RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksAlmond fans have waited long and hard for his debut novel and crustaceous hell does it deliver. All the Secrets of the World is a masterful, nervy, complex and confrontational work that flays the white beasts of power, excoriates the American dream, and serves up a ferocious indictment of the Fourth Estate, all while encased inside a brilliant Gobstopper of a book that changes flavor, shape and hue the longer it sits on the tongue, staining us with its unflinching, irresistible honesty ... Teenage drama? Police Procedural? Social Satire? Desert cult odyssey? Assume you are reading one kind of story and witness the ass in you and me. Almond’s constant subversion of expectation not only rejects categorization but it also keeps readers turning pages. Even my husband, who’s practically allergic to novels, found himself rapt all night, duly wrong about the soporific effects of fiction. Almond injects his bitter truth serum into storytelling so propulsive, characters so alive, and language so dynamic that it’s impossible to put this sucker down. No wonder it is Zando’s first ever title: the secret of this book lies in the breadth of its reach ... his careful attention and ability to illuminate his extensive cast of characters, their secrets and truths, that lends them their profound humanity.
Lily King
RaveThe Washington PostLily King isn’t afraid of big emotional subjects: desire and grief, longing and love, growth and self-acceptance. But she eschews high drama for the immersive quiet of the everyday ... Here we inhabit the worlds of authors and mothers, children and friends; we experience their lives in clear, graceful prose that swells with generous possibility. This is a book for writers and lovers, a book about storytelling itself, a book for all of us ... the formal constraints of the short story yield fresh resonance ... everything King writes is great.
Jo Ann Beard
RaveThe Washington PostIn a world increasingly lived online, there is a grounding comfort to Jo Ann Beard’s refreshingly analog voice. This isn’t to say her writing isn’t relevant or that her language doesn’t wow. Beard’s power comes from phrasings and insights that aren’t just screaming for likes. Few writers are so wise and self-effacing and emotionally honest all in one breath ... Over the course of nine beguiling pieces — which seamlessly meld observation and imagination — she effects an intimacy that makes us want to sit on the rug and listen ... If obsession is a writer’s fuel, Beard is powered by the \'beautiful and stupid\' acts of hanging on and letting go. Every line builds thematic texture, instructing us on how to read, and what to take from it all. Seemingly unrelated phrases advance Beard’s ethos. Festival Days is \'brutal and routine,\' a meditation on the \'dirt-colored scraps of hide and humanity\' ... Beard flawlessly captures the fluidity of time. A minute becomes an eternity. Linearity collapses like a fallen souffle ... Beard imagines her way into anything...If her essays read like stories that’s because she is less concerned with cold accounts, and drawn more to detail and interiority and the choices people do and don’t make ... Invention allows her to excavate a deeper truth ... Beard navigates the darkness with her signature wit.
Joshua Henkin
RaveVol. 1 BrooklynA propulsive, literary page-turner about a family beset by early onset Alzheimer’s? If that sounds like an oxymoron then you have not encountered the heart, scalpel, and unassuming genius of Joshua Henkin whose new novel, Morningside Heights is not only a study in craft, but a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit ... Rife with evocative sensory details like the inimitable Chock Full O’ Nuts, Morningside Heights reads like an ode to New York as it maps a narrative of loss, and asks us to consider what it means to live and love, where our faith lies, and what we leave behind ... Henkin, who directs the MFA program at Brooklyn College, is a quiet master whose prose does not call attention to itself, but rather, works in such direct humble service to story that you forget that you are reading. His gift of compression is enviable, as are his instincts for pacing. He knows precisely where to pick us up and where to drop us down, moving the reader through the lives of multiple characters, through multiple points of view, over multiple decades, in a slim volume that’s under 300 pages, all while making it look deceptively easy ... His characters are complicated, flawed, fiercely alive ... not only impossible to put down, but impossible to forget.
