Book Reviews Archives – Page 14 of 50

‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig: All That Could Have Been

by Nessa Ordukhani

December 1, 2020

Posted on December 1, 2020 (December 3, 2020) by Zack Ravas

There isn’t a single person who hasn’t asked themselves “what could have been.” Regret is as ubiquitous as air and we cannot help but dwell on hypotheticals and possibilities. In Matt Haig’s new novel, The Midnight Library (288 pages; Viking), the reader is invited into a world where regrets and missed chances—the parallel lives that exist should things have turned out differently—can be visited. At the center of Haig’s story is Nora Seed, a woman inundated with remorse. With a dead-end job, a terminated engagement, and a plethora of family issues, Nora can’t seem to get anything right. When she […]

‘Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror’: A Great Escape

by Cade Johnson

November 20, 2020

Posted on November 20, 2020 (November 19, 2020) by Zack Ravas

2020, with all its horrors, may have given Halloween a run for its money this time around. The holiday’s circumstances themselves this year are scary enough to substantiate a scary story—kids stuck at home with parents, or otherwise risking an uptick in COVID-19 transmission by taking part in the festivities. Some who prefer to consume more uplifting content in troubling times may find the book ill-fitted for 2020, but if like me horror is a genre you hold near and dear, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror (Catapult; 289 pages; edited by Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto) is a […]

‘Wave If You Can See Me’ by Susan Ludvigson: The Water We Must All Cross

by Corinne Leong

November 16, 2020

Posted on November 16, 2020 (November 13, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Susan Ludvigson’s latest poetry collection, Wave If You Can See Me (72 pages; Red Hen Press), written in the wake of her husband’s death from long-term illness, is not a narrative of violent, all-consuming grief nor of its resulting numbness. Rather, it is a quiet depiction of longing and inquiry that waxes and wanes, from the perspective of a woman who has prepared extensively for loss. In its restraint, the collection attempts to answer seemingly ineffable questions: Can we know grief before it touches us? Can we begin to interrogate death if we haven’t inhabited it? Ludvigson’s poems are quiet […]

‘Leave the World Behind’ by Rumaan Alam: On the Precipice of Disaster

by Nessa Ordukhani

November 10, 2020

Posted on November 10, 2020 (November 9, 2020) by Zack Ravas

When Amanda and Clay rent a house in the Hamptons with their kids, Rose and Archie, they expect a pleasant family trip and time away from the city. But before they can fully enjoy their rental home, a late-night knock on the door floods their holiday with a new reality of growing fear and unknowable terror. Standing in the doorway under the cover of darkness are the owners of the rental home, G.H and Ruth Washington, whose surprising arrival they claim is prompted by a widespread blackout in New York City. Unable to connect with news sources, or ascertain any […]

‘Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize’: The Ties That Bind

by Cade Johnson

November 6, 2020

Posted on November 6, 2020 (November 11, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Each year, Catapult publishes an anthology of the twelve recipients of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which highlights writers who demonstrate exceptional talent in their first published short stories. In this year’s installment, Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize (240 pages; Catapult), editor Yuka Igarashi’s introduction observes that the un-ignorable presence and impact of money unites the collection. But reading through these stories, it’s hard not to focus, perhaps as a result of the pandemic’s transformation of the ways we socialize, on the stories’ exploration of group dynamics, as well as […]

‘Antkind’ by Charlie Kaufman: One Very Long Laugh

by Colton Alstatt

November 4, 2020

Posted on November 4, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

As a screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman has won acclaim for movies like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York—but not from film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the protagonist of Kaufman’s new avant-garde romp, Antkind (705 Pages; Penguin Random House), who, in a meta twist, maligns the author time and again, often before B. is hit by a bicyclist, or buried beneath an avalanche of books, or falls into a manhole. (He does that a lot.). Reading Antkind is a bodily thing, so full is it of gut and heart. For once, the cliché […]

‘Bestiary’ by K-Ming Chang: Dark of the Mind

by Corinne Leong

November 2, 2020

Posted on November 2, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

From Plath to Vuong, the poet-novelist has long been a centerpiece of literary conversation, subverting convention to craft impossibly engaging narratives. K-Ming Chang, a poet by precedent, comes prepared to contribute to that legacy. Her first novel, Bestiary (272 Pages; One World/Random House), is suffused with lyricism, a multigenerational, mythological, and magical-realist retelling of one family’s fraught history. Bestiary’s three narrators are referred to only as Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother. Their narratives are interwoven, and converse and collapse upon each other. Though Chang’s novel is largely lyric and non-linear, its through-line is deceptively simple: Daughter learns the myth of Hu Gu Po—a […]

‘Just Us: An American Conversation’ by Claudia Rankine: Confronting White Silence

by Cade Johnson

October 23, 2020

Posted on October 23, 2020 (October 22, 2020) by Zack Ravas

The title of Claudia Rankine’s new collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation (352 pages; Graywolf Press), alludes to a Richard Pryor quote from a 1979 stand-up routine about the criminal justice system: “You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find, just us.” The quote is just as potent now as it was then, with mass incarceration making prisons disproportionately Black, and relevant to Rankine’s stance as she confronts white silence and privilege. But the title also evokes community, a sense of a unified “us,” as well as the more private “us” that exists when we […]

‘Straight from the Horse’s Mouth’ by Meryem Alaoui: Vivid and Vividly Angry

by Michelle Latiolais

October 21, 2020

Posted on October 21, 2020 (October 20, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth (304 pages; Other Press; translated by Emma Ramadan) was originally published in French as La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2018. One reads a tremendous amount of work in translation these days, and it is a bounty, what translators make possible for us. I am forever grateful, and particularly, most recently, for this first novel by the Moroccan-born writer Meryem Alaoui. The novel is a vivid, and vividly angry, first-person portrait of Jmiaa, now thirty-four, but forced into prostitution by her destitute husband before she is twenty. Jmiaa […]

‘Daddy’ by Emma Cline: An Unsettling Glimpse

by Zack Ravas

October 15, 2020

Posted on October 15, 2020 (October 14, 2020) by Zack Ravas

The coverage surrounding Emma Cline’s rise to literary fame has tended to focus on everything but her work—a seven-figure book deal with Random House, her young age, a copyright case involving an ex-boyfriend that was definitively shot down in court. But unfortunate as this is, the writing is what matters. Cline’s first novel, The Girls, transplanted the story of the Manson Family to late Sixties Northern California. While the Manson murders were a well-trod subject long before the book was published in 2016, Cline found a way to make the narrative feel compelling again by using it to tell a […]

‘The Party Upstairs’ by Lee Conell: Where Expectations Meet a Harsh Reality

by Nessa Ordukhani

October 12, 2020

Posted on October 12, 2020 (October 9, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Lee Conell’s first novel, The Party Upstairs (308 pages; Penguin Random House), is a provocative testament to class division and the boundless nature of self-absorbance. Alternating between the perspectives of Ruby and her father, Martin, Conell offers us a glimpse into a microcosm of New York where tensions are high, and resentment seems inevitable. Ruby, saddled with a niche degree and few job prospects, is forced to move back to her childhood home—the basement in an Upper West Side apartment building where her father is the super. Martin, exhausted by life and desperate for a moment of peace, must continue […]

‘Telephone’ by Percival Everett: The Futility of Play

by Michelle Latiolais

October 8, 2020

Posted on October 8, 2020 (October 6, 2020) by Zack Ravas

One can read Percival Everett’s latest novel entirely ignorant of why it is titled Telephone (232 pages; Graywolf Press), as I did, or one can be in the know. Supposedly there is an A, B, and C version, and thus the title. I have read the B version, and that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Discrepancies may occur, or indeed will occur, and like those dinner parties in which everyone argues over whether the superior novel is Mrs. Bridge or Mr. Bridge, now we can convene to argue our preferred version of Telephone, except I think this may […]