Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise, and Laura Van den Berg’s State of Paradise all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
(Doubleday)
12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Kevin Barry here
“A rare thing. The Irish writer Kevin Barry’s fourth novel is a strongly plotted book that offers a doomed love affair, horses, high mountains, bad weather, a desperate journey and even a knife fight; a Western, in short, and a good one. But that plot is the least compelling thing about it, and the novel’s real force lies in the mordant wit of its language … Barry’s sentences are often long and flowing and yet sharply angled too. They lilt but don’t lull, and are virtually impossible to quote at length … What sets him apart is the bright black hole, the grim laughter, of his language, with his sentences all ‘bass tones and bottom.’ This short, tight novel pulls one so swiftly along that it can be read on a summer’s afternoon.”
–Michael Gorra (The Wall Street Journal)
2. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(Random House)
11 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an interview with Taffy Brodesser-Akner here
“Brodesser-Akner is ridiculously clever, but never overly so and never merely for the sake of showing off her prodigious way with words. A big reason I love her writing—in any medium—is that every sentence serves the whole. Every word is carefully chosen and I trust that the journey she takes us on will end at a destination worth visiting … This isn’t a breezy beach read and, like Fleishman, you want to restart it as soon as you’re done, to find what you missed.”
–Rochelle Olson (The Star Tribune)
3. State of Paradise by Laura Van den Berg
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“Discomfiting and surreal … Van den Berg rejects the very concept of narrative cohesion, plunging the reader instead into a series of dreamscapes. Moody and hallucinatory … Reflect[s] our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness.”
–Ruth Franklin (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. Madoff: The Final Word by Richard Behar
(Avid Reader Press)
1 Rave • 5 Positive
“Behar approaches this towering mountain of material with rigor, but also a certain informality. He delights in its wackier crags … Behar…seems determined to see Madoff’s humanity, and the tragedy of his family … Boils a story of mythic proportions down to a bowlful of golden nuggets. If this is the first time you’re being served, so much the better.”
–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)
2. The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo
(Graywolf)
2 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Listen to an interview with Stacey D’Erasmo here
“…the author and critic Stacey D’Erasmo poses another, seemingly more pragmatic query: ‘How do we keep doing this—making art?’ It is a question she attempts to answer in her raucous and exhilarating The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry … The honesty and intimacy of D’Erasmo’s story is reason enough to read the book.”
–Mary Gabriel (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne
(W. W. Norton & Company)
4 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Emily van Duyne here
“Deeply researched … Van Duyne’s scope includes the cultural context in which Hughes’ narrative has thrived, bringing in philosophy of intimate partner violence, as well as reflecting on her own personal experiences with an abusive ex.”
–Phoebe Farrell-Sherman (BookPage)
