Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and Destroy, and Vauhini Vara’s Searches all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Audition by Katie Kitamura
(Riverhead)
9 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an interview with Katie Kitamura here
“A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace … Kitamura…writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance … A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted … Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
2. Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
(Random House)
6 Rave
Read an interview with Kate Folk here
“Sleek and darkly comical … Folk is a dryly funny writer, with the melancholic wit and whimsy of Miranda July … Folk’s deft navigation between sardonic optimism and buoyant fatalism is perfectly calibrated to the utter strangeness of being alive today, when the closeness of our private devices pushes us farther from each other and getting swept up in the machinery can feel safer than the turbulence of true attachment.”
–Michelle Hart (The Boston Globe)
3. Big Chief by Jon Hickey
(Simon & Schuster)
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Check out Jon Hickey’s annotated nightstand here
“What Jon Hickey has created with Big Chief is a masterclass on identity and what it feels like to be at peace within our skin. There is power in those actions … A dazzling, fast-paced pressure-cooker journey about not letting others define who we are, but rather deciding that for ourselves.”
–Urban Waite (The San Francisco Chronicle)
**
1. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
(Pantheon)
5 Rave • 1 Postitive
“Vara hasn’t lost her journalist edge, as she shows throughout this book … Searches is as discomfiting as it is entertaining, with Vara exercising playful technique as a writer while also laying down dire warnings about a tech-dominated future. It’s also a clear reminder that, at least for now, nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind.”
–Hannah Bae (The San Francisco Chronicle)
2. John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
(Celadon Books)
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Leslie, a British journalist and author, has a deep affection for, and a penetrating understanding of, these complex characters and their unprecedented friendship … It is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey.”
–T Bone Burnett (The New York Times Book Review)
3. To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen
(Belknap Press)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“An essential addition for collections about the process and theory of writing, authors of diverse backgrounds, and particularly the experiences of Asian Americans, immigrants, and refugees in the United States.”
–Rebecca Brody (Library Journal)
