Books

"Weird and exhilarating and funny and sad and disturbing and scary and poignant and righteous."

“It will radicalize you.”

"Everything I Need I Get from You will fascinate aficionados, but even for someone who’s never so much as logged on, it makes a rich and heartfelt explainer on the feelings and phenomena that thrive on the internet." 

"These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores’s deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives." 

"A work of evil genius that put me in a literal trance and didn't relinquish me until the final page. I loved every insidious second.”

"The Uninnocent is so elegantly crafted that the pleasure of reading it nearly overrides its devastating subject matter. Blake is an investigator of heartbreak, turning a critical eye on the ways our systems have failed us, and how we fail each other. Through that...”

“As original as it is affecting. It is a meditation on grief and on what it means to belong, and there were scenes that left me genuinely creeped out, unsettled, and shaken. An existentially frightening book.”

"How to Wrestle a Girl is a work of stunning grace and rhythm. In these stories Venita Blackburn reminds us she is a writer unlike any other, her stories propelled by voice and wit and harsh beauty."

"A tart and spare palate cleanser tucked into the feast of summer beach reads."

[The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic] is by turns loose and warm and finicky and outraged, and its best pieces are more observant than 94 percent of the first novels that have come my way this year. 

"Layered, complex, and infinitely compelling, Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study is a daring exploration of the self and our interactions with others—a mediation on desire, race, loss and survival."

“Astonishing...With the intensity of a perfect balance between the mythic and the real, The Rain Heron keeps turning and twisting, taking you to unexpected places."

Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a symphony of sex, trouble and wisdom—as if the composer had sex with each member of the orchestra by way of getting it right. An electric prismatic genre-defying punk literary flight, Purnell is twirling here— I loved every page....”

"Reading The Seventh Mansion feels like receiving a divine transmission from a burning bush--I was beguiled by Maryse Meijer's brave and darting sentences and challenged by the questions raised."

"Of the four translations I’ve read, Headley’s is the most readable and engaging. She combines a modern poetry style with some of the hallmarks of Old English poetry, and the words practically sing off the page . . . Headley’s translation shows why it’s vital to...”

“dayliGht has a singular, potent, and persistent swagger—like if KRS-One had written Stone Butch Blues. In this tear-jerkingly matter-of-fact collection, Roya Marsh doesn’t propose an escape of past traumas but rather, sits in the cut, ponders, and comes back with...”

“Old myths translated into bright and glorious colors. I loved this.”

"[A] wide-ranging, zany collection that somehow combines the otherworldliness of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the menacing irony of Shirley Jackson and the cold feminist fury of Margaret Atwood. Love the book or not, there’s no denying that Jemc has a gift for...”

"There is a section in Impossible Owls where Brian Phillips writes about tigers, and he notes that what's most astonishing about the animal is not its size or power or beauty, but its capacity to disappear. This is an excellent description of a tiger, but also an...”

“Perfectly observant down to the smallest details, this account of drinking, sobriety, and starting (and then restarting) a manageable life is one of those books that is deeply serious, witty, and wonderfully compelling. Nothing Good Can Come from This seems to...”

"Nicola Griffith is a brilliant creator of fierce female protagonists. With So Lucky, she fires a gritty, scary, wrathful, sometimes blisteringly funny broadside at the monsters of ableist culture."

"It’s been a long wait for Joshua Wheeler’s first book, but it would have been worth the wait even if we’d had to wait twice as long. Full of fine lines mined by a still-young writer, Acid West is worth its weight in gold."

“VanderMeer’s apocalyptic vision, with its mix of absurdity, horror, and grace, can’t be mistaken for that of anyone else."

"Cyrus Console's Romanian Notebook is among the strangest, most compelling representations of human thought in contemporary literature . . . The thoughts Console records during his voyage are like highly formal buildings with reinforced structures that resist the...”

"Radiant prose...From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed."

"The best book I read in 2014 . . . Gorgeous and necessary."

"If you're an avid follower of contemporary fiction . . . then John Freeman’s How To Read A Novelist is the perfect, and perfectly modest, book . . . A terrific compendium of insights into what contemporary writers are thinking and how they present themselves."

"Koestenbaum's essays showcase a stunning display of carefully crafted sentences in an almost dizzying variety of arrangements. The result is a collection that is by turns funny, moving and insightful."

"[Dead Pig Collector] emerges fully-formed from the delightfully demented mind of Warren effing Ellis...Dead Pig Collector is brief but oh so bold, and predictably brilliant, right through to its abrupt ending."

"Yes, the mayhem quotient is off the charts in Bill’s debut novel, but there is much more to Donnybrook than characters maimed and murdered in nightmarish ways. The cast is memorable, the dialogue crackles, the tension is unrelenting and it all happens for a reason....”

"Smart, sophisticated, and quirky, these essays showcase an original voice that uncannily captures the broodings and shadings of a generation." 

"With a fine ear for dialogue and a nonjudgmental eye, Anasi conjures the pre-9/11 atmosphere of the place, in which the beer flowed like water and there was always a place to crash after a night of pub crawling. An impressive bit of literary journalism and a...”