Hearts Hotel is all the more wrenching for the delicate narrative touch throughout the novel, which has stirred up hope for a happily-ever-after finale for Pierrot and Rose.
