RaveThe New RepublicFunny and cutting ... Slowly dilates into a fever dream as expansive as the Los Angeles metropolis ... Senna’s prose ripples with images of reflection, doubling, and hallucination.
Venita Blackburn
MixedThe Washington PostChannels grief’s staggering capacity ... At its best, the authoritative and bizarre voice of the guides gives the book a playful quality that keeps it buoyant ... Coral often feels peripheral to the book’s formal pyrotechnics. Her passivity faintly contrasts with the agency of the gun-toting, unnamed hero of her own book, but Blackburn does not build on this polarity. The character is less a foil and more a shadow, visible only at fleeting angles. Grief tends toward incoherence, but our stories about it still need some shape if they are to be affecting and compelling. Dead in Long Beach, California works as a moodboard, but beneath its stylish sentences and unorthodox structure, there’s more void than vision.
Kelsey Norris
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewNorris’s ruminative characters drift through their communities and lives like ghosts, free to roam and ponder their haunts yet fixed in space ... In different styles and tones, Norris and Key share an interest in the ways that being bound — to an event, to an act, to a place — shapes notions of freedom. Norris’s stories largely center on collectives ... Norris slinks between genres and forms across the collection, from literary fiction and magical realism to satire and a ghost tale. But her storytelling isn’t always as accomplished as her lithe and polished writing.
Jordan Peele
PositiveThe AtlanticServes mood in abundance. The sense of isolation its title evokes refers to the eerie tales in its pages as well as to Black people’s uneasy history with the genre.
Joshua Bennett
PositivePoetry FoundationFor [Bennett], spoken word isn\'t interesting because it won the culture war against stuffy academics and their dusty canons; the value of spoken word lies in how it reared and continues to nurture its own culture. And in his view, that heritage of autonomy and aegis should shape how people understand it. Bennett, a repeat slam champion who writes poetry and criticism, has intimate knowledge of his subject but approaches it with humility and imagination. He threads research, interviews, autobiography, and close readings of poems and related texts into a nonlinear jaunt through the spoken word archives ... He nimbly details the sights and sounds of each leg of his journey from the University of Pennsylvania to Pennsylvania Avenue ... Bennett organizes the book into meaty but digestible chapters on the Nuyorican poetry movement, the birth of slam, and spoken word’s new life on social media ... Bennett shows that across the genre’s history, writers have come to spoken word in search of community and their own voices and to realize their personal and political ideals. But he doesn’t dwell much on the audience members who jeer, cry, applaud, and now comment virtually from the sidelines ... This silence is not unique to Bennett’s account nor does it sink it.
Joe Coscarelli
PanBookforumPart scene report, part business profile, Rap Capital leverages intimate access to some of the city’s most visible talent and power players to chronicle how the city’s oft-mythologized music gets made and sold ... The book works as a basic explainer of the ways in which the modern music industry—in Atlanta and beyond—still depends on the upward flow of trends and sounds from regional and online scenes. But as a portrait of Atlanta and contemporary hip-hop, Rap Capital fails. Coscarelli’s account overstates the influence of commerce and industry, neglecting the delightful chaos of the music’s creators and audiences, and downplaying the ways Atlanta music, and rap more broadly, refuses to be masterminded ... Atlanta is a city where dance crazes pop up overnight like mushrooms and then disappear just as quickly; where teenagers fiddling around on pirated music software become millionaires; where platinum artists and newcomers alike trial-run songs at strip clubs...But in Coscarelli’s telling, Atlanta’s industry insiders alone direct the music’s volatile tides, a reduction that distorts the unique ecology of the city’s scene and reveals the limits of the business-oriented gaze that often shapes national rap coverage. You can barely hear the music over the stock bells ... Even though he struggles to bring them to life, the teen house-parties, marathon recording sessions, and staid business meetings he attends tacitly show the more peripheral locales that fashion Atlanta rap ... In his telling, every decision by this one label and its roster reshapes culture, a myopia that feels Faustian as his claims grow more untenable. His access provides no benefits to the reader or his work ... Access to a source is sometimes contingent on an agreement to avoid certain subjects, but Coscarelli does not make the reader privy to such brokering. He seems to just record everything he hears without questioning or confirming it ... The book’s composition heightens the lack of perspective. Though Coscarelli includes footnotes at the end of the book, he adapts his Times stories, and quotes from articles by other authors, into his prose without clear attribution, a style that makes the prose feel distant, devoid of scene-setting or a larger sense of place ... Although he reports from inside the rooms where the music originates, it often feels like Coscarelli is viewing the city through a telescope ... Coscarelli clearly aims to counter the perception, among outsiders and Atlantans, that influence is Atlanta’s top currency. But the charts and rap as a whole already tell the story he offers. The mythmaking and bluster of his reporting only further obscure the details numbers never capture ... If Coscarelli truly wanted to illustrate the ways that Black art gets obscured and unacknowledged even in the heart of the rap industry, he’d focus on producers rather than rappers and business executives, but they are largely peripheral to the story he tells ... does not add more context to Atlanta rap or complicate the city’s myths. An empty award show, it just distributes laurels.
Janelle Monáe
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewIn her best work, these sci-fi flourishes blend seamlessly into her fusionist music, flavoring her \'neon gumbo\' but not defining it. The Memory Librarian, an anthology that adapts the themes of Monáe’s 2018 album, Dirty Computer, into literature, lacks that proportion, its flimsy tales drenched in sci-fi tropes but thin on compelling storytelling ... Unfortunately, the body politic implied by these corporeal terms (sinews, blemishes, flesh) never manifests in the storytelling. Monáe’s outcasts rebel against a curiously hollow core. Although two of the stories are novella-length, across the collection it never becomes clear whether New Dawn is the government, a company or a religious group. Nor does the public sentiment for New Dawn’s methods ever get meaningfully articulated ... Science fiction has historically — and often unfairly — been mocked for investing more brainpower into explaining elaborate systems than fleshing out the people who live within them, but The Memory Librarian fumbles both pursuits. There’s so little explanation of the basic mechanisms of New Dawn’s rule that the downtrodden main characters are deprived of agency and nuance. Their domestic and internal struggles, though rendered with meticulous attention to queer experiences and concerns, have no meaningful connection to their material circumstances ... the worlds of science fiction don’t have to be grandiose, epic or futuristic to be rich.
Olga Ravn, Tr. Martin Aitkin
PanThe AtlanticReproducing the particular babble unique to workplace small talk, Ravn presents the employees as nervous chatterboxes who fill the room with whatever comes to mind: their love of shopping, crushes, cookies. In every statement, Ravn excises the interviewers’ questions and reactions, omissions that make the transcripts feel more like confessions than conversations ... The Employees fails to weave this ambient discontent into compelling storytelling despite its hints at social commentary. The gaze of the ship’s management, though built into the novel’s structure, lacks narrative weight. Management is so amorphous that the workers’ perspectives feel arbitrary and ungrounded. And the hierarchy of the ship is so ill-defined that even when mutiny brews, the stakes of the conflict remain vague. The elliptical writing doesn’t help either. Ravn’s denuded prose, though elegant, is short on world building. The book’s repetitive formatting, in turn, muffles the plot and obscures details as basic as whether workers are paid or if they have bills and debts. Empathizing with their plight is hard when their jobs are pure abstractions.
Yan Ge tr. Jeremy Tiang
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe narrator, a cryptozoologist, author and newspaper columnist with a fondness for cigarettes, booze and high jinks, is the book’s strength. Her wry, melancholy voice and bottomless curiosity imbue it with wonder and rumination ... The atmosphere of Strange Beasts of China is delightful. Through the narrator’s futile quest to catalog beasts, Yan captures the fluidness of city life, the way urban space defies definition even for people hellbent on making sense of it. There’s no bedrock to Yong’an’s riddles, so the narrator is constantly revising her understanding of the beasts and herself. Human and beast exist in constant flux, clashing, merging and splintering with tectonic regularity ... Regrettably, the book does not build on that friction. By hewing so closely to the taxonomic framework of the bestiary and treating each chapter as a distinct case study, Yan introduces repetitive narrative beats, such as the narrator going to her favorite bar to chase leads or calling her former zoology professor for advice. These repetitions probably wouldn’t stand out in a story collection, but in a novel they are redundant; the narrator seems to reset every chapter. The book’s symmetrical structure also highlights the lack of interactions among the different beast communities, which are hermetically sealed off from one another despite frequent mentions of their ubiquity. Yan invokes the creatures’ strangeness without probing their existence; we are rarely privy to beasts’ perspectives on themselves, their fellow beasts or humanity. Although Yong’an brims with mood and mystique, it lacks culture.
Ian Williams
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... takes its structure from the organizing principles of cells and chromosomes: As characters reproduce, perspectives multiply and propagate, too, producing symmetries across generations and families. And, just as cells do over time, the novel’s form begins to break down, mutate ... Williams’s imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling, but the story sometimes feels narrow and deterministic. Few of the characters have attachments beyond the principal cast, and those who do downplay them in ways that feel artificial ... is at its best when Williams’s ornate arrangements of life and death feel fragile and unpredictable. He excels at transferring the intensity and action of traumatic events to the doldrums between: phone calls, haircuts, waiting rooms, car rides. In his rich probes of language and intimacy, legacy and inheritance, he slyly shows that reproduction is consequential, but so is everything else.
N. K. Jemisin
PositiveThe NationA work of urban fantasy, the baroque novel uses the city and its endless lore to stage a showdown between its residents and an invading force intent on wiping it off the map. By turns whimsical and creepy, the novel proudly invokes New York’s many histories and peoples, from its beginnings as a home of the Lenape to its present state of relentless gentrification and displacement ... While Jemisin’s tangible love for her city and commitment to showcasing its hidden wonders keep The City We Became personable and charming, that adoration doesn’t provide insight into what New York has to lose, the material and structural costs of its destruction ... What’s deft about Jemisin’s sense of place is that she never reduces a city to a single event or person, always gesturing forward and backward in time ... Jemisin’s ability to nimbly bring spaces to life is tied to her attention to form. Where epics are generally defined by their length and scope, Jemisin emphasizes proportion ... it demonstrates Jemisin’s inner social scientist at work. She refuses to extricate people from their milieus, their potential from the forces that constrain it. Though The City We Became loses punch as the milieu dilutes into \'bullshit,\' it excels when the stakes are intimate and exact.
Hiroko Oyamada, Trans. by David Boyd
RaveThe AtlanticIn casting the most mundane workplace details and interactions as abstruse and dreamlike, Oyamada makes work feel inescapable ... The novel brims with these tiny, tense moments, highlighting the ways in which even fleeting aspects of labor are weighted and exhausting ... Oyamada’s playful, jerky prose and brisk plotting keep the book buoyant despite its bleak air ... Oyamada, especially, illustrates how multifaceted working life often is .... Oyamada’s ecological interpretation of labor—an interdependent web of strangers, siblings, animals, and nature—feels especially suited to a future that will be precarious for workers as well as the environment. In her fantastical, unsparing world, life is what the factory makes of it.
Ted Chiang
PositiveThe Nation...Exhalation demonstrates Chiang’s commitment to form as well as ideation. Across the collection he finds shrewd ways to meld perspective and setting, using prayers, museum plaques, and journal entries to channel character voices and outline his peculiar worlds ... In Exhalation, Chiang gives us storytelling as a kind of terraforming: He builds worlds and makes them inhabitable, for their characters, for their readers, and for their ideas. Exhalation follows scientists, con artists, merchants, software designers, and even parrots across time, space, and dimensions. This impressive range and Chiang’s visible respect for his characters’ differences have led him to be characterized by some critics as a humanist, but that term fails to capture the ambition on display here ... He isn’t simply affirming life’s value; he’s probing its specific resonance, exploring how the nature and value of existence—for both the human and the nonhuman—arise through particular experiences, even the specter of death ... Chiang takes technologies and scientific principles and dares us to imagine them as more than just devices to be controlled or problems to be solved. The robots do not want to kill us, and the animals are not (yet) resigned to our stupidity. Ultimately, it is each of us who makes our world.
Hanif Abdurraqib
RavePitchfork\"[Abdurraqib’s] exploration of A Tribe Called Quest uses his love for the group to leverage remarkably sharp insights about the band and himself. Forthright without being solipsistic, the book is a marvel of criticism and self-examination ... In these candid moments, Abdurraqib’s fandom feels like participation rather than possession. He evokes his Tribe so that we may find our own ... While Abdurraqib’s chronicle of Tribe isn’t definitive, it is a compelling angle from which to consider the group’s legacy ... I had my own connections to these songs, but I was beginning to hear A Tribe Called Quest through Abdurraqib’s ears. It felt like love.\
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
PanThe NationAt its best, Ruffin’s satire is an unflinching reminder that the ignored blemishes of today—de facto segregation, colorism, police brutality—could be the cankers of tomorrow ... But in ways that plague its microgenre as a whole, the book spends more time romping around the fun-house than exploring the carnival that props it up ... The narrator’s candidness about his goals and his world give the novel a gonzo intimacy that’s as engrossing as it is repulsive ... the novel lacks a certain dialectical quality; there is a pull but no push. When he says he’s a unicorn, as arrogant as that sounds, there’s no way to verify or disprove the assertion. Whereas writers like Ellison, Beatty, and April Sinclair have stylishly used the idiocy of racism to comically offset its grayscale misery, Ruffin’s jokes are muted and hard to spot. What is parody and what is not is sometimes difficult to parse ... Ruffin’s narrator essentially monologues for the entire book, overshadowing all of his opponents besides those in his head. He’s too loud and too visible ... rarely explores how white supremacy operates as a system—the animus that fuels it, the society that sustains it, the lives and resources it consumes. Like its counterparts, the story relies so heavily on the inherent spectacle of racial transformation that it obscures the forces that conspire to make whiteness desirable ... scratches the surface of systemic racism—the way that injustice ripples through generations—it ends up settling for little more than a neat character portrait.
