Nicholas Boggs’ James Baldwin: A Love Story, Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face, Peter Ames Carlin’s Tonight in Jungleland, and Jason Mott’s People Like Us all feature among August’s best reviewed books.
1. The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
(Faber & Faber)
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 4 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The City Changes Its Face here
“Extraordinary and exhilarating … McBride’s genius is to create a work whose innovation allows the reader to experience the sensation of feeling and thinking, instead of observing thoughts and feelings described. The sentences do not show themselves off … There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next.”
–Megan Nolan (The New Statesman)
2. Moderation by Elaine Castillo
(Viking)
9 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Moderation here
“Sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic … Castillo’s close third-person narration, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that detonate like precision-guided bombs … Castillo favors long sentences that twist and kink like a delirious garden hose, delighted by the unruly spillage of thought … Succeeds in rendering visible the often invisible dirty work of the digital era.”
–Rhonda Feng (The New York Times Book Review)
3. People Like Us by Jason Mott
(Dutton)
8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an essay by Jason Mott here
“Riveting … A hugely ambitious book. It takes big swings at topics many people like us are struggling to understand. It doesn’t always connect, but that barely matters in a work that insists we must keep trying to put together words that help each other make sense of the world.”
–Chris Hewitt (The Star Tribune)
=4. Ruth by Kate Riley
(Riverhead)
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Ruth here
“It would never work out, but I’m in love with Ruth … Ruth doesn’t speak to us directly, but Riley’s narration is calibrated to reflect her protagonist’s evolving mind. That dynamic fidelity is all the more impressive for being almost imperceptible. In the early sections, the author’s wry voice never flattens the meringue tips of Ruth’s childlike wonder. And later, as Ruth feels increasingly cramped in the little church, Riley maintains ironic distance, careful to avoid collapsing into the character inspired by her own experience. Her epigraphic style, informed by decades of sermons, aphorisms and comic retorts, ensures the novel’s delightful buoyancy.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
=4. The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter by Peter Orner
(Little Brown and Company)
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter here
“What he has constructed is a moody and engrossing meditation on the ephemerality of memory, the persistence of family myths and a haunting ode to a bygone Chicago. A memorable novel of the stories and people everybody has already forgotten.”
–Adam Langer (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
(Doubleday)
9 Rave • 1 Positive • 3 Mixed
“This is an exceptional and important book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling. Anderson leavens his sweeping and complex chronicle with rich character portraits.”
–Mark Bowden (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin
(Doubleday)
10 Rave
“Carlin revisits those pivotal years with a fan’s fervor and a journalist’s attention to detail … Like a director’s cut, Tonight in Jungleland expands on, updates and sometimes revises his researches into Springsteen’s self-invention in the 1970s … Carlin’s prose heightens the drama of the album’s construction … Vividly summons the album’s struggle and its spirit.”
–Jon Parles (The New York Times Book Review)
3. The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-Of-The-Century America by David Baron
(Liveright)
7 Rave • 4 Positive
“[A] romp … Baron skillfully builds tension around the house of cards Lowell creates. How and when everything will come tumbling down is a powerful narrative driver … Baron meticulously pieces all of this together … Prepare to be dazzled.”
–Maren Longbella (The Star Tribune)
4. A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews
(Bloomsbury)
9 Rave
“A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss … Without the constraints of the novel—namely the need to advance a plot—Toews lets her mind loose on the page … Discursive … The reader bobs along in the author’s stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live.”
–Kristen Martin (The Atlantic)
5. Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an interview with Nicholas Boggs here
“Sensational … Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes. The churn and swirl of Baldwin’s life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin’s personal life pervades his work.”
–Charles M. Blow (The New York Times Book Review)
