About Book Marks
Will Stephenson
Recent Reviews
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Anyone who has followed this story over the years will find this account to be, more or less, a survey of the usual suspects, if an entertaining one ... Nearly 200 pages in, [Wallace] is still spinning his wheels: “I was making little headway in my own investigation and beginning to despair.” (A reader could be forgiven for feeling similarly) ... Most disappointing, perhaps, is that Wallace doesn’t meaningfully delve into some of the more left-field prospects to gain prominence over the years ... If Wallace doesn’t close the case, he is an engaging narrator, and his book serves as a useful introduction to one of the century’s true riddles.
Charles Portis
Rave Harper\'s One is constantly confronted, in Portis’s work, with the glories and horrors of the Old South ... The old ways are always being contrasted with present-day American banality, with the encroachment of chintzy commercial culture even into the hinterlands ... Of course, all of his narrators and protagonists are unreliable... this is the source of much of their humor. And humor isn’t only a byproduct in his novels, it is their universal joint, their clutch assembly.
Alexander Maksik
Rave The New York Times The novel is more concerned with storytelling than with \'bodily experience\' as such, and the story it tells orbits around questions of creativity, grief and the Trump era’s demolition of platitudes and ever-escalating implausibility and absurdism...Maksik fortunately sidesteps the polemical fable one worries he might be writing in favor of a much more compelling project...\'You must never fall for the myth of the absolute villain,\' Fields’s grandmother warns him...And even as the colony’s shadowy visionary, Sebastian Light (who at times reminds one of Marlon Brando’s Dr. Moreau), takes on certain Trumpian qualities — his resentment of \'elites,\' his allegiance to kitsch, his willingness to burn it all down to control the narrative — Maksik never allows the novel to seem overly programmatic...It is finally an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life.