Post Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the characters in Tom Cooper’s debut novel, The Marauders, struggle to survive in a world whose customs and cultures are rapidly “disappearing, crumbling to the Gulf.”
“Lennon not only balances the mundane with the fantastic, but makes the fantastic feel mundane in the context of this world”: Sung J. Woo on Robert J. Lennon’s new collection, See You in Paradise.
In her review of Marilynne Robinson’s newest novel, Lila, Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes of the author’s work, “all four of Robinson’s novels—Housekeeping as well as the Gilead trilogy—are united by her compassionate attention to the possibility for amazing, transcendent grace breaking through and illuminating flawed human existence and our daily experience.”
In her review of All My Puny Sorrows, Eleanor J. Bader calls this new novel by Miriam Toews “a love story writ large.” She goes on to say, “It also serves as a potent rebuttal to one of Western culture’s most cherished delusions—that if we have love, nothing else matters.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell says of Robert Hellenga’s new novel: “The greatest charm of this book is Frances herself, her tart, funny voice. Hellenga’s characters are flawed, striving, likeable. Frances Godwin may be my favorite of the whole tribe.”
“Zambreno’s explicit referencing of not just film tropes in general, but Noh theater and French cinema and American plays in particular, immediately raises questions about agency, artifice, and images of women. And in the reflective process that follows, a reader might naturally find themselves asking: who is the director of our lives?”
Lara Zielin calls Sara Farizan’s new novel Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel “more than just a successful young-adult novel. It’s an intersection where a work of art meets a cultural shift at exactly the right moment.”
Eleanor J. Bader calls Lynn Kanter’s third novel, Her Own Vietnam, “a cogent rebuttal to politicians who wax poetic about the glory and honor of war and militarism.”
“Even though recent history might seem to have betrayed Bezmozgis’ intentions, what’s important in The Betrayers are the people who live, toil, and suffer in Crimea and Israel-Palestine.”
Given the vast quantity of Alice/Carroll-inspired work, the reader might wonder: “Is there anything new to add?” Here, happily, Seabrook proves it is still possible to make an original contribution.
“While each novel can stand on its own and conclude satisfactorily, Grossman has built a few essential worlds that help us understand fantasy and our relationship to it through through a progression of novels about people like us faced with the spectacular.”
“The Symmetry Teacher and its Russian version have a different relationship than the traditional one of a translation to an original. The additions and augmentations alone suggest this. The Symmetry Teacher is a bilingual or interlingual novel. Perhaps translingual is the term for it, since the novel refers back to its previous versions.”
