About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Molly McGhee
Rave The Washington Post Luminous, acerbic and devastating ... Abernathy’s story will be familiar to many American readers who came of age in a post-2008 economy on the decline ... McGhee brilliantly articulates the neuroses of a young person trying to survive in a system rigged against him ... McGhee’s canny, often bittersweetly hilarious prose reads as if George Saunders infiltrated the Severance writers’ room ... Given its gripping plot and out-of-the-box conceit, it seems likely that a large readership — and hopefully Hollywood — will find its way to McGhee’s novel. My only words of advice to that audience: Discuss this book with your friends! Listen to its message! Build the emotional and intellectual connections that will ultimately disrupt capital’s attempts to keep us isolated. And whatever you do, don’t end up like Jonathan Abernathy.
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
Rave The New York Times Book Review Ingenious ... It’s not just the skeletons lurking behind the ivy-covered walls of the institute that make the novel so propulsive — it’s also what The Centre has to say about class and the interplay of language and identity ... A novel that knows that whether you’re trying to place an errant foreign word or unlock a dark secret behind a pedagogical miracle, context is key. This is a book whose many delights and horrors are unlikely to be lost in translation.
Sonora Jha
Rave The New York Times Book Review A no-holds-barred comic achievement that lambastes the power structures keeping men like Oliver skulking the halls of academe ... Jha renders Oliver’s bumbling narcissism with impressive skill: Clearly writing across experience, she captures the clueless voice of a supremely privileged man to intense comic effect ... Every scene is infused with the anxieties of a democracy on the brink of collapse and an education system facing a crisis of conscience. To say The Laughter is just a campus novel is to vastly undersell it; it’s also the story of America’s changing cultural landscape and the major political and philosophical shifts needed to uplift and protect the marginalized.
Sarah Thankam Mathews
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Mathews offers us a panoramic view of mingled desires, fears, and joys that will be familiar to readers of Eliot and Austen, but she does them one better: her novel is about an underrepresented first-generation immigrant, and it’s incredibly gay ... manages the rare feat of being both lyrical and page-turning ... t’s this focus on Sneha’s desires that makes the novel particularly luminous. Simple actions — sleeping with whomever you want to sleep with, making meaningful connections with your friends — become radical, a message that will be especially resounding in a contemporary America where LGBTQIA2S+ rights are under attack ... The novel is at its best when we’re given a clear glimpse of the emotional shibboleth separating Sneha from Marina ... Mathews’s brilliance lies in her ability to capture the terra infirma of Sneha’s emotional landscape, resistant to the superficial diagnostic categories of American pop psych. Barred from being difficult, Sneha has become a mystery to herself ... Mathews is careful not to make examples of her characters, however; there is no how to act in this book, just a lot of clumsy, well-intentioned acting. In a truly genius move, the novel doesn’t value Sneha’s friends over Marina or vice versa: all of them are swept up in the chaotic epochs of their own histories, trying to survive and loving each other throughout. This love is in large part what makes the novel so inviting ... Mathews is a gifted prose stylist ... The prose, coupled with the characters’ love, makes for a novel that is incredibly warm, considering its difficult subject matter. American xenophobia, figuring out one’s life post–economic collapse, volatility, and heartbreak: all this is cast in the inviting glow of Mathews’s smart and elegant sentences. This is one reason among many that the novel is so hard to put down ... Few debuts are as precisely drawn as this one, but then All This Could Be Different is an exceptional novel. With characters compassionately rendered and a story that speaks to the experience of a first-generation queer millennial, All This Could Be Different is the kind of book many readers will need as much as they want, and we’re lucky to have it.