Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, and Harald Jähner’s Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany are among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
(Scribner)
12 Rave • 3 Pan
Read an interview with Rachel Kushner here
“Bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring … The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit … The story, told in short chapters that feel punchy even when they’re highly cerebral, slides around the labyrinth of Sadie’s mind, which is equally deceptive and deceived … Kushner inhabits the spy’s perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun she’s having … Bore through this noir posing and wry satire of radical politics, and you feel something vital and profound prowling around in the darkness beneath.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
2. Colored Television by Danzy Senna
(Riverhead)
8 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Colored Television here
“Well-oiled, precisely choreographed … Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person … Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.”
–Tyler Austin Harper (The Atlantic)
3. Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
5 Rave • 1 Postive
“Greenwell flouts the sumptuary laws of style, favoring run-on, comma-spliced sentences sequined with archaic words and unfashionably long paragraphs that can billow out to several pages without a line break or indentation … Lush with literary references, the novel invites still more.”
–Rhoda Feng (The Boston Globe)
**
1. Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany by Harald Jähner
(Basic Books)
3 Rave • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Vertigo here
“Jähner’s pages are stained with the blood of abortive coups, uprisings and assassinations … Jähner is wonderful on the details of everyday life, from houses and offices to cars, typewriters, dresses and dances … His political coverage is relatively fleeting, probably because German readers are already so familiar with it. And like so many writers he tends to focus on eye-catching extremes … But his book contains so many pleasures.”
–Dominic Sandbrook (The Sunday Times)
2. Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck
(Crown)
1 Rave • 3 Positive
“An in-depth examination and analysis of the forces leading to Trump’s rise to power and many concurrent assaults on our freedoms.”
–James Pekoll (Booklist)
3. Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World by Peter Godfrey-Smith
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Because Godfrey-Smith has devoted so much effort to excavating the origins and cross-species parallels of mental capacities familiar to us, he can afford, without risk of exceptionalism, to point out how we are different … His willingness to look in unexpected directions keeps the discussion surprising.”
–Philip Ball (The Guardian)
