Katharine Coldiron
Vanishing Monuments is painstaking, in the literal sense of that compound word: it took enormous pain to make this book. It’s a novel that, for all its organizational strategies, reads with the immediacy of a memoir.
Amina Cain’s style is unusual, and it may tow readers so rapidly through this brief novel they won’t look back.
Virginie Despentes novel reads like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia mashed with Don Quixote and set in contemporary Paris.
As a River is a sensuously and smoothly written book, a heartfelt meditation on what divides us from each other and from love.
We Are All Good People Here is an enormously insightful examination of how dangerous suggestible people can be, to those around them and to themselves.
The Bird King is an utterly lovely reading experience.
The Western Wind turns out to be a beautifully written novel, a serious book of great depth, intention, and craft.
Everything about Schumacher’s story indicates that clichés about the ’50s are so powerful because things really were that way: repressive, poisonous, full of unspoken secrets and blustering ignorance.
The twelve stories in this collection are set in radically different places, use multiple forms, and reflect varying levels of political engagement.
Recommended Books, 2019
An eclectic round-up of our favorite books of the year from our critics.
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