RaveThe Washington PostThe women...are so flawed: bruised, crass, guilt-ridden, incontinent, self-centered, blunt to a fault, furious at themselves and each other and the world. And they are such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising ... A story about the tragedy of resilience. It’s wonderful that Paula has made it to this late chapter, in which a kind of fulfillment has finally appeared to be briefly at hand ... In Doyle’s crisp, wry language, the story of that pain is just the story of life, along with all its small moments of levity and unexpected connection.
Rosalind Brown
RaveThe Washington PostThere’s a genius in the idea of using Shakespeare’s sonnets, which form an exploration of desire deeply and messily concerned with questions of gender and selfhood, to illustrate the complicated process of a young woman figuring out who and what she is ... One of the joys of Brown’s writing, which is often lovely even if it sometimes labors to surprise, is how lightly she lets readers make thematic connections ... Brown appeals specifically to those who have found themselves shaping their own identities around the words of others, and then coming to wonder whether that process has honed their individuality or lessened it.
Ferdia Lennon
RaveThe Washington Post\"[A] thrilling and heartbreaking debut novel ... a stunning (and stunningly fun) meditation on companionship, humanity and the role of performance in keeping us all afloat ... Most everyone in Glorious Exploits is eternally trying on new personas and attuning them to the audience at hand. In time, that jovial creativity yields an underlying darkness; there can be morbid consequences when we step outside of ourselves to withstand the impossible ... Sometimes grief is so profound that the only thing to do is proclaim it, in our own halting ways, to heaven and earth — even if those proclamations themselves cause more grief.\
Helen Oyeyemi
PositiveThe AtlanticParasol Against the Axe shares a literary language with those folk stories ... Oyeyemi’s plot is layered and sometimes baffling, taking many seemingly nonsensical turns ... Throughout the novel, there is little clarity or definition to be found, just an overwhelming sense of immersion in a completely bizarre, completely enthralling world.
Marie Ndiaye, trans. by Jordan Stump
RaveThe Washington PostThe central ideas in Vengeance Is Mine are, thrillingly, as difficult to pin down as the identities of its characters. In one light, it’s a scathing look at the simmering desperation provoked by France’s rigid structures of authority and power. But it’s also an uber-feminist rewriting of a plot made familiar by texts from Medea ... In the hands of a less skilled writer, that ambiguous mix might feel forced, or like an evasive way out of thinking rigorously about a challenging psychological subject. But NDiaye...is a poet of uncertainty. Her ability to simultaneously embody all the fractured parts of a character’s mind makes aspects of Susane’s spiral that might otherwise seem unbelievable...come across as engrossingly, utterly human.
Louisa Hall
MixedThe Washington PostThe novel begins powerfully ... Hall has a way with sentences that toe the line of dreamy and despairing, and it’s easy to feel lulled by the atmosphere she creates, that of an uncomfortably lovely nightmare ... It becomes more difficult to see Hall’s novel’s lack of focus as meaningful, however, once she attempts to mirror Shelley’s portrait of the dangers of scientific advancement.
Claude McKay
PositiveThe New York Times... perhaps McKay’s most complicated examination of marginalized economic and social classes ... Our sense of the Harlem Renaissance, Holcomb said, is growing to encompass \'something much more complex and broader than the original idea\' of \'a cultural nationalist African-American movement.\' Romance in Marseille, one of the Renaissance’s most radical texts, hidden for decades from public view, makes a natural avatar for that development.
Colum McCann
PanForwardI don’t know if I’ve ever read a more exhausting book ... is so obsessed with its own significance as to reduce its big story to a laborious performance of authorial ego. Reading it is like listening to an erudite conspiracy theorist explain their thesis of the universe, the thesis being that just about every meaningful thing that has ever happened is connected, and connected specifically to Israel and Palestine. The idea that those places are by nature capital-M Meaningful too often substitutes for an attempt to really see, or question, what that meaning might be. McCann, in Apeirogon, has taken that substitution to a new extreme ... McCann’s use of trivia can be impressive ... McCann exploits his form as he exploits his subject, treating its vastness as a substitute for many of the things a reader might wish for: character development, emotional nuance, real thoughtfulness ... one of the tragedies of Apeirogon is how, in trying to exult Aramin and Elhanan’s bravery, McCann makes it seem empty ... The book sometimes hints at what it could be, if McCann had been less preoccupied by the enormity of his vision.
Karolina Pavlova, Trans. by Barbara Heldt
MixedThe AtlanticPavlova’s novel A Double Life shook the Russian literary world when it was published in 1848, earning widespread praise for its revolutionary form and psychological acuity. Pavlova had written a book depicting a woman’s struggle against social constraints, and—a full half century before Freud popularized the idea of the subconscious—insisting on the independence of the unconscious mind ... Pavlova constructed a strikingly prescient psychological vision: a mind responding to extreme social pressure by slowly and completely separating itself into parts, but giving few external indications of change ... The familiar marriage plot has few narrative twists, and while Cecily’s plight is persuasive, her character is too lightly sketched to elicit real empathy. Pavlova’s prose and poetry are so radically distinct in style that seeing the novel as a cohesive whole is sometimes difficult. A Double Life is compelling but unwieldy—too modern for its time, yet also too yoked to its own literary period to transition easily into the present day.
Even so, the book is remarkable for its insights about the workings of internalized oppression.
Bari Weiss
PanForwardThe assumption that a reader would need a refresher on the most significant anti-Semitic tract of recent centuries, but would inherently understand the much-debated definition of “Islamist,” speaks to a confusion at the heart of Weiss’s book. Is it an introduction to anti-Semitism for those wondering what all the fuss is about? Or a manual for those who, already concerned about the oldest hatred, have made it their work to be broadly informed? It doesn’t help that the book, which was written on an unusually rushed schedule, is quite scattered, reading more like 200 pages-worth of 1,200-word columns than one cohesive work. “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” is heartfelt and sometimes moving, and Weiss can be persuasive in laying out the disturbing new vulnerability of the Jewish community in both the United States and Europe ... But for much of the book it’s not clear who she’s trying to convince, or why ... the book doesn’t ultimately aim to deepen thinking about anti-Semitism, but rather to offer an affirming endorsement of preexisting beliefs about it ... How to Fight Anti-Semitism is in the business of providing answers, but mostly avoids engaging with the deep and complex questions that make the fight against 21st-century anti-Semitism unique.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
PositiveForward...it was on page 266, around the time that the titular Fleishman finds himself stunned that a friend \'had such a depth of understanding of his place in the world,\' that I figured out what the novel was trying to do. It was so very tragic that I hardly knew how to move on with my day ... The first third of Fleishman Is in Trouble reads like a smart but somewhat boring novel ... What results is an examination of power and gender that, because it is easy to read, somewhat masks its own intricacy. Fleishman Is in Trouble is a book by a woman in which a woman tells the story of a man in order to tell the story of another woman ... Once you look at it closely, Fleishman Is in Trouble isn’t actually a book in which a woman tells the story of another woman by telling the story of a man. It’s a book in which many, many permutations of this triangulated storytelling unfold.
