1. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
(12 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Johnson somehow manages to be both conversational and poetic, simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious … Like any Denis Johnson work, each page of this collection is peppered with one or two tremendous lines that reach out to grab your heart … Johnson has an astonishing power to turn from one emotion to another in a line or two. His transitions between stories, sections, and paragraphs are worth the study of every aspiring fiction writer … The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is yet another terrific book of heart, humanity, and humor. Read and treasure it. It is a final gift from a master.”
–Lincoln Michel (BOMB)
Listen to Nick Offerman read a story from The Largesse of the Sea Maiden here
*
2. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
(7 Rave, 2 Positive, 3 Mixed)
“…[a] bewitching and provocative novel … Aligned in her artistic command, imagination, and deep curiosity about the human condition with Nicole Krauss, Dara Horn, and Stacey D’Erasmo, Benjamin asks what we want out of life. Duration? Success? Meaning? Who do we live for? Do our genes determine our path? How does trauma alter us? Benjamin has created mesmerizing characters and richly suspenseful predicaments in this profound and glimmering novel of death’s ever-shocking inevitability and life’s wondrously persistent whirl of chance and destiny.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
Read an excerpt from The Immortalists here
3. King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich
(5 Rave, 2 Positive)
“…ambitious and metaphorically dense… Rich, a resident of New Orleans, throws his arms wide open to history and to the city, and King Zeno, particularly in its first half, is as unruly and laterally active as a big urban novel ought to be. And the novel, like a city, somehow coheres, as Rich never loses control of the riotous raw material…”
–Chris Bachelder (The New York Times Book Review)
*
4. Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
(5 Rave, 1 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“Imagine, if you will, a Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films Inception and The Matrix, Raymond Chandler’s quest romances about detective Philip Marlowe, John le Carré’s intricately recursive Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the dizzying science fiction of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Iain Pears’s hypertextual Arcadia and Haruki Murakami’s alternate world IQ84 and even this week’s Washington Post story about China’s push for ‘total surveillance'”
–Michael Dirda (The Washington Post)
*
5. The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce
(5 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed, 1 Negative)
“…enchanting … Like his previous book, the short story collection Hall of Small Mammals, it’s richly imaginative, quirky but not twee, and the work of an author who’s determined to find the surreal behind the ordinary … It’s a deeply generous, compassionate book that asks its readers to open their hearts and treat one another with understanding, even as the world grows more complicated, and more unknowable, every day.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
Read an excerpt from The Afterlives here
**
1. How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
(8 Rave, 1 Positive)
“The greatest of the many merits of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s contribution to what will doubtless be the ballooning discipline of democracy death studies is their rejection of western exceptionalism. There are no vaccines in American (or, I would add, British) culture that protects us: just ways of doing business that now feel decrepit … As Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasise, democracy survives when democratic leaders fight for it.”
–Nick Cohen (The Guardian)
*
2. Bloodlines by Melissa Del Bosque
(6 Rave, 1 Positive)
“What saves Bloodlines from devolving into the gratuitous gore that fills the pages of Mexico’s blood-soaked tabloid media — the so-called Red Notes, or notas rojas — is the unique, binational crime that Lawson is investigating: a colorful money-laundering operation… An investigative reporter who has covered the border for publications like Time and The Guardian for nearly two decades, del Bosque based her account on scores of personal interviews and reams of court documents, and proves herself fluent in detailing the exceedingly different, but equally rich, milieus of cartel kingpins, Texas equestrians and federal investigators.”
–Alan Feuer (The New York Times Book Review)
*
3. Texas Blood by Roger D. Hodge
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“This is part elegy, part picaresque, part memoir and part history, all bound together in prose that is by turns lyrical and slashing … The book calls to mind Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, the 1989 melancholy paean to America’s wind-blown prairie … Splendid writers like Hodge, with a sharp sense of history and a loving but unsparing pen, help us understand what we’re seeing as we go.”
–Doug J. Swanson (The Dallas Morning News)
*
4. Off the Charts by Ann Hulbert
(4 Rave, 2 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“There are few secrets here for raising a genius, or for being one. That’s good news. Instead, Ann Hulbert…delivers something infinitely richer — a nuanced study of the lives of 15 child prodigies, as well as the parents and mentors who shaped them, and the theories that (tried to) explain them. Hulbert has chosen her wunderkinds carefully, recognizing them not only for their individual brilliance but also as pint-size portraits of their eras.”
–Rachel Sugar (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
*
5. Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta
(4 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Bartolo’s Tears of Salt, written with Italian journalist Lidia Tilotta, is equal parts memoir, celebration of his birthplace and report from the front. Above all, though, it is a plea for compassion … But it’s not the massive numbers that give Bartolo’s account its emotional impact — it’s the attention he focuses on individual survivors… Bartolo tells many such stories of courage and sacrifice.”
–Edward Morris (BookPage)
