Book Reviews Archives – Page 16 of 50

‘A Burning’ by Megha Majumdar: At the Whim of the Powers That Be

by Cade Johnson

July 28, 2020

Posted on July 28, 2020 (July 27, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Megha Majumdar’s first novel, A Burning (304 pages; Knopf), is one of the most invigorating debuts in recent memory. The Kolkata-born Majumdar weaves the story of three individuals living in contemporary India whose fates are at the whim of the powers that be. Jivan, a young, driven Muslim girl who grew up in the Kolabagan slum, aspires to join the middle class. After she witnesses a terrorist attack at a train station that kills more than a hundred people, she posts a Facebook comment critical of the local police response. “If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and […]

‘How to Pronounce Knife’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa: Life on the Margins

by Bella Davis

July 24, 2020

Posted on July 24, 2020 (July 23, 2020) by Zack Ravas

In her debut story collection, How to Pronounce Knife (192 pages; Little Brown), Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on power and privilege, connection and isolation. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Lao parents and raised in Canada, Thammavongsa centers the day-to-day lives of immigrants in fourteen stories, written in a precise and emotionally devastating style. In the titular story, a young girl brings a book home from school to practice reading and asks her father for help pronouncing a word she’s never encountered. The next day in class she’s tasked with reading aloud and is sent to the principal’s office […]

‘Dailiness: Essays on Poetry’ by Mark Jarman: A Devotional Poetic Voice

by Meryl Natchez

July 22, 2020

Posted on July 22, 2020 (July 27, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Amidst the clamor of poetic voices, reading Mark Jarman’s Dailiness: Essays on Poetry (Paul Dry Press; 177 pages) has been a deep pleasure. These essays display a profound, thoughtful, rigorous attention to poetry, especially its roots and formal structure. Jarman is a formal poet, and his explication of Donne, Herbert, and Hopkins, as well as contemporary poets you might not expect (Michelle Boisseau, Rita Dove, Brenda Hillman, and Sophia Stid, for example) is insightful and rewarding to read. The premise of the book is that life and work consist of daily showing up. This theme pervades the essays—poetry as daily […]

‘Death in Her Hands’ by Ottessa Moshfegh: A Dark Antidote

by Zack Ravas

July 20, 2020

Posted on July 20, 2020 (July 17, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Under normal circumstances, the literary world would likely be abuzz over Death in Her Hands (259 pages; Penguin Press), the latest novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, one of the few writers of her generation who could be said to have “made it”—if we want to define that as a certain level of name recognition, lengthy book tours with celebrity moderators, and, more importantly, a style that is decidedly her own. Pick up a book by Moshfegh and you might have some idea of what to expect: unreliable-verging-on-unlikable female narrators, a smattering of gross-out details regarding characters’ bodily functions, and a tone […]

‘All Adults Here’ by Emma Straub: The Politics of Respectability

by Cade Johnson

July 14, 2020

Posted on July 14, 2020 (July 10, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Emma Straub’s delightful third novel, All Adults Here (368 pages; Riverhead Books), takes place in Clapham, a fictional Hudson Valley town. It’s a small, white, and affluent community that is both a getaway for New Yorkers and a reservoir for elite Brooklynite culture. A roundabout sits in the center of town (a commercial hotspot where an obtrusive, geometric, and vacant building houses a threat: the possibility of a chain store opening in Clapham). Residents circle through downtown like clockwork until one day a school bus kills longtime resident Barbara Baker right before matriarch Astrid Strick’s eyes, sending atriggering repressed memory […]

‘August’ by Callan Wink: The Struggle of Youth

by Jesse Bedayn

July 10, 2020

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

August (304 pages; Random House), Callan Wink’s first novel and second book following his story collection, Dog Run Moon, opens on a collection of cat tails chopped from tabby corpses in a Michigan barn. The 12-year-old boy responsible for this violence, the titular August, is paid per tail, proof he’s killed a feral cat. And so Wink launches us into a turbulent coming-of-age story punctuated by donuts performed drunk outside a Hutterite colony and the pregnant pauses on the phone between the protagonist and his emotionally distant father. While August’s inner turmoil is often opaque, the novel offers an uncannily sympathetic […]

‘And Their Children After Them’ by Nicolas Mathieu: A Disaffected Life

by CJ Green

July 6, 2020

Posted on July 6, 2020 (July 2, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Recounting four summers in the life of a teenager, Nicolas Mathieu’s new novel, And Their Children After Them (420 pages; Other Press; translated by William Rodarmor), is a testament to what words can do at their leanest. The opening reads as check list: “Anthony had just turned fourteen…His parents were jerks. When school started he would be in ninth grade.” When Anthony and his cousin (never named) are “bored out of their skulls,” they paddle over to a nude beach where they find not nudists, but peers, girls their own age—and yes, out of their league. The novel proceeds in […]

‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett: A Lonely Gift

by Cade Johnson

July 1, 2020

Posted on July 1, 2020 (June 28, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Brit Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half (352 pages; Riverhead Books), is an enthralling addition to the literature of passing: novels about taking on an alternative racial identity that often explore the concept of race as performance. The Vanishing Half is powered by its reflections on deception, motherhood, and love, and where they intersect. Whereas other novels about passing, such as James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, focus on the arbitrariness of racial constructs, Bennett’s novel studies the self-inflicted psychological and social repercussions of passing and the alienation of self. Beginning in the 1960s, the […]

‘Hurricane Season’ by Fernanda Melchor: Taboo of the Witch

by CJ Green

June 26, 2020

Posted on June 26, 2020 (June 25, 2020) by Zack Ravas

More than once did I consider abandoning Hurricane Season (224 pages; New Directions; translated by Sophia Hughes), Fernanda Melchor’s first novel. Sentences are pages long, and the ones that are not are often fragments. Many times I lost my place. I could barely see through the imagery, which is torrential yet constantly vivid. Even so, I turned its final page after only a few sittings. The story begins with a body. The Witch, she is called. Discovered by five boys wading through a canal, she lies floating beneath a “myriad of black snakes, smiling.” From there the next seven chapters […]

Love, Longing, and Loss: Scott Spencer’s Journey to the Far Shores of Emotion

by Paul Wilner

June 24, 2020

Posted on June 24, 2020 (June 23, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Reading Scott Spencer’s work is an adventure in negative capability—an opportunity to fall, or dive, into a deeper world beyond good and evil, reason and faith, will and fate. The love, and acceptance he feels for his characters is endless, though not without a deep understanding of the many flaws— narcissism, inconstancy, faithlessness, greed—that flesh is heir to. His latest novel, An Ocean Without A Shore (341 pages; Ecco Press), is a sequel of sorts to River Under the Road (2017), which took a hard look at the multiple misfortunes of Thaddeus Kaufman, a struggling novelist and screenwriter manqué, living […]

‘New Waves’ by Kevin Nguyen: Adapt or Be Left Behind

by Zack Ravas

June 11, 2020

Posted on June 11, 2020 (August 6, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Sometimes it seems as as though authors go out of their way to select the most academic or arcane-sounding quote (the older, the better) to serve as the preamble to their novel. Not so with Kevin Nguyen’s first novel, New Waves (303 pages; One World). The book opens with a familiar quote from the classic 1986 Nintendo game Legend of Zelda, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this,” which clues in readers to the millennial voice of this novel—warm, inviting, unpretentious—and underscores one of the themes of the book, that of friendship and solidarity, including the makeshift families we sometimes […]

‘Little Family’ by Ishmael Beah: A Family Living in the Shadows

by Cade Johnson

June 4, 2020

Posted on June 4, 2020 (June 10, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Ishmael Beah’s new book, the novel Little Family (272 Pages; Riverhead Books), tells the story of a chosen family whose companionship and commitment to each other replaces their lost homes, working as an antidote to the slanted and violent institutional structures of a post-colonial nation. The story takes place in an unnamed African country, details about which indicate Beah’s native Sierra Leone, where bribery, political corruption, and class disparities characterize the social order. Beah’s understated storytelling gives the family’s camaraderie and mutual understanding the subtle warmth of ever-glowing embers. Elimane, the book-smart, eldest member of the group, reads Shakespeare and […]