Kelly Link’s The Book of Love, Calvin Trillin’s The Lede, Diane Oliver’s Neighbors and Other Stories, and Ed Zwick’s Hits, Flops and Other Illusions all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. The Book of Love by Kelly Link
(Random House)
6 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Delivers plenty of…trademark dream logic while also making full use of the longer form to simmer characters, relationships and setting to the point of profound tenderness … An intriguing cast of characters who each nurse their own tangles of kinship and loss … A refreshing celebration of the special alchemies that animate human connection of all kinds.”
–Chelsea Davis (The San Francisco Chronicle)
2. Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver
(Grove Press)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
Read a story from Neighbors and Other Stories here
“…extraordinary … The author’s heartfelt and resplendent writing is loaded with an earthy complexity reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston—indeed, novelist Tayari Jones names Oliver along with Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ann Petry as ‘literary foremothers’ in her introduction. Oliver’s brilliant stories belong in the American canon.”
3. Leaving by Roxana Robinson
(W. W. Norton & Company)
4 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, Leaving, cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet … even if their wealth feels at times off-putting, Robinson’s writing—unfailingly clear-eyed, packed with psychological insights—compels readers to care passionately about them. Because of that, the novel’s pressure steadily bears down; Robinson has sown in just enough occlusion and uncertainty that its final impact shatters—and the aftershocks abide. Leaving stands as a wondrous feat, at once a cautionary tale, cutaway reveal and pageant. I can’t forget it.”
–Joan Frank (The Washington Post)
**
1. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante
(Penguin Press)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from I Heard Her Call My Name, here
“Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens … Vividly written … One of the things that make this memoir convincing is that it is, on a certain level, unconvincing. Sante is a writer with a lot of peripheral vision … It’s a story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring. Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press by Calvin Trillin
(Random House)
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“Both humorous and serious … Trillin is a diligent reporter and a subtle writer, and his prose reads as though it were both effortlessly written and carefully, painstakingly crafted … Paints a portrait of a disappearing journalistic world—of newspapers, mostly, but also of magazines. It contains not a whiff of sentimentality; Trillin is too clear-eyed for that. But readers might feel bereft, noting how much has changed in the 60 years since he started writing, how diminished newspapers have become, how robust newspaper wars once were, how many larger-than-life writers have died or moved on. In short, how things used to be in the trade.”
–Laurie Hertzel (The Los Angeles Times)
3. Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood by Ed Zwick
(Gallery Books)
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“…a fantastically entertaining memoir that shows the movie business in high definition. It is part how-to guide, peppered with frank lists that crunch hard-won advice into easily digestible bites, and will be useful for young film-makers—but the layperson will inhale it for the gossip and what it reveals about the frankly bewildering systems of power that prop up the entertainment business … Half the fun of Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is in reading between the lines. If this is the stuff that won’t get Zwick excommunicated from the parties he doesn’t want to go to anyway, then I’d love to know what he left out.”
–Rebecca Nicholson (The Guardian)
