Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Harald Jähner’s Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Emily Witt’s Health and Safety all feature among September’s best reviewed books.
1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
14 Rave • 7 Positive • 6 Mixed • 2 Pan
“I admire Intermezzo almost without reservation … Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work…is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive … Wise, resonant, and witty … There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea … A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you … Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading … This book charmed and moved me.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
(Scribner)
19 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed • 3 Pan
Read an interview with Rachel Kushner here
“Bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring … The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit … The story, told in short chapters that feel punchy even when they’re highly cerebral, slides around the labyrinth of Sadie’s mind, which is equally deceptive and deceived … Kushner inhabits the spy’s perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun she’s having … Bore through this noir posing and wry satire of radical politics, and you feel something vital and profound prowling around in the darkness beneath.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. Colored Television by Danzy Senna
(Riverhead)
10 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Colored Television here
“Well-oiled, precisely choreographed … Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person … Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.”
–Tyler Austin Harper (The Atlantic)
4. Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
(Grove)
8 Rave • 4 Positive
“Quatro alchemizes gloomy subject matter…into transcendent beauty … Rather than pitting these seeming polarities against each other, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between them, the realms of ambiguity that are far more indicative of the human experience … Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple.”
–Melissa Broder (The New York Times Book Review)
5. Playground by Richard Powers
(W. W. Norton and Company)
7 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence … Any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment … Compelling … He writes without a drop of mawkishness about guilt and grief and the sorrow endemic to caring about the natural world … Even with faith that its parts would at some point cohere, I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
**
1. Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany by Harald Jähner
(Basic Books)
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Vertigo here
“Jähner’s pages are stained with the blood of abortive coups, uprisings and assassinations … Jähner is wonderful on the details of everyday life, from houses and offices to cars, typewriters, dresses and dances … His political coverage is relatively fleeting, probably because German readers are already so familiar with it. And like so many writers he tends to focus on eye-catching extremes … But his book contains so many pleasures.”
–Dominic Sandbrook (The Sunday Times)
2. Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue by Sonia Purnell
(Viking)
3 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Kingmaker here
“Rigorous but rollicking … Purnell seeks nobly to highlight Harriman’s involvement in public as well as private affairs … The majority of biographies lose steam as the subject ages; Kingmaker gets a strong second wind with Harriman’s early talent spotting of Bill Clinton … If Purnell’s prose sometimes lapses into breathlessness, who can blame her? Like her beloved horses, Harriman went through her days at full gallop, and it would be hard for even the most devoted stable mistress to keep up.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
=3. Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses by M. G. Sheftall
(Dutton)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“”[Sheftall] proves that first-person accounts are the most powerful tool to educate and reeducate the world about what happened … Sheftall’s voice is respectful, his perspective balanced, his access to a network of people willing to share their lives with him very deep … Sheftall does not spare readers from this human-made inferno. His chapters are short, the prose is tight, and the memories are in Technicolor … For those who want to understand what happened underneath the mushroom cloud—and shouldn’t we all?—Sheftall’s sweeping, sensitive and deeply researched book is required reading for our human hearts.”
–Karin Tanabe (The Washington Post)
=3. Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt
(Pantheon)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Haunting … Witt…writes with such cool precision that it’s hard to imagine her fully losing herself in sentimental projects, even with chemical assistance … As important as Andrew was for her, exactly what it was that made him such an enthralling presence is never quite conveyed … It’s a testament to Witt’s skills as a writer that this book is enhanced, and not diminished, by her refusal to reconcile such contradictions.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
5. Connie: A Memoir by Connie Chung
(Grand Central Publishing)
2 Rave • 4 Positive
“Chung’s writing about her upbringing and family life are fascinating, but those coming to this memoir more for some media gossip won’t be disappointed … Chung’s memoir, often enchanting and enlightening, serves as a historical account of broadcast news during its most powerful, competitive and sometimes most absurd era.”
–Karen Heller (The Washington Post)
