Give A Gift
Displaying all articles tagged:

Book Review

  1. book review
    Transness Gets Metaphorical in Torrey Peters’s Stag DanceShe examines the messy underbelly of DIY trans culture, diving into the cringier aspects of queer growing pains.
    By Grace Byron
  2. book review
    The Minority Report Gets a Trump-Era UpdateLaila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is an alarming dystopian approximation of what we might be headed toward.
    By Sam Worley
  3. book review
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Frustrating ReturnHer new novel Dream Count suffers from the retrograde gender politics and bad writing that has defined her career of late.
    By Sanjena Sathian
  4. book review
    Neko Case Survived It AllThe songwriter’s unusual tell-all skips the gossip, revealing a life in music as the solution, not the plot.
    By Emma Alpern
  5. book review
    Han Kang’s Latest Novel Mines Korea’s Bloody PastWe Do Not Part is the very best kind of story-telling, poetic and ambiguous without ever shying away from horrible historic truths.
    By Robert Rubsam
  6. book review
    You Can’t Outrun SpotifyLiz Pelly’s Mood Machine suggests that logging off is the only way out of our music streaming nightmare.
    By Nicholas Quah
  7. book review
    Fear and Loathing in BerlinAn Afghan girl seeks solace in sex and drugs in an ambitious but bloated debut.
    By Jasmine Vojdani
  8. book review
    The Perfect Fantasy Novel for These Uncertain TimesThe last book in Tad Williams’s influential Osten Ard series has a strong anti-authoritarian streak.
    By Sarah Jones
  9. books
    Percival Everett Can’t Be Pinned DownHis masterful new novel, James, cements his status as one of our most idiosyncratic writers.
    By James Yeh
  10. book review
    Haruki Murakami Has Lost the SauceTwo new works read more like fan fiction set in the extended Murakami universe than the thrillingly strange novels he’s famous for.
    By Bailey Trela
  11. book review
    Alan Hollinghurst Tries to AtoneThe writer has tended to fetishize marginal POC characters in his novels. In Our Evenings, he puts a biracial man at the center for the first time.
    By Sam Worley
  12. book review
    Has Olga Tokarczuk Been Struck by the Nobel Curse?Her latest novel, The Empusium, is more focused on dictating a salient political message than pushing the bounds of art.
    By Robert Rubsam
  13. close read
    Hot CommodityIn Sally Rooney’s novels, love is always being bought, sold, or reduced to tropes. But this is also what makes it real.
    By Andrea Long Chu
  14. book review
    Is Rejection the First Great Incel Novel?Tony Tulathimutte’s second book is a hilariously brutal story collection about elder millennials grappling with their sexual failures.
    By Madeline Leung Coleman
  15. book review
    Danzy Senna Can’t Stop Thinking in Black and WhiteColored Television, the author’s latest comic novel about a mixed-race Black woman, holds diminishing returns.
    By Madeline Leung Coleman
  16. book review
    Taffy Brodesser-Akner Overcooks ItA wealthy Jewish family gets the Succession treatment in the writer’s hectic second novel.
    By Emma Alpern
  17. close read
    Against ‘Women’s Writing’Rachel Cusk’s gender fundamentalism fully surfaces in her latest novel, Parade.
    By Andrea Long Chu
  18. book review
    The Crisis of the Realist NovelJoseph O’Neill’s Godwin displays all the anxieties of a form stuck in place.
    By Ryu Spaeth
  19. book review
    Claire Messud Writes Novels for a Different CenturyThis Strange Eventful History is the kind of generation-spanning family story that doesn’t really get published anymore. Does it still work?
    By Emma Alpern
  20. book review
    Miranda July’s New Novel Will Ignite Your Group ChatsAll Fours is a hot, weird, and utterly captivating book about a middle-aged woman’s sexual reawakening.
    By Christine Smallwood
  21. book review
    Salman Rushdie Did Not Want to Write This BookIn Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the many incarnations of Rushdie are at war with one another.
    By Sanjena Sathian
  22. book review
    In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange Writes a New Secret HistoryThe author’s second novel, after the dazzling There There, follows family members who are inheriting more than they know.
    By Emma Alpern
  23. book review
    In Alex Pheby’s Novel Malarkoi, God Is Dead and Objects Are AliveThe second book in Alex Pheby’s trilogy Cities of the Weft spins fantasy tropes in strange and visceral new dimensions.
    By Emma Alpern
  24. book review
    Teju Cole, Reluctant CosmopolitanIn his first novel in 12 years, the author is at odds with himself.
    By Ryu Spaeth
  25. book review
    How Zadie Smith Lost Her TeethSince her audacious debut, she has been moving toward character-driven realism. In the process, she’s become the least interesting version of herself.
    By Andrea Long Chu
  26. book review
    Finally, Some Freaky K-pop WritingEsther Yi’s debut novel, Y/N, is great parody, throwing readers down the hole of obsession in all its fevered absurdity.
    By Cat Zhang
  27. book review
    Catherine Lacey’s Alternate America in Biography of XA “biography” with a warped sense of history.
    By Emma Alpern
  28. book review
    What Their Psychiatrists Won’t Tell YouIn Rachel Aviv’s book Strangers to Ourselves, personal narratives of mental illness take primacy over institutions’.
    By Jane Hu
  29. book review
    Kathy Acker Wanted EverythingEat Your Mind, a new biography of the writer and punk feminist icon, is both maddening and compulsively readable.
    By Sarah Chihaya
  30. book review
    Mum’s the Word: Elizabeth Remains a Cipher in New Biography The Queen: Her LifeAuthor Andrew Morton doesn’t even try to pin his subject down, offering instead Wikipedia-deep chronologies and press-release prose.
    By Hillary Kelly
  31. book review
    In Surrender, Bono Embraces His ContradictionsThe U2 frontman does not shy away from blunt self-reflection in his poetic and very Bono memoir.
    By Jen Chaney
  32. book review
    Radiation Takes Center Stage, for Better or Worse, in Trinity, Trinity, TrinityJapanese history and “unseen forces” propel Erika Kobayashi’s science fiction thriller, sometimes at the expense of its own characters.
    By Paula Aceves
  33. book review
    When Grief Returns Again, and Again, and Again …In her time-looping novel The Furrows, Namwali Serpell’s deft use of repetition makes the plot feel dynamic even as she retells the same story.
    By Mary Retta
  34. book review
    Ottessa Moshfegh Is Praying for UsThe author has been hailed as a high priestess of filth. Really, she wants to purify her readers.
    By Andrea Long Chu
  35. book review
    A Memoir of Prison Time, Delivered With a Note of ApologyIn Corrections in Ink, Keri Blakinger writes about the years of addiction and incarceration she lived through before becoming a reporter.
    By John J. Lennon
  36. book review
    Either/Or Is a Coming-of-Age Story That Moves at the Speed of ThoughtEither/Or is a sequel to Elif Batuman’s campus novel The Idiot — and it reveals what she’s been up to this whole time.
    By Sarah Chihaya
  37. book review
    In These Novels of Tech Dystopia, Memories Belong to the CloudJennifer Egan’s The Candy House and Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao are two very different books with a troubling shared prediction.
    By Mallika Rao
  38. book review
    In the Novel Post-Traumatic, a Trauma Plot Refuses the ObviousIn Chantal V. Johnson’s novel Post-Traumatic, the story of one woman’s breakdown feels visceral and specific.
    By Jamie Hood
  39. book review
    Sheila Heti Does It the Artist’s WayHer novel Pure Colour is strange, even incoherent. But it also has the power to make you feel better.
    By Jennifer Wilson
  40. close reads
    Hanya’s BoysThe novelist tends to torture her gay male characters — but only so she can swoop in to save them.
    By Andrea Long Chu
  41. book review
    Edith Schloss, 20th-Century WomanIn her book The Loft Generation, a fixture of the midcentury New York art scene gets a long-overdue introduction.
    By Jamie Hood
  42. book review
    Love Behind Bars Is Possible. It’s Just Absurdly Hard.In Love Lockdown, journalist Elizabeth Greenwood follows couples who are trying to make it work when at least one partner is in prison.
    By John J. Lennon
  43. book review
    The Sentence Shows the Downside of UrgencyLouise Erdrich’s novel takes on the 2020 protests — and draws conclusions that feel dated already.
    By Jennifer Wilson
  44. book review
    ‘What Is the Power of My Body?’Emily Ratajkowski may want to join the feminist discourse, but in her essay collection she’s mostly in conversation with herself.
    By Jordan Taliha McDonald
  45. book review
    In Rax King’s Book Tacky, Lowbrow Is High PraiseA new essay collection celebrating trash culture is less certain about why some things are considered tacky at all.
    By Hillary Kelly
  46. book review
    Kwon Yeo-sun’s ‘Lemon’ Is a Murder Mystery That Refuses to Be SolvedThe novel by Kwon Yeo-sun tracks the aftermath of a teen girl’s murder, with three very unreliable narrators.
    By Arianna Rebolini
  47. book review
    Fear and Loathing in ‘Asian America’In The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang tries but fails to restore meaning to an empty term.
    By Madeline Leung Coleman
  48. book review
    A So-So Franzen Novel Is Still Better Than Most Books. That Said …In Crossroads, too many boring characters are boring in the same way.
    By Molly Young
  49. book review
    The Magician Resists the Shallow Gestures of the Hollywood BiopicColm Tóibín’s new novel about Thomas Mann reaches for depths in its subject that mainstream film wouldn’t bother with.
    By Rumaan Alam
  50. book review
    In Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad, There’s No Escaping the SelfThe novel by Chang-rae Lee turns a coming-of-age trope into something much more bleak and strange.
    By Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard
Load More