Fiction
1. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
(5 Rave, 4 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“This is a haunting novel, full of dazzling moments and not a few surprising turns, that manages to be suspenseful despite its uneven momentum. When deep religious and political conflicts get personal in this story, beliefs and choices and agendas are inevitably on a fatal collision course. Home Fire blazes with the kind of annihilating devastation that transcends grief.”
–Katherine Weber (The Washington Post)
Read a profile of Kamila Shamsie here
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2. The Grip of It by Jac Jemc
(6 Rave, 1 Mixed)
“…a cerebral haunting in book form, a page-turning, suspenseful read that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it … Like the work of Leonora Carrington, the effective terror of The Grip of It comes with sudden juxtaposition of the surreal, both in the subject’s environment and within the subject’s persona.”
–Matt E. Lewis (Electric Literature)
Read an excerpt from The Grip of It here
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3. The Mountain by Paul Yoon
(5 Rave)
“The stories in Paul Yoon’s debut story collection are told with a placidity that belies their violence — reading The Mountain is like admiring a glowing sunset before realizing that what you’re really watching is a wildfire heading your way … All six stories in The Mountain play with this tension of how to describe loss and failure simply but without clichéd bluntness — his sentences read like Hemingway stripped of his machismo.”
–Mark Athitakis (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an excerpt from The Mountain here
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4. The Misfortune of Marion Palm by Emily Culliton
(4 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…funny, pointed and very smart. With its madcap plot (embezzling mom goes on the lam), its dry tone, and its sly digs at upper-crust culture, the book does for Brooklyn what the novels of Maria Semple do for Seattle. The title character, Marion Palm, has no apparent moral center and few likable qualities, and yet you will root hard for her — Culliton is that good at revealing what makes her tick, earning Marion our empathy, if not our admiration.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an excerpt from The Misfortune of Marion Palm here
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5. The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“The Good Daughter is a stunning work of psychological suspense that will undoubtedly, and deservedly, rank among the year’s very best (crime) novels. Karin Slaughter has an inimitable style that lends itself to complete immersion, and the absolute sense of realism that she captures within her narrative is both awe-inspiring and gut-wrenching.”
–John Valeri (Criminal Element)
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Non Fiction
1. Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Why Poetry casts its net wide and hauls in a splendid bounty. Zapruder quotes sources as diverse as Pope Francis, Pema Chödrön, Keats and Roxane Gay, and moves nimbly from French surrealism to Japanese haiku. He engages deeply with language and meaning and doesn’t shy away from crucial questions of ethics or politics, examining Audre Lorde on racial violence, Amiri Baraka on 9/11, Adrienne Rich on rape … While intellectually rigorous, his chapters resonate because of currents of personal revelation running alongside the argument.”
–Diana Whitney (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Read an excerpt from Why Poetry here
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2. Among the Living and the Dead by Inara Verzemnieks
(3 Rave, 2 Positive)
“The personal story is seamlessly backed by the author’s deep research, from scholarly papers to records found in ‘a file in an unmarked warehouse located at the end of an unpaved service road in Riga’ … [a] magical combination of history and personal history.”
–Rebekah Denn (The Christian Science Monitor)
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3. From Holmes to Sherlock by Mattias Boström, Trans. by Michael Gallagher
(3 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…a riveting tale involving brilliant artists, cunning criminals, eccentric characters and illuminating moments of tragedy and triumph … Mr. Boström has expertly unearthed entertaining instances of the sleuth’s diverse appearances in all media, throughout the world.”
–Michael Saler (The Wall Street Journal)
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4. Wild Things by Bruce Handy
(3 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…a clear-eyed and often hilarious deep dive into some old standbys of children’s literature. Though it would be easy to fall into either rapture or diatribe, Handy treats his literary subjects like family members, with admiration and infuriation and love. He’s a perceptive and affable close reader.”
–Eliot Schrefer (USA Today)
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5. The Kelloggs by Howard Markel
(2 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“In addition to capturing the personalities of the two brothers, Markel does an extraordinary job covering the many complex dimensions of this story, including John’s later, unfortunate embrace of his own idiosyncratic version of the pseudoscience of eugenics … Markel, the author of three previous, well-received histories has, by reaching into a simple box of cornflakes, come up with a rich and satisfying account of the lives, work and enmity of two warring brothers and of a pivotal epoch in American history.”
–Katherine A. Powers (Newsday)
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