Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, K Patrick’s Mrs. S, and Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
(Knopf)
11 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Lorrie Moore here
“Moore excels in…[the] neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done … Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story … A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.”
–Abhrajyoti Chakraborty (The Guardian)
2. Mrs. S by K Patrick
(Europa Editions)
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Patrick is able to use language to evoke smell—to evoke all the senses—with a luxurious affluence. In less adroit hands, Mrs S might feel like sensory overload. Instead, it’s almost alchemical: sounds can be touched, sight is transformed into taste … Narrated in the first person, and without any quotation marks to indicate speech—whether that of the narrator or her interlocutors—consciousness runs into action, into conversation, into description, all of it rich, molten and fluid. The feeling of torpor lingers, a thick, slick haze of sex, heat and queer female desire. The sex scenes are beautifully written, but even without them the sensuality would remain … Patrick clearly loves language, but more importantly, also knows exactly what to do with it.”
–Lucy Scholes (The Telegraph)
3. Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
(Dial Press)
5 Rave
Read an essay by Claudia Cravens here
“A funny, sharp, subversive marvel: a queer Western that feels both fresh and timeless. With gunfights, gambling, mysterious strangers riding into town, criminal gangs and highway robbery, it has all the trappings of a classic Western. The plot takes off about two-thirds of the way through, and it delivers plenty of heart-pumping action and adventure … A complicated and moving portrait of a young queer woman determined to take up space in a world trying to render her invisible.”
–Laura Sackton (BookPage)
**
1. The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“He gives us a keen bird’s-eye view … Stille recounts with an almost claustrophobic intimacy … A major amusement of The Sullivanians is how it conjures the bad old days of New York City in all its lurid colors … A fascinating study of group dynamics and a highly competent historical account. Its only flaw, narratively speaking, is that this key party of self-actualizers features no particular cheerable hero or heroine—only survivors with varying degrees of rue, blinking as the light of hindsight intensifies.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street by Jackson Lears
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“In his fifth book, this note of longing at last finds full voice … Abundant detail … The huge-and-elusive-ness of Mr. Lears’s subject arrives before you even open the book … It’s all very rich and complex, but this is only a fraction of what Mr. Lears has attempted in this book.”
–Jeremy McCarter (The Wall Street Journal)
3. Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys’ Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman
(Legacy Lit)
1 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Drawing from a collection of captivating anecdotes and supported by extensive data, Garrett Neiman’s Rich White Men…makes a compelling argument that inequality harms us all … Neiman doesn’t shy away from self-indictment, regularly pointing out where he has fallen short—and where he continues to struggle — as he strives to maintain an orientation towards justice.”
–Ericka Taylor (NPR)
