Australian short story writer Carys Davies’ “haunting and beautifully crafted” debut novel, West—the tale of a widowed Pennsylvania mule breeder who, upon hearing that ancient mammoth bones have been discovered across the Mississippi River, sets out into the uncharted wilderness to see for himself, leaving his young daughter behind—is our best reviewed fiction title of the week. On the nonfiction side, Patricia Hampl’s “swirl of memoir, travelogue and biography of some of history’s champion day-dreamers,” The Art of the Wasted Day, occupies the top spot.
We’ve also got United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s latest collection, Melissa Broder’s erotic-aquatic fantasia, Sheila Heti’s maternal musings, a fugitive family memoir, and more.
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1. West by Carys Davies
(6 Rave, 1 Positive)
“…one of the most haunting and beautifully crafted novels I have read in a long time … Some readers might find the premise of the novel (Bellman’s search for monsters) difficult to navigate, and just too quixotic. But, once you accept it, the novel blossoms. Davies, as she showed in her previous books, is immensely generous towards her characters — a gift of empathy that is hard to resist. She is comfortable, too, inhabiting different voices, and is subtle and rounded in her characterisation … There is something of the fairy tale about Davies’s book. And like the best fairy tales, it is filled with wonder, about the natural world, and about humans and their impractical dreams. Davies has produced something quite wonderful in West. This is a gently seductive book, one that entrances right to its cleverly conceived end.”
–Andrew Holgate (The Times [UK])
*
2. The Pisces by Melissa Broder
(4 Rave, 4 Positive)
“…the dirtiest, most bizarre, most original work of fiction I’ve read in recent memory … Broder has a talent for distilling graphic sexual thoughts, humor, female neuroses, and the rawest kind of emotion into a sort of delightfully nihilistic, anxiety-driven amuse-bouche … The Pisces is proof that she can sustain this 140- and 280-character knack over hundreds of pages and a narrative arch … Broder finds something both resonant and amusing in our cultural attraction to these kinds of ultra-romantic death wishes.”
–Julia Felsenthal (Vogue)
Read an essay by Melissa Broder here
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3. Head On by John Scalzi
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“With Head On, John Scalzi proves once again what an exciting storyteller he is. He deftly explores gender and disability through a rollicking science fiction crime thriller. It’s fun, fresh, and layered with meaning and interpretation. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Head On will be high on my recommendations list for years to come.”
–Alex Brown (Tor)
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4. Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
(1 Rave, 4 Positive)
“Miller has written an urgent tale imploring us to look at the ties between technology, race, gender and class privilege. Still, the novel is surprisingly heartwarming. Ultimately, Blackfish is a book about power structures and the way that privilege is built on the backs of the disenfranchised — wrapped in an action-packed science fiction thriller.”
–Everdeen Mason (The Washington Post)
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5. Motherhood by Sheila Heti
(2 Rave, 5 Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“…[an] earthy and philosophical and essential new novel … [Motherhood] floats somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. It reads like an inspired monologue, delivered over a kitchen table, or the one Spalding Gray sat behind in Swimming to Cambodia. Not a lot happens, yet everything does … This book is endlessly quotable, and a perfect review would be nothing but quotations. She makes a banquet of her objections to parenthood. If you are an underliner, as I am, your pen may go dry.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
**
1. The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
(6 Rave, 1 Mixed)
“Hampl is such an incisive writer, a reader comes to trust that those rabbit holes are worth tumbling down into … Like most of the rest of this odd and haunting book, it’s impossible to do justice to the cumulative power of Hampl’s dream-weaver writing style by just quoting a few lines. You have to go on the whole voyage with her, take the detours, be willing to let yourself get becalmed in thought. The payoff — because, of course, we’re all still looking for a payoff — is that by wasting some of your time with Hampl, you’ll understand more of what makes life worth living.”
–Maureen Corrigan (NPR)
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2. Eunice by Eileen McNamara
(5 Rave, 2 Positive)
“Her vivid biography is neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but a frank and nuanced assessment of a complicated woman … McNamara’s blunt depiction of Eunice’s flaws by no means diminishes her. Rather, it prompts admiration for her ability to channel anger and frustration into a life dedicated to the causes she believed in … Famous for her indifference to such social niceties as good grooming and good manners, she would likely have appreciated Eileen McNamara’s forthright portrait.”
–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)
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3. The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg
(4 Rave, 3 Positive)
“The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table…is a collection of stories — wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales about how generations of Bragg’s extended family survived from one meal to the next … the reader can skip the recipes altogether and concentrate on the stories wrapped lovingly around them — and still get a cooking lesson, how Margaret Bragg made plain food, well-seasoned, taste like a preview of kingdom come.”
–David Holohan (USA Today)
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4. No Way Home by Tyler Wetherall
(5 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Wetherall has written a luminous memoir that no one who reads it will soon forget … It’s an arresting, absorbing read as we come to know Tyler the child, the youngest in her family and, it would seem, the most attuned to the unspoken and unspeakable … Through it all, as Tyler struggles to carry on with the business of growing up, she conveys her exceptional yet familiar experiences in language that makes the reader stop and savor, or simply chuckle. She is witty and eloquent on the passing of childhood, describing how games and toys lose their power … As in any good coming-of-age story, our heroine has left family behind and begun to make her home in the wider world. Now that she has done so, we eagerly await the new stories she will tell.”
–Anne Boyd Rioux (The Washington Post)
Read an essay by Tyler Wetherall here
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5. The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Why on earth would a talented musician risk a prison term by stealing a bunch of bird skins? A fascinating new book provides the answer while exploring the bold derring-do of naturalists, the batty heights of Anglo-American eccentricity, and the high price of our never-ending attraction to beauty in nature … one of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books you’re ever likely to read … Johnson is an intrepid journalist who doesn’t mind venturing into the arcane world of, say, a Victorian salmon-fly-tying symposium held at a DoubleTree in New Jersey. He also has a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.”
–Randy Dotinga (The Christian Science Monitor)
Read an excerpt from The Feather Thief here
**
Bonus Poetry!
Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
(7 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“What I have always liked about Smith’s poetry is her interest in other people’s lives. The lone self has been the sacred cow of lyric poetry since the ancient Greeks, and there’s no way to sever that link permanently, but a vacation now and then from self-absorption to look around and see what the rest of the human race has been up to can do wonders to one’s poetry … The poems in Wade in the Water are full of memorable images nimbly put together by Smith’s exquisite sense of timing and her feel for the kind of language appropriate to the poem … Wade in the Water is not only a political book. It asks how an artist might navigate the political and the personal, and the collection’s real strength lies in its many marvelous poems that are more private.”
–Charles Simic (The New York Times Book Review)
