1. The Incendiaries by R O Kwon
11 Rave • 6 Positive • 3 Mixed
“The Incendiaries is a sharp, little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon doesn’t make it easy to get her debut out of your system … Kwon’s crisp, poetic style conveys events that feel lightly obscured by fog, just enough to be disorienting without being frustrating … One of the cleverest aspects of The Incendiaries is the way Kwon suggests that all three of these people are lying, though for different reasons and with wildly different repercussions … In a nation still so haunted by the divine promise, on the cusp of ever-more contentious debates about abortion and other intrinsically spiritual issues, The Incendiaries arrives at precisely the right moment.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
*
2. Brother by David Chariandy
11 Rave • 2 Positive
“…hardly the first novel to wrestle with the strange confluences of fate and consequence—or even the first to frame [its story] through the eyes of characters whose identities lie at least partly on another continent. But [it does] it with such shrewd insight and graceful economy that the result feels gratifyingly new … Chariandy (whose previous novel was released only in Canada) traces that loss in paragraphs so clean and pared down, every sentence feels like a polished stone … [a story] that [doesn’t] try to outline or erase otherness but illuminate it, beautifully.”
–Leah Greenblatt (Entertainment Weekly)
Read an essay by David Chariandy here
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3. The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg
7 Rave • 5 Positive
“The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds can open within worlds. There’s Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg … The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg’s fantastic writing and unique twists of language … so much subtextual lava is coursing under the surface of every page of The Third Hotel the book feels like it’s going to erupt in your hands.”
–Randy Rosenthal (The Washington Post)
Read an essay by Laura van den Berg here
*
4. Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Fruit of the Drunken Tree is one of the most dazzling and devastating novels I’ve read in a long time … Rojas Contreras, in this vividly imagined and deeply researched book, renders in breathtaking specificity the humanity of each singular participant—whether perpetrator or bystander, betrayer or betrayed … By the end of this unforgettable book, we understand that what these two young women have endured, both separately and together, will continue to haunt them, together and separately.”
–Elizabeth Rosner (The San Francisco Chronicle)
*
5. Hits & Misses by Simon Rich
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“In his previous six books, Rich has proved he has a boundless imagination and a sharp sense of humor, and Hits and Missescontinues that streak—it’s a bizarre and hilarious collection from one of the funniest writers in America … Rich can be edgy, but his comedy doesn’t require victims; you get the feeling he actually likes his characters, and doesn’t see them as just ends to a punchline … He’s endlessly clever, but not impressed by his own wit; gentle, but not afraid to test boundaries. It’s a kind of humor that recalls early 20th-century writers like James Thurber and E.B. White, but Rich’s comic genius is really all his own. He spent years being regarded as a kind of precocious wunderkind, but with this book, Rich has come into his own as one of the most talented writers of comedic fiction working today.”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
Read an excerpt from Hits & Misses here
**
1. You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir by Parker Posey
4 Rave • 7 Positive
“Posey, the Ur-’90s indie darling, made her name in some of the decade’s best movies—Party Girl, Dazed and Confused, Waiting for Guffman, Kicking and Screaming, The House of Yes, Best in Show—with roles that were variations on a theme: the gum-cracking oddball, sometimes manic, sometimes brittle, sometimes smart aleck, sometimes airheaded. Her book—written in a voice just as wry and memorably demented as any of those characters—suggests she may have been playing some version of herself all along.”
–Julia Felsenthal (Vogue)
*
2. Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown
6 Rave • 2 Positive
“Brown offers an acerbic biography of the star-crossed princess, one that is hilarious and bittersweet in turns … All of these stories have been told countless times already, and Brown rather brilliantly parses the different accounts for what they tell us about the teller. Brown considers all the angles of many apocryphal stories, especially the ribald ones … a surprisingly substantial page-turner. Brown’s gift for satire is tempered with a genuinely humane portrayal of the emptiness of the princess’s life … Brown’s book is highly recommended for all American royal-watchers.”
–Catherine Hollis (BookPage)
*
3. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy
5 Rave • 3 Positive
“…a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference … The further Macy wades into the wreckage of addiction, the more damning her indictment becomes … Macy introduces so many remarkable people that, midway through Dopesick, readers may find it challenging to keep track of them. (Imagine the writer as the literary equivalent of a triage doctor, with more patients to stabilize than she can linger on.) Taken as a whole, however, this gripping book is a feat of reporting, research and synthesis.”
–Jessica Bruder (The New York Times Book Review)
*
4. Jell-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Jell-O Girls is a fascinating family history combined with an examination of an iconic brand, one with double-sided messages of domesticity and nurturing that have influenced generations of women. By sharing her family’s most personal tragedies, Rowbottom shows the interconnectivity among women and the continued need for amplification of their voices.”
–Melissa Firman (Shelf Awareness)
Read an excerpt from Jell-O Girls here
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5. Killing It: An Education by Camas Davis
2 Positive • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“That Davis is a skilled storyteller also is clear. And perhaps her story of becoming a champion of carnivores cannot be told without the personal relationships that influenced her work … Davis takes the essential need to eat and compels us to examine how, why and what we consume, without preaching or judging. Killing It could be a provocative choice for book clubs, given how it propels an examination of our relationships with animals as commodities, as companions, and as coq au vin.”
–Kim Ode (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an excerpt from Killing It here
