1. Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess
3 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Famous Men Who Never Lived goes beyond individual themes of grief and displacement. It takes on the complex idea of cultural loss … [Hel’s struggles] should be heavy handed, but K. Chess writes with such emotional dexterity that Hel’s focus becomes the reader’s focus … Famous Men Who Never Lived is subtle and powerful. It deftly straddles literary and science fiction, and shrugs off its hybridity … In its approach, in its thoughtfulness and style, Chess’ novel stands among the best works of hybrid SF.”
–Annette Lapointe (The New York Journal of Books)
Read an excerpt from Famous Men Who Never Lived here
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2. The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Wilson’s tale unfolds with all the grace and swiftness of a classic magical adventure, with strange encounters and new lands waiting with each turn of the page. There’s a familiarity, a lived-in quality, to the prose and sense of character that evokes an almost fairy-tale sensibility, but then Wilson digs deeper, into something as timeless as a myth but much more intimate. As it spreads out before the reader like a lavish tapestry, Wilson’s story becomes a gorgeous, ambitious meditation on faith, platonic love, magic and even storytelling itself, with a trio of unforgettable personalities serving as its beating, endlessly vital heart … a triumph—immersive in historical detail and yet, in many ways, it could have happened yesterday. Wilson has once again proven that she’s one of the best fantasy writers working today, with a book that’s just waiting for readers to get happily lost in its pages.”
–Matthew Jackson (BookPage)
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3. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“… a gem of idiomatic dialogue. Every character has a unique voice and every conversation is a polyrhythmic marvel of New York accents. Part Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and part Mario Puzzo’s La Mamma, A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is a funny, gritty, touching narrative about the strength of three New York women caught in a world of abusive men, broken families, and mob violence … Boyle has a knack for violence and telegrammatic prose. He uses dialogue to tell the stories of his characters and push the action forward, and when no one’s talking, his writing is fast and sharp, with a touch of literary flair … A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is a rarity; a fresh novel about New York’s underbelly.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
Read William Boyle on “Screwball Noir” here
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4. The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“…outstanding, expansive … Like King Lear that great exploration of ‘unaccommodated man,’ The Volunteer dramatizes the beauty and terror of self-undoing—and the role love might play in reconstituting a life … The Volunteer is epic every way … The prose in The Volunteer is less obviously brilliant than it was in The End; the style is quieter, almost restrained for stretches. But the lyrical heights of this second novel are, if anything, even higher … The Volunteer will be described as a great historical novel, and it is.”
–Anthony Domestico (The Boston Globe)
Read a conversation between Salvatore Scibona and Victor LaValle here
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5. Instructions for a Funeral by David Means
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“A strange thing about Means’s fiction is the way it stimulates skepticism in the reader. I often found myself resisting the stories in Instructions for a Funeral … Elaborate syntax leaves the end of a sentence, half a page or even a page distant from its start, in a state of queasy grammatical limbo that sends you back picking through stacked clauses (and nested parentheses) looking for verbs, marveling at how he got you from here to there, or shaking your head that he would even try … The untidiness of his compulsive narrative layering has made him one of the most fascinating and confounding American fiction writers of the past few decades … The best of them have a mythic quality, the kind achieved by rearranging elements worn to the point of cliché and making them strange once again … his mastery of tone in each mode is the same.”
–Christian Lorentzen (Bookforum)
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1. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves by Frans de Waal
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Even bolder and more important than its companion volume, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, de Waal’s 2016 best seller…puts these most vivid of mental experiences in evolutionary context, revealing how their richness, power and utility stretch across species and back into deep time … Though emotions are our constant, intimate companions, de Waal surprises us on almost every page. This book is full of the kind of facts you call up your best friend to share … But the book succeeds most brilliantly in the stories de Waal relates. ”
–Sy Montgomery (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an excerpt from Mama’s Last Hug here
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2. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee
5 Rave • 3 Positive
“The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a wonderful book, not least in the literal sense of an epic unfolding in a nonstop procession of marvels, ordeals and apparitions … The true measure of Wilson-Lee’s accomplishment, delivered in a simile-studded prose that is seldom less than elegant and often quite beautiful, is to make Hernando’s epic, measured in library shelves, not nautical miles, every bit as thrilling as his father’s story … The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is also a work that speaks to our own information-engorged time … But, the quality of writing aside (which in its strongest passages bears serious comparison with the sensuous descriptiveness of Marguerite Yourcenar), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, is most compelling as a meditation on the response to an explosive expansion of knowledge.”
–Simon Schama (The Financial Times)
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3. Spies of No Country by Matti Friedman
2 Rave • 6 Positive
“Today, nearly 53 percent of Israeli Jews have roots in the Arab world. To Friedman, understanding that fact is crucial to understanding Israel … an important book…Americans are not accustomed to hearing about Israel’s complexity, or its diversity. We are rarely asked to consider Israel as a country that is, as Friedman says, ‘more than one thing.’ Any serious defender or critic of Israeli politics should consider this a serious problem. Meaningful opinions require nuanced understanding, and Spies of No Country offers that.”
–Lily Meyer (NPR)
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=4. When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“…a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBT life … The book is studded with the stories of Brooklyn-based A-list gays of yesteryear: Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Truman Capote … the book also excels in uncovering what life was like for ‘ordinary’ queer folk … One of the fascinating aspects of the book is how accepted the queer community was in Brooklyn at certain periods (and by certain people) … There’s probably no better time for us to relearn Brooklyn’s queer history.”
–Dominic Rushe (The Guardian)
Read an excerpt from When Brooklyn Was Queer here
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=4. Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Christina Thompson weaves together history, science, folklore and the islands’ ancient oral traditions, archeology and genealogy, creating a mesmerizing, page-turning account of Polynesia. Thompson includes an intriguing cast of characters … Thompson’s personal interest in the subject was piqued by her Maori husband and sons, who are direct descendants of Polynesians. This deep curiosity shines through in the meticulous background and details she provides … Thompson’s book sheds light on a fascinating region. Sea People is a revelatory summation of this vast area steeped in culture and tradition.”
–Becky Libourel Diamond (BookPage)
Read an excerpt from Sea People here
