Bryan Washington’s Family Meal, Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, and Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Family Meal by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead)
7 Rave • 4 Positive
“Masterful … What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear … Family Meal juggles a lot…but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength.”
–Ernesto Mestre-Reed (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf)
8 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Todd Portnowitz on translating Jhumpa Lahiri here
“Melancholy yet electric … The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Stories from a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole. By putting many kinds of foreignness together, Lahiri shows that they all belong.”
–Lily Meyer (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Blackouts by Justin Torres
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love … Easily 2023’s sexiest novel … Astonishing … It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author’s exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era … Run, don’t walk, to buy it.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)
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1. Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel
(Little Brown and Company)
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 5 Mixed
“Gabriel’s writing is unfussy and direct … It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept.
–Fiona Sturges (The Guardian)
2. Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
(Penguin Press)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“There is a great deal in this book about Mr. Herzog’s childhood and youth, a convention that can be dull, but not when the life is like this one … Herzog has never made strictly linear films, and this is not at all a linear book. Observations about his films are nonchalantly mixed with tangentially related memories … This year, Mr. Herzog turned 81. We can only hope that he continues the chase as long as possible.”
–Farran Smith Nehme (The Wall Street Journal)
3. Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich
(Knopf)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“A vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South … For the most part, Bordewich’s narrative hews closely to the historical period, showing how federal power was the only way to stamp out local regimes that countenanced the suffering of Black people while allowing white perpetrators to go unpunished … Toward the end of the book, Bordewich gestures toward the fractured political landscape of the present day. Grant’s victory over the Klan is a story that many Americans would like to tell themselves, but the retrenchment that followed is a cautionary tale.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
