1. Circe by Madeline Miller
(6 Rave, 2 Positive)
“As with her previous novel, the great skill here is the way Miller gives voice to a previously muted perspective in the classics, forging a great romance from the scraps left to us by the ancients. If The Song of Achilles recovered a half-buried homosexual love story from the Iliad, Circe gives us a feminist slant on the Odyssey.”
–Alex Preston (The Observer)
Read an essay by Madeline Miller here
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2. How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister
(5 Rave, 1 Mixed)
“Tom McAllister’s How to Be Safe is as startling as the crack of a bullet. The story’s volatile tone tears through the despair of our era’s devotion to guns … Like nothing else I’ve read, How to Be Safe contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
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3. The Overstory by Richard Powers
(5 Rave, 2 Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“…his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size … The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 feet up, stand with any prose I’ve ever read.”
–Barbara Kingsolver (The New York Times Book Review)
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4. Country Dark by Chris Offutt
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“You expect descriptions like this to be accompanied by eerie banjo plucking from Deliverance. But Mr. Offutt impressively inhabits this impoverished, fiercely private world without condescension or romance, fashioning a lean, atmospheric story that moves fluidly between the extremes of violence and love … The rumblings of Southern Gothic horror are audible in the distance of Country Dark, but Mr. Offutt is such a measured and unexcitable stylist that the story never wallows in the grotesque.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
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5. Cove by Cynan Jones
(2 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Cove is Beckettian in prose and virtue: removing as much as possible, leaving out even the necessities, and raising questions the reader struggles to grasp … Cove is the latest and most accomplished of Jones’s works. It once again proves Jones’s formidable talent. The book is confusing and demanding and damning and everything and anything and nothing. Above all else, however, Cove is beautiful, all too beautiful.”
–Ioan Marc Jones (The Huffington Post)
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1. Sharp by Michelle Dean
(5 Rave, 2 Positive, 4 Mixed)
“Dean’s literary bash is as stimulating and insightful as its roster of guests. She not only encapsulates their biographies and achievements with remarkable concision, but also connects the dots between them … Like Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, Sharp makes literary criticism accessible and lively. The book’s topicality, combined with Dean’s astute analyses of her subjects’ lives and vinegar-sharp wit, should appeal to more than literary wonks … Sharp is a wonderful celebration of some truly gutsy, brilliant women.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
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2. No Turning Back by Rania Abouzeid
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Her narrative of the unending Syrian war from 2011 through 2016 and into 2017 offers page after page of extraordinary reporting and many flashes of exquisitely descriptive prose. But it is the characters around whom the story is built who make the book unforgettable, as Abouzeid threads together their stories of hope and loss in a country where ‘the dead are not merely nameless, reduced to figures. They are not even numbers.’ ”
–Christopher Dickey (The New York Times Book Review)
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3. The Return of Marco Polo’s World by Robert D. Kaplan
(4 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“What is ultimately clear is that Kaplan’s lead essay is a thoughtful and significant piece of global thinking that hopefully is being considered by the powers that be. It is, essentially, the antithesis of the shoot-from-the-hip diplomacy that seems to be the policy du jour. You may not agree with all of Kaplan’s analysis but you cannot help but admire his incredible depth and breadth of historical and geopolitical knowledge and the intriguing analysis and predictions he offers up based on them.”
–Paul Markowitz (The National Book Review)
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4. Selfie by Will Storr
(2 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…this book is no life hack. Rather, in this fascinating psychological and social history, Storr reveals how biology and culture conspire to keep us striving for perfection, and the devastating toll that can take … The book takes readers on a long and complicated journey through centuries of religion, literature and economics, but Storr navigates the material with remarkable clarity, frequently recapping and synthesizing.”
–Sara Eckel (The Washington Post)
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5. Space Odyssey by Michael Benson
(4 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Benson is clearly in tune with the film and he follows the story of the movie’s creation with an eye for small, precise detail. In its way, this story about the making of 2001 is as compelling and eye-opening as the film itself.”
–David Pitt (Booklist)
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