Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day, Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters, and Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Michael Cunningham is possessed by a spirit, one whom a good deal of contemporary writers find it hard to shake: Virginia Woolf walks the hallways of his novels … with new emergencies rushing by us each day, I find it harder and harder to abide literature concerned with the pandemic itself, rather than its long-tail outcomes. (Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway—an obvious influence on Day—benefited from being set after, not during, the flu epidemic of 1919-20.) And yet, Day is not really about the pandemic at all, and its first section, set long before anyone besides virologists had ever uttered the word coronavirus, is by far its strongest. Cunningham scatters his characters to their separate emotional exiles with an aim to bring them together at day’s (and Day‘s) end. Dispersal is his forte … Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self, to be

unable ‘to reenter the orderly passage of time.’ Day is even set on a date New Yorkers will recognize as a kind of faux spring, when, in defiance of the calendar, the earth stays hard and the flowers huddle underground … In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love—familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous—I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent … When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.”

–Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day (The Los Angeles Times)

“It has been a robust year for celebrity memoirs…There’s the sob story, the gallant bildungsroman, the louche chronicle of various addictive behaviors, the righteous making of an activist, the victory lap. Streisand’s book, in its sheer breadth and largesse, attempts to be all of these things, and thus becomes something incredibly rare. Call it the diva’s memoir, an act of bravura entertainment and impossible stamina. The diva’s memoir is, by definition, a somewhat delusional form, in that its author lives in a very different world from the rest of us, and has a different sense of scale …

If something interests her, then it is interesting, full stop. In a way, she draws on an old-fashioned idea of celebrity: to be a star is to be golden, and to make everything you touch look the same. And would we want anything less? Streisand has never thought it necessary to contain herself, and there’s no reason to start now. The audio version of My Name Is Barbra is forty-eight hours long—the longest author-read memoir at Penguin Random House. It is also, I would argue, the superlative way to experience Streisand’s opus. She ad-libs at will; she refuses to say the word ‘farts.’ Sometimes she sounds like a tired bubbe, sometimes a grand dame. But she’s her best, as ever, when she’s singing….The sound is pure, exultant catharsis. It will make you believe in something, if not quite as much as the singer believes in herself.”

–Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New Yorker)

“Putting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least—in a hyper-polarized time—a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both … Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality … Rife with dissatisfactions—to its credit—and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes … Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.”

–Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn (The Los Angeles Times)

“The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism … Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual’s reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory—or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment … Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently—the monsters in our midst.”

–Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (The Guardian)

“The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, So Late in the Day, that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.) Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman … Keegan’s stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable. As in her stunning, tiny novels, Foster and Small Things Like These, she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something…Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read …

All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale … they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”

–Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (The Star Tribune)

Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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Fiction

1. The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)

6 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an interview with Sigrid Nunez here

“Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception … This one comes across as a Covid diary, with a light scaffolding of incident to hold its meditations up. The narrator’s interactions with the parrot are funny and moving … I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. But Nunez is a closer observer than most, and she is wittier … Like certain storms, this novel churns intensely in one place. There is a bit more plot … I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny—good and strong company … You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

2. How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
(Biblioasis)

3 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from How to Build a Boat here

“Feeney effortlessly combines the overwhelming ebb and flow of life with her boat-building plot … Feeney’s prose is both careful and relaxed—detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling, the point of view shifting throughout scenes … the difficult winter carries the reader into a hopeful spring. Life is random; our connections are as essential and uncontrollable as the tides, the book seems to say. All we can do is learn how to float.”

–Sophie Ward (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park
(Random House)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Park’s follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams, arrives a full decade and a half later [after Personal Days], with all the heft, complexity and ambition such a lengthy interim suggests. The author has greatly expanded his literary scope and complicated his narrative technique, though certain fundamentals remain … Braids three plots together in a bewilderingly layered structure … Absurdly complex … Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make Same Bed Different Dreams succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.”

–Jonathan Russell Clark (The Los Angeles Review of Books)

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Nonfiction

1. A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Paul Caruana Galizia
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 2 Positive

“Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are … This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.”

–Christina Patterson (The Sunday Times)

2. Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop
(W. W. Norton & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score … Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronom.”

–Isabel Hamilton (The Financial Times)

3. My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
(Viking)

3 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A 970-page victory lap … Details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame …but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table … Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives, Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner, and Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach Power Broker proportions … For one thing, she is—fits of insecurity notwithstanding—a bona fide power broker…For another, as Streisand writes in My Name Is Barbra, a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh. There are just so many scintillating Streisands to contemplate over so many years: singer, actress, director, producer, philanthropist, activist, lover, mother, wife, friend, autobiographer. ‘I would make a very good critic,’ she suggests at one point, and as I struggle to put a button on this, all I can reply is: Barbra, be my guest.”

–Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New York Times)

“What if ghosts return not to haunt or hector, but because they cannot bear to relinquish the common pleasures of daily life? … Smith…writes prose at once dazzling and exacting. On nearly every page of this book is a phrase or sentence to marvel over, a word (usually an adjective) so unexpectedly apt that it freshens familiar language … So luscious that it often reads less like a collection of essays than like a work of prose poetry. Its six long sections and brief coda are not neatly contained narratives or discrete arguments, but threads in one continuous web of reminiscence and observation … Many of Smith’s flights of fancy are attempts to imagine all that the historical record conceals — to endow skeletal statistics with flesh and blood — and her lively lyricism is an antidote to the slick obfuscations of bureaucratic language. Over and over, she pits the dead rhetoric of institutions against the vibrant hum of human speech … Nothing could be less like institutional abstractions; nothing could be more lavishly particular.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives (The Washington Post)

“That discomforting riddle—what these business machinations contribute to the actual publication of actual books—is the central question of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction...Sinykin argues that the corporate ethos that dominates the modern publishing house has exerted such an overwhelming influence on the way books are written and published that it has inaugurated a new epoch: ‘the Conglomerate era.’ As he sees it, the consolidation of the industry that began in the nineteen-sixties and seventies transformed American fiction and ‘changed what it means to be an author.’ The stakes of Sinykin’s inquiry are to explain ‘how we should read’ fiction published in the U.S. during the past half century or so, a period during which every book, no matter its preoccupations or themes, could be said to reflect a greater entity: the corporation … Today’s publishing house is closer to a hedge fund than a tastemaker. Every book that it acquires is a bet on profitability. The financialization of the acquisition process functions like an index of risk, creating a ‘system in which homogeneity . . . is encouraged’ to minimize bad bets … Sinykin sidesteps the question of whether this system has made books worse. He wants to demonstrate something trickier: how the process of authoring a book has become subsumed by a larger and larger network of interests, changing what it meant to be an author. Critics and scholars, Sinykin contends, are uncomfortable displacing the author when studying literature. His book is an earnest attempt to focus attention on the non-authorial figures involved in a book’s creation. Instead of individual writers, he wants us to think in terms of a ‘feedback loop’ .. The clumsiness of these readings points to the limitations of works like Big Fiction…These are daring attempts to map the larger structures that shape how books are written and published, but their attention to the big picture can obscure how novels operate on a visceral, textual level. Still, Sinykin’s study is valuable because it speaks to the same fear that Gerald Howard voiced in 1989: that the balance of culture and commerce at the heart of publishing is increasingly weighted toward profit.”

–Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (The New Yorker)

“I can hear the whingeing already: Nothing happens in this novel. It’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s not high concept or high event. And in a nod to how conditioned we—or at least I—have become to expect high event, I spent the first 25 pages of Baumgartner waiting for its namesake to be kidnapped, maimed or just locked in a closet by the meter man. When it was clear this just wasn’t going to be that kind of novel, I had to start over. What kind of a novel is Baumgartner, then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate Baumgartner in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty…So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work … The novel walks us through what he thinks about and, more important, how he thinks. How his thoughts assemble and fall apart, how they produce a kind of cumulative power that dissipates just as powerfully in the face of life’s little intrusions … Sy is old, lonely, frail, and his life is starred with these small events in a constellation that proves explosive enough on this morning to push him out of his emotional impasse. It also pushes the novel into gear to begin exploring and excavating Sy’s memories … There are a lot of books out there about grief, and it’s hard to say what kind of conversation Baumgartner is having with them—every grief is its own. Still, Sy’s experience puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who at 61 lost his wife to cancer, and who wrote about the loss in A Grief Observed...As Lewis put it: ‘Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.’ Baumgartner, for its quiet and thoughtful meandering, reads the same way.”

–Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner (The New York Times Book Review)

“At the time the novel was published, Italian literary culture revolved around neorealism. The practitioners of this style…spurned elegance, artifice, and the pomposity of Fascist propaganda, using plain language to convey the devastation of the war and the fractured society it left behind. Lies and Sorcery is in many ways neorealism’s inverse. The novel, a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, is a deliberate anachronism in both its themes and its style. Its Belle Époque setting, sweeping cast of characters, frequent asides to the reader, and grandiloquence place it firmly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. It is not concerned with truth but with lies: glittering surfaces, concealed identities, and foolish pretensions.​​ As Morante reminds us again and again, however, appearances are often deceiving. Despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century. The novel is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality that she saw in her countrymen. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise.”

–Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (The New Yorker)

Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, Alice McDermott’s Absolution, and Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
(Gallery/Saga Press)

10 Rave

“Emotive and eschews realism for the supernatural. It combines current concerns about race and justice for young Black men with an intensely readable, immersive story with decisive paranormal features. In fact, the novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work. I couldn’t stop reading. I needed to find out what was going to happen next, and next, and next … A supernatural historical novel and a straight-up page-turner. This is a difficult combination to sustain for nearly 600 pages, but Due accomplishes it, and in so doing invites us to consider what it means to be enthralled, even entertained, by a young man’s ethical dilemmas, and to find ourselves unexpectedly rooting for revenge, for the living and the dead.”

–Randy Boyaga (The New York Times Book Review)

2. The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore
(Scribner)

6 Rave • 3 Positive

“The author brings her powers of language and research to bear on a historical novel that announces from the start that it plans to break the rules. She opens with a description that seems to gestate and eat itself, like an ouroboros … Visceral … This is a sensory feast that asks us what brutality we are prepared to witness, taste, hear, smell and touch. While some may find the prose overstuffed, others will relish a compelling, urgent, empathic, beautifully revolting novel that wants to kick the stuffing out of our complacency.”

–Kim Sherwood (Times Literary Supplement)

3. Absolution by Alice McDermott
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“It’s futile to predict where a great writer’s boundless imagination will take us and, as Absolution affirms, McDermott is a great writer … What draws out McDermott’s most incisive, compassionate writing is the expat world of ‘the wives’ … McDermott possesses the rare ability to evoke and enter bygone worlds…without condescending to them.”

–Maureen Corrigan (NPR)

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Nonfiction

1. White Holes by Carlo Rovelli
(Riverhead)

3 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Going beyond that horizon towards a new understanding of space, time and black holes is the principal goal of physicist Carlo Rovelli’s wonderful new book … White Holes, like Rovelli’s other works, is remarkably short—less than 200 pages. But the clarity of his explanations is unparalleled. As a scientist who is also a popularizer, I often find myself marveling at the acuity of his passages. More than just an ability to explain cutting edge ideas in physics, Rovelli’s erudition and sensitivity lets him make contact with the broadest human yearnings for making sense of the world … taking the journey with Rovelli is more than worth the price of the book. Dante gave us his tour of the underworld. We could not do better than having Rovelli as a guide into the dark world of black holes.”

–Adam Frank (NPR)

2. The Race to Be Myself by Caster Semenya
(W. W. Norton & Company)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“Here, for the first time, Semenya shares her perspective on the trauma and horrific treatment she endured to fulfill her dreams of reaching her potential as a female athlete and providing her family with financial support. Told with candor, Semenya’s story reminds readers to treat all humans with dignity and that being different does not mean being wrong.”

–Brenda Barrera (Booklist)

3. Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman
(Simon & Schuster)

2 Rave • 3 Positive

“A beautifully composed and unique look at how Chaplin was characterized as an immoral sexual deviant and Soviet-sympathizing subversive. The author vividly documents the federal government’s relentless pursuit of Chaplin … A brilliant must-read about the epic and turbulent life and times of a cinematic titan.”

–Kirkus

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Lauren Michele Jackson on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Julie Phillips on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, Jennifer Egan on Alice McDermott’s Absolution, Jennifer Wilson on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, and Maggie Doherty on Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“An interesting discrepancy develops in the text. It becomes clear that Spears has limited interest in some of what we onlookers might consider the touchstones of her career … Instead, Spears’s most reflective passages, peppered with clusters of queries for a sympathetic reader, are reserved for her most wounding personal relationships, and the way that, rather than buffer the onslaught of the world, those closest to her accelerated the rate and severity of her overexposure … For some readers, the book will add to a distaste for Timberlake that has ballooned in recent years as the public reëvaluates his early career triumphs and the women, such as Spears and Janet Jackson, who served as collateral. Even at a time when skuzzy men seem poised to make a comeback, he has been unable to escape the whiff of calculated misogyny … Her writing can also veer into the sort of hammy foreshadowing one might find in a middle grade novel…But there is still value in the specifics that this memoir collects. As chilling as the previous reporting has been, Spears’s interior account of the conservatorship is a visceral view of the methodical means by which her family endeavored to eclipse her … Even if Spears wants The Woman in Me to offer lessons for her readers, the truth is that she was not an everywoman. She is an artist who has experienced a level of success that only a handful of people in the history of the world can claim. At the same time, Spears was not ‘O.K.,’ and she may never be O.K. in a prescriptive sense of the word. But proper comportment should not be a prerequisite for human dignity.”

–Lauren Michele Jackson on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me (The New Yorker)

“‘Historical novel’ isn’t quite the right term for this book, which strips that particular genre down to bare bones, omitting the elaborate descriptions of antebellum houses, clothing, and customs—except for those belonging to the practice of chattel slavery … To this portrayal of enslavement at its most brutal, Ward adds an element of the fantastic, using it—like recent writers from Colson Whitehead and Kaitlyn Greenidge to adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—to ask questions about power, agency, and past and future choices. Ward also takes down to its essence a theme of her previous novels: the hope that love and family ties can be strong enough to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by exploitation and injustice … Ward describes every bit of the ordeal in ravishing prose that moves to the rhythm of footsteps, the pour of rain, the scrape of wind, the ache of suffering … The novelist with whom Ward seems most in conversation is Toni Morrison. Let Us Descend recalls not only Beloved, Morrison’s mother-daughter ghost story, but A Mercy, her historical novel, set in the seventeenth century, about a daughter whose enslaved mother gives her away to keep her from rapist slaveowners. Convinced that she is not loved, the daughter never recovers from what she experiences as betrayal … In response, Ward delivers a moving defense of the strength and persistence of mother love…At the close of Let Us Descend, it’s the bond between mother and child that proves the real talisman against oppression, one that affirms the human value of both their lives.

–Julie Phillips on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (4Columns)

“Alice McDermott is rightly celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-20th-century life, with a particular focus on Irish Americans. Her fans may be startled, then, to find themselves plunged into 1963 Saigon at the start of her enveloping new novel, Absolution, whose lofty title belies its sensory, gritty humanity … The debacle of America’s involvement in Vietnam might easily have overdetermined McDermott’s story, and it is a measure of her skill that Absolution maintains an oblique relationship to the war. McDermott’s subject is not intervention per se but the altruistic impulse—particularly as practiced by those whose privilege lets them anoint themselves to heal what Charlene calls Vietnam’s ‘wretchedness.’ She’s one of many characters who are trying to ‘do good,’ and they range from the greedy and presumptuous to the genuinely selfless … The chasm between Charlene and Patricia reasserts itself, and the reader is left with a sense of how unlikely, even otherworldly, their collaboration was. Yet as American wives overseas in 1963, they had a great deal in common: a near-total lack of agency or power; a choice between parroting their husbands’ opinions or operating independently in the margins, to limited and uncertain effect. What difference might it have made, for everyone, if those wives had been given a choice in the decision-making? Without posing this question directly, Absolution leaves the reader in its provocative shadow.”

–Jennifer Egan on Alice McDermott’s Absolution (The New York Times Book Review)

“NDiaye’s latest tale, a story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, is scattered with interpretive hints, clues to the crimes of contemporary French society. Though it starts with a date on the calendar, the story works like a map. The novel is dotted with coördinates around Bordeaux—neighborhood and street names—which NDiaye drops into the story like pins, marking the poor sections of the city where domestic workers live and the rich ones where they work. By the last page, I was newly fluent in the social geography of Bordeaux and its environs, well traversed in the French city’s throughways of privilege and its dead ends of precarity … In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility and eager for a place to rest—a way out rather than in … NDiaye is interested in the elusiveness of motive in crimes committed by mothers, who, she suggests, are at the mercy of an insanity-inducing chorus of voices from all corners of society telling them what to do and how to behave … Reality is a slippery thing in NDiaye’s novels. In the tradition of French Surrealism, she aims to get at the truth by distancing herself from it. In Vengeance Is Mine, Maître Susane’s psyche breaks down as she works on Marlyne’s case, resulting in a narrative fractured by the trauma of its protagonist … NDiaye treats politics and the material conditions it creates as forces that lead to unpredictable, idiosyncratic outcomes. She never lets her characters be flattened to make a point. A lesser author might stage the interplay between Marlyne and Maître Susane as the contest between a mother and a professional, the novel becoming a stage for the drama of women’s choices to play out. NDiaye transforms them instead into versions of a single person—two women raised to court the rich, to do whatever it took to be let into their houses, even if it meant they would never be at home in their own skin.”

–Jennifer Wilson on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (The New Yorker)

“New Ernaux is never entirely new, which makes her long career strangely difficult to interpret. Typically, a literary critic proceeds chronologically, comparing an author’s recent work to earlier work, and tracing the evolution of a writer’s style and themes over time. Ernaux thwarts this approach. As Jamie Hood and Joanna Biggs have each noted in their essays on Ernaux, her books are full of repetitions and recursions; they are not so much discrete stories as fragments of one endlessly expanding story, a kind of ‘total novel,’ as she puts it in The Years (2008). Memory, the narrative present, and the time of writing blend into one continuous timeline, stretching across different books. To read Ernaux, and to write about her, mean becoming comfortable with repetition. Her memoirs ask us to cultivate different expectations for narrative, and perhaps for life: to seek not novelty but rather the familiar, which surprises in its own way … This is one way to understand Ernaux’s repetition compulsion: By revisiting and retelling the same stories from her past, she shows that any given account is incomplete. What was missing from the first version of the story was not specific incidents or details—many of which are the same in both books—but rather Ernaux’s own feelings of guilt and despair … For Ernaux, writing is a way to demystify the past, to render it intelligible, and also a process that is never fully complete … she is less concerned with the ethics of May-December romances than she is with the way this particular romance collapses time, forcing her to repeat moments from her past—or to consider them anew … As Ernaux’s work shows, telling the story of a life always involves more than putting the facts of it in order. It means moving backward and forward through time, repeating and revisiting, uncovering old memories and fleshing out stories that have already been told. If you end up returning again and again to the same episodes, then so be it. Show them from different angles. Rearrange the order. Do whatever you must to make it new.”

–Maggie Doherty on Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man (The New Republic)

Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self all feature among this month’s best reviewed nonfiction titles.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
(37 Ink)

8 Rave • 3 Positive
Listen to an interview with Safiya Sinclair here

“Astounding … a personal story so fierce, honest and utterly absorbing that it’s impossible to put down. In How to Say Babylon, Sinclair uses that fire she found so long ago to pen a powerful portrait of a young woman cleaving her way out of hardship to wield a mighty voice all her own. … Boundless and beautiful and all the rest, How to Say Babylon is, in a word, a triumph.”

–Alexis Burling (The San Francisco Chronicle)

2. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
(Knopf)

8 Rave • 2 Positive

“Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers…who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time … An engrossing survey … The real joy of The Dictionary People is to be reminded that any group of people pinned at its intersection will still burst forth every which way, a tapestry of contradictions, noble and ignoble, wild and banal.”

–Dennis Duncan (The New York Times Book Review)

3. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall
(Metropolitan Books)

7 Rave • 3 Positive 

“A penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.”

–David Schulman (The New York Review of Books)

4. A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
(Henry Holt & Company)

6 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Mantel…left behind a literary legacy that also includes a wide range of her right-handed writing. A Memoir of My Former Self gathers together the best of it. Spanning four decades, and comprising work that originally appeared in various outlets, this bravura collection of articles, essays, reviews and talks showcases the inquiring mind, fierce intelligence and shrewd way with words of a dexterous — and indeed, ambidextrous — prose stylist … Mantel impresses with her sharp wit, informed opinions and keen observations.”

–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)

5. Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard
(Liveright)

6 Rave • 2 Positive

“An erudite and entertaining new book by the redoubtable classics scholar and feminist Mary Beard … Beard, a consummate storyteller, finds ‘ancient gossip’ understandably hard to resist. Such stories also free her up to pursue her subject thematically instead chronologically, pointing not just to differences among the emperors but also similarities … As a writer, Beard is so appealing and approachable that even the recalcitrant reader who previously gave not a single thought to the Roman Empire will warm to her subject.”

–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, Teju Cole’s Tremor, and Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC all feature among this month’s best reviewed fiction titles.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf)

13 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read Todd Portnowitz on translating Jhumpa Lahiri here

“Melancholy yet electric … The fluid transitions between Lahiri’s and Portnowitz’s translations elevate Roman Storiesfrom a grouping of individual tales to a deeply moving whole. By putting many kinds of foreignness together, Lahiri shows that they all belong.”

–Lily Meyer (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Tremor by Teju Cole
(Random House)

15 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Pan

“As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor … Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling … Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident … To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

3. The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
(Penguin Press)

7 Rave • 11 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read a profile of Benjamín Labatut here

“Darkly fascinating … Riveting … Labatut handles all of this with impressive dexterity, unpicking complex ideas in long, elegant sentences that propel us forward at speed (this is his first book written in English). Even in the more feverish passages, when yet another great mind succumbs to madness, haunted by the specters they’ve helped unleash on the world, he feels in full control of his material.”

–Killian Fox (The Observer)

4. Family Meal by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead)

10 Rave • 5 Positive

“Masterful … What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear … Family Meal juggles a lot…but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength.”

–Ernesto Mestre-Reed (The New York Times Book Review)

5. Blackouts by Justin Torres
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 1 Positive

“A transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love … Easily 2023’s sexiest novel … Astonishing … It steers clear of contrivance, thanks to edgy illustrations, an origami structure, and the author’s exquisite eye and ear. This is a novel of ideas, too, brimming with queer history, racial defiance and the injustices of the Freudian era … Run, don’t walk, to buy it.”

–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Leah Greenblatt on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Hua Hsu on Staci Robinson’s Tupac Shakur, Walton Muyumba on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, Ryan Ruby on Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’ Our Strangers.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“What Spears fills in, in prose that is chatty and confiding and occasionally salty, is the ongoing thrum of family dysfunction and fear … Throughout the book, Spears repeatedly portrays her relationship to creativity as a kind of pure soul connection, a private communion with godliness independent of outside forces and opinion. Details on the actual salient process of music-making, though, are scant … The mostly linear narrative in The Woman In Me tends to treat these moments and many other well-documented highlights of her career as passing or ancillary, a distant cacophony muffled by the much louder noise of her personal struggles. Still, the facts of it are presented so cleanly and candidly that Womanseems designed to be read in one sitting. It’s nearly impossible to come out of it without empathy for and real outrage on behalf of Spears … As freely confessional and often furious as it is, The Woman in Me isn’t quite the blazing feminist manifesto that some witnesses to history may have wanted Spears to write, nor the kind of granular, completist portrait-of-an-artist autobiography that others have dutifully supplied in the past. It could be argued, though, that she never stopped telling us who she was.”

–Leah Greenblatt on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me (The New York Times Book Review)

“In just five years of stardom, Tupac Shakur released four albums, three of which were certified platinum, and acted in six films. He was the first rapper to release two No. 1 albums in the same year, and the first to release a No. 1 album while incarcerated. But his impact on American culture in the nineteen-nineties is explained less by sales than by the fierce devotion that he inspired. He was a folk hero, born into a family of Black radicals, before becoming the type of controversy-clouded celebrity on the lips of politicians and gossip columnists alike. He was a new kind of sex symbol, bringing together tenderness and bruising might, those delicate eyelashes and the ‘fuck the world’ tattoo on his upper back. He was the reason a generation took to pairing bandannas with Versace. He is also believed to have been the first artist to go straight from prison, where he was serving time on a sexual-abuse charge, to the recording booth and to the top of the charts … That he contained such wild contradictions somehow seemed to attest to his authenticity, his greatest trait as an artist … It’s a reverential and exhaustive telling of Shakur’s story, leaning heavily on the perspective of his immediate family, featuring pages reproduced from the notebooks he kept in his teens and twenties. The biography’s publication follows Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur, a documentary series that premièred, on FX, in April. Robinson was an executive producer on Dear Mama, which drew on the same archive of estate-approved, previously unreleased materials as her book, and the works share a common purpose: to complicate Shakur without demystifying him … At the heart of the Tupac Shakur mythology is how much of his artistic persona was the result of moments in which he imagined what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes. It speaks to how empathetic—but also how impressionable—he could be. It’s something his fans often debate: Were there simply some poses he could never shake? … Perhaps Shakur’s contradictions—the gangster poet who was never exactly a gangster, the actor who could never break character—would have found resolution had he lived longer. At the heart of things was always the question of how to distinguish the persona from the person.”

–Hua Hsu on Staci Robinson’s Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography (The New Yorker)

“Leading Dante into hell, Virgil, the poet guide, intones: ‘Now let us descend into the blind world here below.’ Jesmyn Ward’s new novel…employs Alighieri as a guide through the dark, teeming forest of slavery in the United States … Among her talents, Ward can imagine and draw complex emotional and psychological lives for her adolescent characters. The children in Ward’s novels are frequently blessed with second sight and psychic understanding of animalia and supernatural worlds … Some critics have claimed that the novel form is already imbued with a kind of magic. So, any additional supernatural forces entering the literary frame seem overbearing. But Caribbean, African, South American, and ethnic American writers have yanked the form into their own matrices. There is, of course, room enough for all sorts of novelistic practices. Why be hierarchical, favoring, say, realism as the one true novelistic aesthetic, when an ecumenical approach to technique and reference offers the novelist more opportunities for dwelling in webs of contingency and linkage? For example, identifying Toni Morrison as an influence on Ward’s lyrical prose and ancestor invocation is fair, true, and too easy. Instead, we ought to read Ward as placing Greek mythology, ancient epic poets, Judeo-Christian narratives, and the system of Dante’s hell, adjacent to but not above her African American and African-descended gods. Her novels argue that these are interconnected, co-equal branches of practical magic.”

–Walton Muyumba on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (The Boston Globe)

“Young envisioned a book that would top out at around two hundred pages and take two years to complete. When she delivered the manuscript to Scribner eighteen years later, the stack of papers was almost half as tall as she was … In Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the American Dream is depicted quite literally: as a series of incompatible hallucinations. Set largely in the course of a single, harrowing nighttime bus ride during the last years of Depression, the story follows the narrator, Vera Cartwheel, as she sifts through her memories of her eccentric upbringing in a mansion on the coast of New England … Vera encounters the truth as something that is constantly flipping upside down and right side up again. In Young’s telling, reality is not the neutral ground where disparate perceptions overlap; it is the interstices between them. Reality is the worm in the wheat, as the novel’s working title would have it, the point at which our ‘perfect equations’ come up short, our ‘definitions fail,’ and our desires for ‘ultimate harmony’ are frustrated. Truth is ‘but another illusion,’ Vera is forced to conclude … What Vera finds at the end of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is something none of the novel’s perfection-seekers do: love … At 1,198 pages, it is among the longest single-volume novels in the English language. If Moby-Dick, the book against which all other Great American Novels are measured, is about a single monomaniac, Miss MacIntosh is a veritable republic of Ahabs, each more idiosyncratic than the next. An Indiana bus and a New England mansion furnish the book with its principal settings, but Young, much like Melville, never fails to imbue them with cosmological import…The book is an epic of mothers and daughters, rather than of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, or war and peace, and Young’s sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist.”

–Ryan Ruby on Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (The New Yorker)

“Davis has wondered if she should continue to write amid the destruction of our environment. Her increasing ambivalence about writing is detectable in Our Strangers—not because her prose is any less good, but because its fastidiousness now seems to culminate in ordinary everyday language. In her latest stories, she has made herself smaller, shifting her focus to networks, communities, and systems, the units which we will need to think in to change course collectively. Davis’s title announces straight away the new territory she is exploring. Whereas older collections like Break it Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), and Can’t and Won’t (2013) largely feature intimate relations—husbands, ex-husbands, friends, children—this collection foregrounds a cast of strangers—neighbors, fellow travelers, old men seen around town. These strangers variously produce reactions of irritation, bafflement, pity, gratitude, and intrigue … The bond between strangers is not so different from the bond between family members, Davis suggests. Both can be seen as arbitrary. We might love our families, condemn them, or even reject them, but it’s impossible to entirely ignore them—and something like this applies to the strangers we live with, too … In a tight seven-sentence piece, Davis writes that a person’s ultimate aim should be to ‘feel small and still feel strong, and good.’ To act at all today—in relation to communities, in relation to the climate—requires an embrace of one’s own insignificance in the larger scheme of things. By giving meticulous form to her singular sensibility, Our Strangers suggests that this fact does not have to annihilate meaning. Rather, it can be a wellspring for the wonderful and absurd.”

–Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’ Our Strangers (The New Republic)

Teju Cole’s Tremor, Sly Stone’s Thank You, and Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Tremor by Teju Cole
(Random House)

11 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Pan

“As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor … t does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling … Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident … To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

2. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
(Bloomsbury)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The House of Doors here

“Outstanding … Eng ingeniously inserts a further shocking twist. But what most gives his novel its grip is his masterly conjuring up of Maugham’s imaginative world and the steamy tropic latitudes in which it burgeoned … Occasionally the prose becomes overclamorous … Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham’s life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work.”

–Peter Kemp (The Sunday Times)

3. Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye
(Knopf)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an essay by Jordan Stump on translating Marie NDiaye here

“The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood … A master at agitating, probing and upending expectations … She presents a new litter of misfits and constructs one of her most beguiling and visceral tales … NDiaye deals in impressions and captures a particular kind of emotional delirium in Vengeance. She leans into jaggedness, twisting her narrative to mimic Maître Susane’s fraying psychological state as she searches for a kind of truth.”

–Lovia Gyarkye (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction

1. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers…who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time … An engrossing survey … The real joy of The Dictionary People is to be reminded that any group of people pinned at its intersection will still burst forth every which way, a tapestry of contradictions, noble and ignoble, wild and banal.”

–Dennis Duncan (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone
(Auwa)

 3 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Sly Stone has been MIA for so long, many people will probably be surprised to learn that he is still alive. Actually, at age 80, the incredible and unpredictable funk music pioneer has, once again, surprised us all by producing a frisky, remarkably vivid and cogent account of his life and career.”

–Joel Selvin (The San Francisco Chronicle)

3. The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Lumumba Plot here

“Reid…has arrived with a carefully researched book that warns us about what is lost when tensions between great powers play out in the developing world … Reid develops his main characters beautifully, especially Lumumba, who passes ‘like a meteor’—to borrow the lovely phrase of his daughter Juliana—through its pages … Lumumba is re-elevated by the end of Reid’s book, mainly through the sea of indignities he suffered as a captive … argues convincingly that by ordering the assassination of Lumumba, the Eisenhower administration crossed a moral line that set a new low in the Cold War.”

–Nicolas Niarchos (The New York Times Book Review)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor, Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, and Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“The two halves of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s slim, searing novel are bound by both minor and major details: a brutal gang rape and murder, the punishing heat, the eerie presence of a dog in distress and two nameless characters. The first is a fastidious, quietly malevolent Israeli platoon commander who organises the gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin. The second is a woman in Ramallah who stumbles upon the story in a newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail—the fact that the girl’s assault happened 25 years to the day before she was born … The Negev gang rape at the heart of Minor Detail is a true story, carried out by Israeli soldiers in 1949. Another minor detail: according to declassified documents, the real-life commander answered his superior’s question on whether the girl was eventually returned to her village by reporting that his soldiers killed her because ‘it was a shame to waste the petrol.’ The atmosphere is one of unbearable tension, measured by the increasing anxiety of the dog who stands as helpless sentry over the girl. He howls and cries, pants and trembles, barking endlessly. Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page … The second section of the novel follows a Palestinian woman as she hunts down information about the crime decades later. What ought to be an ordinary search—visiting two museum archives—becomes a logistical nightmare for someone living under occupation … All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.”

–Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (The Guardian)

“His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight … An elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time … If Open City was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, Tremor occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre … At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well … It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls ‘sanctimony literature,’ a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not ‘cannibalize the lives of others’? … A work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere … There is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake … Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. Tremor, with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that Open City revolved around 9/11.”

–Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor (The New Yorker)

“No one could legitimately call Marie NDiaye ‘overlooked’…Nonetheless, the magnificence of her writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante. What makes her a master? In part, it’s NDiaye’s deft interweaving of those narrative traits we associate with genre fiction, specifically crime thrillers—suspense, mystery, intrigue, a touch of the supernatural—with a high-modernist sensibility in thrall to the shifting, refractive nature of memory, unsettled selfhood, and intersubjectivity tout court. To attempt to summarize NDiaye’s approach—this blend of the heady high and supposed low—is to properly appreciate what an unruly mix it is, one that surely risks chaos, or, worse, pretension. What a feat, then, that the author invariably marshals these strains into lucid sophistication, not least in her newest book, the superbly controlled Vengeance Is Mine … The plot is accelerated by these enigmas, while the prose fruitfully resists this velocity, submerging you into time-stretched and sensation-heightened dimensions. A friend once played me a Justin Bieber song that had been slowed down by 800 percent. ‘U Smile,’ a trite little burst of sugary pop, was now transfigured into thirty-five minutes of shimmering, transcendent washes of sound that felt like an appropriate score for the cosmos. It remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. NDiaye does something like this with words. No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.”

–Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (4Columns)

“Between Going Infinite and Walter Isaacson’s enormous biography of the increasingly daffy and grim Elon Musk, it has been a rough time for the Heroes of Capitalism genre. The future prospects for that type of book are certainly still bright; Americans aren’t going to stop revering rich people just because they are ‘awful’ or ‘boring’ any time soon. But the ways in which Going Infinite falls short suggests a problem that goes beyond a national shortage of sufficiently compelling or just acceptably non-sociopathic rich guys. The fact that Isaacson’s ‘The Genius Biographies’ series has declined from Leonardo Da Vinci to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk suggests not only that the heroes are getting less heroic, but that these books’ usual signifier of genius—vast wealth—has completely decoupled from any personal merit … Much of the satisfaction of these stories comes from how deftly Lewis explains those bigger issues and the artful, affectionate way that he colors in those characters. Lewis protagonists are not always admirable, and their motivations are not necessarily pure, but because they are correct and bold and often outside of an Establishment that is more smug or more self-interested or just slower than them, they tend to make for effective heroes. Going Infinite fails to deliver on either half of that formula. It’s not clear in the book, as it has never really been clear anywhere else, what social or economic problem is being addressed by cryptocurrency. This is doubly true of the ad hoc lawlessness of FTX … while he seldom fails to note the abstruse grandiosity that allows generalities about benefiting humanity to justify various smaller-scale inhumanities in the moment, Lewis does not doubt that Bankman-Fried wants to make many billions of dollars so that he can then give it away, at some point TBD, for some socially useful end, as effective altruism prescribes. The comedy is in the contrast—the reminder that all these strange, selfish, toweringly disagreeable people doing these socially useless things in a liminally legal space are actually doing them all to save humanity … Bankman-Fried is a weird guy and does plenty of weird things, but he is also never quite as brilliant as this story or the usual Lewis template would require. He’s absolutely high-handed and cold and difficult to be around in the ways that geniuses are, but any sense of his genius seems to have been reverse-engineered from how unstintingly, exhaustingly reckless and unpleasant and uncaring he is. As with Musk, the fact that Bankman-Fried was a billionaire when Lewis started reporting the book seems to not just color but retroactively justify what a turd he otherwise is; why else would this distinguished author be writing a book about him?”

–David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (New York Magazine)

“…a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny. Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author’s success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author … These days, the more sophisticated literary estates may be less likely to hire ghostwriters to imitate a deceased writer’s work; instead, they authorize established writers to continue the work (and share cover credit) under their own names. The premise of a seamless transition, in which the original author slips off into the afterlife unnoticed, has been replaced by a Frankenstein-like chimera of the living and the dead…Such collaborations tend to be respectful, reasonably successful, and positively reviewed, but there often is, nonetheless, something unnervingly lifeless about them. Like all the undead, the books’ resurrected protagonists are free to perform only a few limited actions, shadowy repetitions of actions they took in life—solving mysteries, spying on behalf of England, channelling the One Power. It’s hard to read them without imagining those unseen authorities peering over the writer’s shoulder and wondering about the limits of their good will … the creation of official sequels and spinoffs is inevitably haunted by questions of agency, power, and control. To join Elizabeth Hand on her journey to Hill House is to be reminded of the slippery dominance of genius, the way it both establishes and breaks its own rules, tempting then trapping those who dare to follow them. Faithfully adhering to the rules doesn’t guarantee success, yet breaking them will inevitably invite accusations of failure and betrayal. Each reader who arrives at A Haunting on the Hill hoping to return to the original Hill House will feel disappointed in her own way, although the shape of her disappointment will speak more to the nature of her loyalty to Jackson than to the qualities of the new book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Haunting on the Hill is least successful when Hand directly imitates Jackson, most successful when she draws on her own talents—and becomes truly fascinating when Hand lets those anxious whispers about authority and influence take over the tale.”

–Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (The New Yorker)