Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl, and Susan Orlean’s Joyride all feature among October’s best reviewed books.
1. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
(Penguin)
13 Rave • 6 Positive • 6 Mixed • 4 Pan
“It’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance—and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open … Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now … For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.”
–David Kipen (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
(Knopf)
11 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an essay by Gish Jen here
“Oscillates between plainspoken narrative and bold, italicized dialogues between Gish and her kvetching dead mother. The conceit is risky but pays off. The imagined colloquies punctuate the prose like counter melodies … The exchanges are edged with humor and skepticism: the mother scoffing at or replying brusquely to her daughter’s reminiscences, questions, speculations … What transforms it into a transcendent work of art is Jen’s empathy for all her characters.”
–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)
3. Venetian Vespers by John Banville
(Knopf)
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Venetian Vespers here
“Maps out a territory halfway between Banville’s supreme fictions and his more forthright entertainments … An intricate thriller that is also a slyly fashioned work of art; a pastiche that is also indisputably the real thing. John Banville, up to his old tricks.”
–Kevin Power (The Irish Times)
4. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett
(Riverhead)
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Themes of relationships and communication might seem at odds with Bennett’s quest to shuck off the self and write from somewhere deeper, but therein lies the magic of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye … Fertile new ground for the author, and her prose is ideally suited to exploring them. Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.”
–Annie McDermott (Times Literary Supplement)
5. The Rose Field (Book of Dust, Volume 3) by Philip Pullman
(Knopf)
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Jam-packed with chases, daring escapes, splendidly operatic scene setting (including an evil sorcerer’s titanic mountain forge), strange and magnificent creatures, and charismatic supporting characters that readers will clutch to their hearts with undying love. It is tremendously entertaining … Questions may niggle at some readers, but they don’t interfere much with the pleasures dispensed by The Rose Field, from its thrilling action sequences to the return of such indelible creations as the witches with their harsh, ascetic wisdom and ragged elegance. The novel’s moments of keen emotion resonate especially well because Pullman never stoops to sentimentality or can’t.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
**
1. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
(Scribner)
12 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife here
“The structure…allows its readers to understand something that usually goes unmentioned in literary biographies. A writer is not merely the sum total of known events that occurred to her between birth and death, she is also the network of readers created by her work during that period and afterward … When Wade is confronted by writing she doesn’t understand, curiosity rather than resentment wins the day … The superiority of Wade’s approach can be measured by the insights into Stein’s work that she gleans from it … Thoughtful and thorough, with insightful interpretations of her work embedded in a compelling narrative of her and Toklas’s life, Wade’s biography makes a convincing case that, while her status as a cultural figure is secure, her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”
–Ryan Ruby (Bookforum)
2. 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands
(Knopf)
9 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from 38 Londres Street here
“Remarkable … It is the relentless pursuit of this hidden and repulsive past that gives 38 Londres Street its startling originality, turning it into a tour de force that extends its reach far beyond what we typically envisage from a book about human rights.”
–Ariel Dorfman (New York Review of Books)
3. Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean
(Avid Reader Press)
9 Rave • 2 Positive
“Might be the best craft book on writing you will ever read. It’s not written as a craft book, of course; it’s a memoir, and an entertaining one at that. But it is a memoir about how Orlean became a writer … Orlean is engaging and generous, explaining how she found ideas, honed and reported them, overcame obstacles … It is the good fortune of the rest of us to be invited along on this ebullient ride.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Boston Globe)
4. True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
(Pantheon)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Lance Richardson here
“Untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.”
–Terry McDonnell (Alta)
5. The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe
(Avid Reader Press)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
“Crowe’s charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place … As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye … Reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic.”
–Mark Weingarten (The Los Angeles Times)
