Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, and Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ The Bullet Swallower all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Knopf)

10 Rave • 1 Postive

“A deliberately provocative title that suits its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet who is painfully conflicted, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and frequently impossible … Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor … The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.”

–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)

2. The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
(Simon & Schuster)

4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Elizabeth Gonzalez James on the “weird, wild literature” of her home state, here

“Mixes elements of western novels and magical realism to deliver a wildly entertaining story that spans generations and crosses borders in a riveting family saga … While great characterization and superb storytelling make this an enjoyable read, Gonzalez’s use of magical realism elements is what pushes this novel into must-read territory. The narrative reads like a western, but the magical elements enrich the story in unexpected ways.”

–Gabino Iglesias (The Boston Globe)

3. Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn
(MCD)

3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Dead in Long Beach, California here

“Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control … It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t …

We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.”

–Stef Rubino (Autostraddle)

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Nonfiction 

1. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here

“A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

2. The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
(William Morrow & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Shuster paints with great sympathy a complex picture of Mr. Zelensky and his transformation … Like many writers on a tight deadline, Mr. Shuster crafted a longer book than he otherwise might have. But The Showmansurpasses all similar efforts to date and is set to be the standard by which all other works on Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine’s wartime politics will be judged.”

–Bojan Pancevski (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold
(Penguin Press)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Disillusioned here

“…presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development ‘that functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ … Disillusioned excels in documenting the effects racial exclusion and intimidation had on suburban growth, and Herold offers eye-opening details like the fact that Compton, Calif., was once home to George Herbert Walker Bush and his young children. For readers like me, who previously only thought of Compton as a burning epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Herold reminds us that places don’t start out in disrepair. They’re shaped by forces that cause decay … As Herold jumps between cities and decades, it can be hard to keep track of the exact rulings in different cases regarding desegregation. But the patterns are clear and continuing, cementing the idea that equal rights and opportunity exist only in theory in this country, not in practice.”

–Vikas Turakhia (The Star Tribune)

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic, and Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“Shame-ridden Shams is the sun around which Martyr! moves. The writing evokes shades of Denis Johnson—in the gutted, elegiac quality of Train Dreams but also flashes of the hapless antihero of ‘Emergency.’ It is sumptuous with metaphors, at their best when animating Cyrus’s childhood … With a kaleidoscope of perspectives that illuminate almost 40 years of history, the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War and dreamlike scenes outside of time, the novel is obsessed with how ‘meaningless’ individual suffering can become legible ‘at the level of empire,’ asking what turns a death into a martyrdom. With its scope, intense interest in the limits of language and self-aware narrative strategy, Martyr! has both focus and heft. Yet it is also unpretentiously veined with the language of sacred and poetic texts, and is studded with new poetry from Akbar writing as Cyrus …

In the hands of a lesser writer with an agenda, this material could be esoteric and tedious, but Akbar’s narrative maintains a glorious sense of whimsy: In one chapter, the ghost of Cyrus’s mother speaks with Lisa Simpson; later, a Trumpian buffoon attempts to complete a gory transaction for the Mona Lisa in a mall … Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity—through metaphor and with humor that lands. He invites the reader to embrace the kind of queer sense-making that finds no answers yet rests, as Cyrus says, with, ‘All I know is I’m fascinated.’”

–Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (The Washington Post)

“The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses—nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. ‘Horror is always kitsch,’ he writes after an ad hoc execution, ‘even when it’s real’ …

The book’s final third—in which Debreczeni has been assigned to the “cold crematorium,” a place where inmates too sick to work are left to die—is especially staggering…Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit … The finest examples of Holocaust literature—and Cold Crematorium is so fine it transcends its category—aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.”

–Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz (The New York Times Book Review)

“A biography of the psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is, inevitably, a biography of the world he fought to change. Fanon would no doubt have approved: As a pioneer of ‘social therapy,’ an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms, he understood better than anyone that individuals are unintelligible in isolation. The maladies he treated as the director of a mental hospital in colonial Algeria, where he worked on the eve of the country’s fight for independence in the 1950s, were to him inextricable from the deadliest illness of all: the epidemic of French imperialism.

A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (The Washington Post)

“The United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty. At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, ‘drapetomania.’ Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern ‘expert’ in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as ‘whipping the devil out of them.’ In the decades following the prohibition of slavery, the United States found another way to use psychology to control Black Americans—and squeeze out more free labor. As detailed in the journalist Antonia Hylton’s fascinating Madness, the ‘feeble-minded’ Blacks were rounded up and placed in asylums where they were put to work as indentured servants …

Madness, though ostensibly the story of Crownsville, is really about the continued lack of understanding, treatment and care of the mental health of a people, Black people, who need it most. Near the end of her book, Hylton invokes the 2023 story of Jordan Neely. In visible distress and screaming that he was hungry, he was thrown to the floor of the New York subway by a former Marine who locked him in a chokehold and killed him. ‘I thought of Maynard when The New York Post labeled Jordan Neely “unhinged” and a “vagrant” and wrote about him as though he had been the villain in the story of his own public killing,’ Hylton notes. Though both Foster and Neely were in need of treatment, care, support and kindness, she adds, they ‘were met with almost anything but.’”

–Linda Villarosa on Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (The New York Times Book Review)

“Glück is a self-professed slow writer, but he was also delayed by the burden of his book’s content—the subject was his first real boyfriend, and he had to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality…Time enabled him to create something uncommon and powerful. About Ed is a literary monument that harnesses memoir’s emotional honesty while indulging fiction’s stylistic latitude … The book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to AIDS. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise …

The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp … The parts of Ed that are barred to Bob are the core of the book’s sadness and mystery. Glück often slips into poetic spacing when integrating Ed’s prose, reminding us of the contrivance of appropriation. We’re always aware of the author’s hand, assembling and editing Ed’s words, and thus of the hard limits of our ability to inhabit and connect with Ed directly. The book makes us question whether human beings in general resist the complete soul-merging that Bob seeks through romantic sex and appropriative writing.”

–Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed (The New Yorker)

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea, and Rebecca Boyle’s Our Moon all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave

“…astonishing … Never mind the fault in our stars…this is a book that exults in them … An ineffable sadness and sense of resignation hang over Beautyland, which refuses to give in to sentimentality or serendipity or the idea of everything working out for a reason. It’s the second novel I’ve reviewed in six months that invokes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the first being, more obsessively, Ann Patchett’s best-selling Tom Lake. Adina is cast not as Emily, like Patchett’s heroine, but as the narrator, which feels deeply significant. Being an alien here might just be a metaphor for the difficult blessing of feeling enough apart from the thrum of life on Earth to report on its goings-on: to tell a story.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

2. Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
(HarperVia)

5 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Susan Muaddi Darraj’s essay on finding inspiration in the lives of ordinary Palestinians here

“Susan Muaddi Darraj’s powerful debut novel-in-stories, Behind You Is the Sea, depicts multiple immigrant Palestinian families in Baltimore, whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Darraj uses a kaleidoscopic point of view, dropping the reader into a character’s life at a pivotal moment, then switching to another character later in time, providing a multifaceted look at their community … Other stories illuminate the difficulties of living in diaspora, from making a living, adjusting to a different culture, experiencing racism and classism and navigating generational conflicts over changing values … moments of insight and empathy limn Darraj’s novel, shining through the sadness and tension of her characters’ lives.”

–May-lee Chai (The Star Tribune)

3. Ilium by Lea Carpenter
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 1 Pan

“While Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs, what makes Ilium intriguing are the characters … This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes Ilium such an unexpectedly moving novel.”

–Chris Bohjalian (The New York Times Book Review)

**

Nonfiction

1. The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin
(Pantheon)

4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Last Fire Season here

“Powerful … Grounded…surprising … She braids together strands of various histories—a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire—all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging … The range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”

–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)

2. Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read Rebecca Boyle’s essay, “Motherhood and the Moon,” here

“Boyle walks the reader through a history of both Earth and humanity, from the formation of our planet and the evolution of life to the development of civilization, religion, philosophy and, eventually, science … Boyle, whose graceful writing is as lulling as a bedtime story, paints the moon as more than just a driver of physical phenomena … Boyle finds the moon in places I would never think to look. And she has convinced me that though our connection to it is ever-changing, the moon perseveres as a source of knowledge, wonder and influence—and is anything but dull … Timely … Makes the moon feel closer than ever.”

–Katrina Miller (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen
(Grand Central)

3 Rave

“Breen blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of mid-20th-century research into ‘psychedelic’ experiences … Breen artfully weaves Mead’s biography with fascinating details of the sprawling psychedelics scene (producers of the TV show Flipper took acid). The result is a riveting exploration of a shadowy episode in 20th-century history.”

–Publishers Weekly

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Ahdaf Soueif on Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Madison Ford on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Lincoln Michel on Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man, James Wood on Hisham Matar’s My Friends, and Richard Robinson on Gerald Murnane’s Inland.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“In the book he brings the reader as close to this reality as can possibly be done with words. Through the painstaking accumulation of detail after detail he enables the reader who has never been to Palestine to experience life under Israeli occupation … The author shows, in cool, dispassionate language, how all of it, every step, was preset by the occupation; how the occupation’s rules and laws and regulations, its system of passes and permits, the land appropriations and boundary redrawings, the walls and watchtowers and flyovers, the neglect and surveillance, are all in place not to regulate life, but to squeeze the breath out of it …

The world has ignored the Palestinians to the best of its ability. The Arabs have, state by state, betrayed them. But the Palestinians have never stopped resisting. Every Palestinian in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama displays resistance in its most common form: under the rule of a ruthless occupying military power you continue to live; to live as a human being, as part of a community and a culture.”

–Ahdaf Soueif on Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Times Literary Supplement)

“While this seems a proposition that promises the speculative, Bertino prefers to ground the reader in the minutia of the human experience, allowing for a deeper excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth … Bertino accomplishes what certain acclaimed novels bewilder us with: the ability to encapsulate an entire life within a few hundred pages. Works like A Little Life and Their Eyes Were Watching God come to mind, where we can map a life from adolescence into adulthood and leave with what feels like a birds-eye view of human complication. Is this what it feels to play God? To watch a life untangle from above, to witness the profound in the mundane? But Beautyland’s greater triumph is capturing how time passes … This is where the sorcery lives, as Adina reveals the eccentricities of human nature, and we watch Adina reluctantly succumb to their emotional weight. When Bertino writes of magic, of science fiction, of the surreal, she is writing of reality.”

–Madison Ford on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (The Brooklyn Rail)

“Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page. ‘Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing,’ opens the visceral ‘Burn Man on a Texas Porch,’ the first entry in Burn Man, an anthology of 21 stories culled from Jarman’s four-decade career. The rest of the story is, like many of Jarman’s tales, a hallucinatory rummaging through the mind of a broken man. After receiving skin grafts that ‘didn’t quite fit,’ the narrator fumes: ‘Hate is everything they said it would be, and it waits for you like an airbag.’ In Jarman’s stories and sentences, things seem always ready to explode …

The archetypical Jarman narrator is a bedraggled man dragging around a big aching heart. He might be a petty thief, a hockey scout, an addict or a bloodstained soldier … When I read these stories, I scribbled down two names: Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. Then I turned to the book’s introduction, by John Metcalf, which speaks at length about the influence of both on Jarman’s prose. But let me be clear: Jarman is no mere imitator. He may have the crackling syntax of Hannah, Johnson’s gift for shocking yet poetic images, and the penchant for loners and misfits of both, but Jarman’s voice rings unique.”

–Lincoln Michel on Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man: Selected Stories (The New York Times Book Review)

“As he walks, Khaled reprises the history of their intense triangular friendship, the undulations of their lives, and the shape and weight of their exile. Exile turns countries into temporalities: the place you came from and the place you find yourself in become the time before and the time after … In two novels and a memoir…Matar has found different ways of narrating the aftermath of this most decisive wound. He has written that absence is not empty but ‘a busy place, vocal and insistent.’ His work speaks eloquently of this loud absence and its unstopped complexities. One of them is obvious enough: the momentous event of Matar’s life happened first to his father and only secondarily to him. Matar’s writing is painfully alive to this asymmetry …

It’s one thing to live in the shadow of a daunting parent, a predicament many children know. It’s a different dilemma to live in the ghostly shadow of that greatness, where the challenging patriarchal achievement is always beyond reach—legendary, lost … The shape of Matar’s lifelong quest inevitably places a narrative emphasis on the shock of his own abandonment: the father leaves home. But in another, quieter motif that runs through Matar’s work, the decisive break is not when the father leaves but when the son does … It’s as if Khaled is both Telemachus and Odysseus, at once son and father, abandoned and abandoning. Khaled made the mistake of leaving home when ‘no one should ever leave their home,’ and the price he pays for this sin will be a kind of long imprisonment in England. The mysteriousness of Khaled’s inertia, his woundedness—both a literal wound and a figurative one—turns Matar’s narrative into a deep and detailed exploration not so much of abandonment as of self-abandonment. Who is this man? Khaled remains obscure in his inertia and his hesitation—damaged, adrift, cut loose. Exile has split him into different versions of himself, and he cannot quite tell the story that would make the parts cohere again.”

–James Wood on Hisham Matar’s My Friends (The New Yorker)

“The reissue of Australian author Gerald Murnane’s fiction is introducing new readers to this most idiosyncratic and formally adventurous of novelists, now in his 80s. Postmodernism is at a nadir, but Murnane’s nested, self-reflexive narratives may be placed alongside the fabulations of Nabokov, Calvino and Borges, once grouped under that label. Murnane is known for not straying far from Goroke in Victoria—he is the anti-type of globe-trotting literary celebrity—but like those writers, and some of the modernists before them, he is a dreamer of other worlds. His work uncompromisingly blurs the frontiers of memory and imagination; it is not for the faint-hearted. Inland, originally published in 1988, was the last novel Murnane wrote before a mysterious creative hiatus. The reader of other republished novels, such as Tamarisk Row (1974) or Border Districts (2017), now finds an important missing link. Inland is a novel that, in even more absolute terms than these books, disrupts realist conventions about setting and sense of place. Murnane is a fastidious exponent of the prose sentence, which he often treats as a report of a remembered image. From the interconnected pattern of these image-sentences we gradually infer not a place out there, but the landscapes of a solitary mind …

Inland is a love letter that looks out, looks within and looks back to ‘that other world which is in this one’ (as Paul Éluard put it). When the narrator writes ‘I saw,’ he is not limited to perceiving an object or remembering an image; nor even to remembering himself once remembering or seeing himself once seeing. In Greek, the verb to see is idein. Murnane is constantly thinking and seeing in idealities: things that exist only as creations of the imagination.”

–Richard Robinson on Gerald Murnane’s Inland (The Guardian)

Hisham Matar’s My Friends, Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, and Rachel Slade’s Making it in America all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. My Friends by Hisham Matar
(Random House)

10 Rave

“Amid this refined climate of melancholy acceptance arrives the unexpected revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, whose tensions and excitements My Friends captures as well as any novel I have read … Matar weighs these complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and My Friends is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

2. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from You Dreamed of Empires here

“Enrigue presents us with two societies that feel far removed from our modern sensibilities, one of which—the Aztec empire—has often been shoddily reproduced, its complexity buffed away … The intricacy of this series of events might have daunted many writers; it’s difficult enough just to portray it accurately and make it comprehensible. Even when someone has done their research—and Enrigue has done it admirably well—the story could easily become ponderous and overblown, a mothballed costume drama. Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor.”

–Silvia Morena-Garcia (The Los Angeles Times)

3. The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell
(W. W. Norton & Company)

5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Waters here

“Sounds grim, but there’s an indomitable spirit pushing back against despair in Campbell’s work … A light touch of fantasy runs through this story … She immediately peoples her pages with a large cast of eccentric characters and a thick backstory so casually laced with shocking violence that it’s tempting to think you must have misheard. But don’t be quick to drive by Whiteheart. You must succumb to the pace of The Waters… It subtracts nothing from Campbell’s originality to suggest that she’s taken up the mantle of John Irving … Astonishing.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

**

Nonfiction

1. Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins by William Viney
(Princeton University Press)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“Viney captures the full range of nontwin response, among much else … Viney acknowledges the dangers of reading too much into twinhood … Perhaps our fascination with twins is the result of that enduring, mysterious fact: As singletons, we can never really understand what it means to be multiple.”

–Christine Rosen (The Wall Street Journal)

2. Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way) by Rachel Slade
(Pantheon)

1 Rave • 4 Positive

“Her book benefits from extraordinary access, providing an up-close look at the challenges of manufacturing … Slade’s key insight, and possibly the strongest argument for reviving domestic manufacturing, is that it is how we innovate.”

–Jenna Sauers (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov
(Penguin Press)

2 Rave • 2 Positive

“The author does an excellent job placing the unprovoked attack within the historical context of Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Russia’s equal insistence on dominating Ukraine. Trofimov also demonstrates the power of words in war as he examines the slogans, memes, and speeches that Ukrainians rally behind, contrasted with the empty and often ridiculous Russian propaganda used to justify and rationalize Putin’s invasion. This tour de force covers the first year of war in Ukraine and a solid second draft of history, as the author intended. We can hope for a second volume that will be the last, chronicling a truly independent Ukraine.”

–James Pekoll (Booklist)

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Patricia Lockwood on Blake Butler’s Molly, Elizabeth Gonzalez James on Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, MJ Franklin on Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer, Sigrid Nunez on Cynthia Zarin’s Inverno,  and Ron Charles on Hisham Matar’s My Friends.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“The reading was like falling, into a level that hovered just below my bed. A horizontal experience. Into the secret life that was Molly’s. I was supposed to be writing something about the book, but everything sounded mad: a document you might find in someone’s papers after their death. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. The book begins at the end of language, someone at a bombsite or in a burned-out church, the words and phrases jarred out of their places, as if they too had heard the gunshot and started running; as if the ripples of the act, the derangement in the air, had entered into English itself. Or Blake’s breath, running to find her in the field, past the grown-together pair of trees Molly said might be them in their old age. That is the way that it is. Why should words be available when he has for so long stored them in her? …

Molly, more than anyone else, understood there would be a book called Molly; what did she want that book to contain? … It does not seem we should be able to see Molly there in her field, but these things happen out in the world. He is telling us that. His wish: that we should look upon her face, see even the fly. Hear what he hears in the firework, now. Go into Dante’s dark wood, and experience language as useless, in him.”

–Patricia Lockwood on Blake Butler’s Molly (London Review of Books)

“Enrigue spins a seductive tale despite the fact that everyone already knows how, in reality, it ends—spoiler alert: Spain won. And yet, immersed in the world Enrigue builds, we read beyond the shadow of this ending hoping that just maybe, this time around, the story will be different. In his hallucinatory prose, anything could happen … It is tricky to write against a backdrop as well known as the Spanish conquest of the New World, though it is precisely this limitation that allows Enrigue to take his biggest risks … And once we have allowed time and history to collapse in on itself in this instance, the centuries folding over and sitting atop one another like one city built on the ruins of another, we allow what Enrigue does later on, which is to introduce a Calvinoesque tipping of his hand into the narrative …

The ending of You Dreamed of Empires, the aftermath of that fateful meeting, is both expected and surprising, the author having a bit of cake and eating it too. It has been pitched as a colonial revenge story, restitutive, and revolutionary. But these descriptors shift focus toward what happens and away from what I believe is the novel’s greatest strength: its comfort in the murky could-have-been. I find little solace in revenge and restoration—what would that even look like 500 years on? What Enrigue does in this novel is better than revenge—it is an attempt to understand. Why did Moctezuma let Cortés in? Why didn’t he kill him where he stood? Would it have made any difference if he had? All we can do now is recognize, imagine, wonder, fight, and stand until it is our own turn to fall. We don’t last. And yet, in that span, we may dream multitudes.”

–Elizabeth Gonzalez James on Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Midway through Claire Oshetsky’s beautiful, terrifying sophomore novel, a mother asks her daughter: ‘Did you leave Agnes Bickford in that cooler to die, Bunny?’ This turns out to be the central question of Poor Deer  … This setup frames Poor Deer like a thriller, but the novel is less a mystery about what happened on that fateful day, and more a psychological deep dive into how Margaret, and all those who orbited the girls, grapple with the tragedy …

Grief is a well-trod territory in fiction, but in Oshetsky’s hands, this familiar topic becomes fresh and strange. The book’s narrative structure mirrors the grief-stricken mind—starting, stopping, looping back, stuttering, marching grimly forward … With Poor Deer, Oshetsky proves themself the bard of unruly psyches. They show how loss warps our realities, and how that distortion can be both a coping mechanism and a destructive force.”

–MJ Franklin on Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer (The New York Times Book Review)

“I would in fact recommend this book to any reader for whom a chief pleasure to be found in literature is beautiful sentences. The elegance and incantatory power of Zarin’s prose, along with her virtuosity at observation, are undeniable, but, like many original works, Inverno resists easy description. Central to the novel is a love story, one that, like most love stories, is at once simple and terribly complicated … The narrator has a riveting, lyrical voice and a deliberately digressive but expertly controlled style …

Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but Inverno is all about that other power they share: to annihilate. As the narrator finds herself ‘running behind something or someone that is leaving forever,’ the reader finds herself slowing down, the better to savor Zarin’s allusive, evocative prose. To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art. There is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written.”

–Sigrid Nunez on Cynthia Zarin’s Inverno (The New York Times Book Review)

“Part historical fiction, part cultural reflection, this is a story about the way exile calcifies the heart into an organ of brittle longing … It’s gratifying to see this thoughtful writer take all the time he needs to wrestle until daybreak with the mysterious angel of his disquieted conscience … Matar writes with cool solemnity in phrases that are often epigraphic but never contrived … Sorrowful as this novel often is, it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy nor an elegy. Matar’s previous books have always felt slender—never slight, no, never that, but compressed, the work of a displaced man aware of the need to pack only what’s essential. With My Friends, it’s gratifying to see this thoughtful writer take all the time he needs to wrestle until daybreak with the mysterious angel of his disquieted conscience …

Matar writes with cool solemnity in phrases that are often epigraphic but never contrived. Such is the muted intensity of his tone that it feels entirely natural for a character to say, in full-throated Rumian splendor: ‘Where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh scent of hope’ … But sorrowful as this novel often is, it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy nor an elegy in the spirit of ‘In Memoriam.’ It’s a profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us.”

–Ron Charles on Hisham Matar’s My Friends (The Washington Post)

Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls, Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made, and Erika Howsare’s The Age of Deer all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack
(Soho Press)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Masterful narrative skill … What matters is the intensity of Nealon’s reflections as he gathers himself back into his life. McCormack’s language is evocative, perfectly suited to the noirish atmosphere he builds throughout the book … This is a strange novel, sinister yet hopeful, a descent into darkness that somehow manages to rise into a ringing light.”

–Erica Wagner (The Guardian)

2. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
(S&S/Mary Sue Rucci Books)

2 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Storm We Made here

“World War II might be the most popular subject for historical fiction, but Vanessa Chan’s debut, The Storm We Made, defies the typical focus on the Western front and a clear-cut distinction between good and evil that characterizes many books … Chan’s chronicles of atrocities against Malayan children serve as a bracing reminder that despite the way World War II is often depicted in fiction, it was not romantic. The Storm We Made invites reflection about who should be considered the main characters of this war. It’s clear that people in every locale affected by its brutalities deserve to be protagonists, and Chan’s novel proves there are still fresh perspectives to reveal.”

–Jenny Shank (The Star Tribune)

3. Mercury by Amy Jo Burns
(Celadon Books)

1 Rave • 3 Positive

“Mercury is a character-driven novel; the point isn’t the plot, but what the people enacting it reveal about themselves. Though the book covers only nine years, there’s something epic about the love story at its heart … And so the most powerful tension in this novel doesn’t come from the dead body. It comes from the question of whether Marley will demand a place for herself—and for her voice to be heard.”

–Mary Beth Keane (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction

1. The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors by Erika Howsare
(Catapult)

5 Rave • 2 Positive

“Through carefully wrought prose and evocative imagery, Howsare depicts how deer and human populations have both relied on and butted up against one another for eons … A thorough, eye-opening invitation to ponder our own relationships with the natural world, practically and reverently.”

–Becky Libourel Diamond (BookPage)

2. How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity by Jill Burke
(Pegasus Books)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“A sprightly cultural history … She introduces us to women who, through luck and force of will were able to parlay their talents, skills and, inevitably, beauty into successes as painters, writers, performers and courtesans. And it says something about what rare birds these were that Burke is able to identify virtually all of them in one brief book.”

–Ellen Akins (The Star Tribune)

3. Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock
(Pegasus Books)

3 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Francesca Peacock here

“Pure Wit thoroughly acquaints you with Cavendish’s background and milieu, but her writing can be harder to cathect to, in part because her poor penmanship and spelling muddied publication, with editions revised repeatedly over the years. Peacock argues her work deserves the same scrutiny and careful attention as that of her male contemporaries … Peacock works hard to situate her subject alongside other iconoclasts. This is probably the first time Cavendish has been likened to David Bowie and bell hooks, and it would no doubt delight her, even if the academy harrumphs.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

“With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you be of good cheer…”
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Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.

As longtime readers of this annual feature will know, each year in the run up to the holidays, we (the normally benevolent stewards of BookMarks.reviews) make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of a bountiful review harvest for the coming year.

Among the books being flung into the fiery pit this time around: Walter Isaacson’s “dull, insight-free doorstop” biography of Elon Musk; Paris Hilton’s “vapid and vaporous” memoir; Tom Hanks’ “bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction”; and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “hollow PR exercise.”

So here they are, in all their gory, gut-punchin’ glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2023.

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“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter …

To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best …

There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? ‘Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,’ Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced) …

Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”

–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (The Guardian)

“The overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard—someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly …

All the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined … Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote … For the most part, The Courage to Be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT …

At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities … Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in The Courage to Be Free is chilling—unfree and scary.”

–Jennifer Szalai on Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (The New York Times)

“…a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is—at moments—very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …

What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family … Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes…I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner—’The past is never dead. It’s not even past’—he found on brainyquote.com. Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something …

Here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.”

–Rachel Cooke on Prince Harry’s Spare (The Guardian)

“…amounts to a book-length shrug … At least you can say there’s no false advertising. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is titled Opinions, after all, not Thoughts or Ideas. She gives us exactly what she promises: a series of opinions on various subjects, arranged haphazardly, adding up to nothing substantial at all …

It isn’t Gay’s fault that feminism became so devoid of meaning that our hard-won slogans were easily stripped from their context and used by bad actors to fight against abortion rights, to protest vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic, and to harass trans women. But Gay, in her anti-intellectual stance, became a kind of mother figure for those who would prefer to avoid thinking their way through cognitive dissonance, smoothing back their hair to coo, ‘you’re already perfect, just the way you are’ …

It’s not an argument for acknowledging complexity, it’s an argument for not thinking. It’s an argument for focusing, first and foremost, on our own comfort … Such tepid writing makes no intellectual, ideological or psychological demand of its reader. Working against ideology might look like a principled, sophisticated stance, one that values nuance and uncertainty, but instead it reveals a lack of rigour. If anything, you could say that ‘comfort’ is her primary ideology, as she uses the word and its variations dozens of times throughout …

Readers see her waffling and confuse it for courage … ‘Extend your empathy’ is her instruction—as vague and thoughtless as an advertisement for a new moisturiser. This book is proof that the anti-fascist philosopher Simone Weil was right, when she wrote: ‘There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.’”

–Jessa Crispin on Roxane Gay’s Opinions (The Telegraph)

“Killing Moon is so cruelly, brutally misogynistic and brimming with every savage cliche of crime fiction that it’s barely readable … Nearly ten pages into Killing Moon, I wondered whether Nesbo had always depicted women in such a cruel, hateful way. Did I overlook it for two whole decades? … Perhaps some readers simply don’t mind Nesbo’s description of young women as ‘parasitic bimbos on the hunt for a suitable host’ because, as he asserts, it’s traditional …

Maybe someone needs to remind Nesbo that storytelling in fiction allows us to explore alternate worlds. It lets us stand in the shoes of characters who are both like us and entirely different so we can expand our thinking and take on new perspectives. Storytelling that relies on tired cliches that frame women as hapless gold-digging victims who are lucky to have an ancient, alcoholic ex-cop on their case is a literary tradition we can do without.”

–Cat Woods on Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon (Observer)

“Melodramas of oppression and resistance do not brook much nuance, and, in any event, it can be difficult to insist on ethical complexity when faced with a story that resonated with many readers … Mom Rage is Dubin’s book-length effort to grant mothers the absolution that many of them seek … Dubin’s claims and prescriptions are, by now, staples of pop-feminist nonfiction …

The newer books—call them ‘feminish’—engage only sparingly with the original sources. Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as ‘white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy’ are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another …

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed father … No doubt the patriarchy and capitalism have power, but how precisely that power results in the rage of mothers toward their children, as opposed to their husbands or their bosses, remains unclear … The imprecision of Dubin’s language strands her argument on unstable ground …

The book fails to universalize a particular predicament, and, in strenuously attempting to do so, turns into an exercise in ill-advised candor … How clearly can a writer see anyone or anything—her children or the social and political contours of motherhood—when she perceives everything through the haze of moral cliché?”

–Merve Emre on Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood (The New Yorker)

“Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence. The book—ventriloquized by Joni Rodgers, who describes herself as a ‘story whisperer’—is as vapid and vaporous as the fragrances Hilton sells; all the same, archaeologists may one day consult it in the hope of understanding how and why our species underwent a final mutation into something glossily post-human. The antics of this entitled flibbertigibbet expose the absurdity of a culture in which the self only exists if it is validated by a selfie, membership of society depends on the mirage of social media and the reality in which we were all once anchored has been replaced by a flimsy virtual replica …

This air-headed mysticism merges with the digital revolution, which allowed Hilton to disseminate her image around the globe and to seep into our defenseless heads … Yes, it’s her world and after reading her book I just wish I could move off-planet.”

–Peter Conrad on Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir (The Guardian)

“…an ascendant group of conservative thinkers persists in defining liberalism as everything and nothing…This motley crew might have served as an advertisement for liberalism’s commitment to religious toleration, were its denizens not united by their shared distaste for globalism, the sexual revolution and allegedly latte-lapping elites … Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic. The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time …

The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of ‘the many’ before making so many confident assertions about ‘what most ordinary people instinctively seek’ … Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (The Washington Post)

“No…fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary. Instead of a bottom-up social movement led by young women, change in The Future comes from the top down … What follows is a dubious effort to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Alderman has an undeniable talent for concocting a twisty, rollicking narrative, replete with assassination attempts, desert island bunkers and machine-learning prophets. Yet for all its conspiratorial thrills, The Future mostly reads like a manifesto for technocracy wrapped up in a genre-fiction bow …

The book suffers not just from its dogmatism but also from its homogeneity … The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future … Though it purports to affirm the human capacity for empathy and curiosity, The Future is built like a machine: calculating, doctrinaire and hollow on the inside.”

–Ian Wang on Naomi Alderman’s The Future (The New York Times Book Review)

“All this should be fun. But alas, The Romantic is a tired, spiritless piece of work, written as if Mr. Boyd was slogging dutifully through the formula he created and has previously used to better effect … Who is Mr. Boyd’s target reader, one wonders? Anyone with a genuine interest in the Byron and Shelley circle, or African exploration, or literary London, will find nothing of consequence in these pages. And anyone looking for an engrossing love story will not find one in the conventional romance of Ross and his Raphaella. The novel might serve as a novice’s introduction to the period, a sort of 19th Century 101. But for an author of Mr. Boyd’s reputation, that’s a low bar to set.”

–Brooke Allen on William Boyd’s The Romantic (The Wall Street Journal)

“As usual the ‘action’ proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel. It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair …

I wonder whether a) people arrive at these books predisposed to favour fiction that showcases the mundane and b) the swathes of mediocre prose slip under the radar because it’s basically quite easy to read … If you like the boring bits of Knausgaard and Ford, I can’t argue with that. But I’m still going to try to persuade you not to read Be Mine, for several other reasons. First, there’s nothing novel about this novel … Why this boorish, boring also-ran is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023 is a mystery.”

–Claire Lowdon on Richard Ford’s Be Mine (Times Literary Supplement)

“The most intriguing thing about Central Park West—in a way, the real mystery here—is the strange sense that there is something missing. For all his power and access, all those decades of crimes and secrets, Comey has produced any other middle-aged lawyer’s clunky but passable fling at that courtroom novel he always threatened to write. It raises an almost depressing question: Does Comey—do any of these politicos turned authors—have anything to reveal at all? …

To describe the prose as workmanlike would be too kind. It is often lurching and awkward, and the dialogue frequently reads like someone ran the original English through a machine translator into a foreign language and back again … Location descriptions are painful, like notes that a more fluent writer would plug in fully intending to come back to on a second draft … But there is still something to like here. Within reason. For all its clichés, it is a work of genuine imagination. It is plotted with reasonable care …

How deflating, then, to discover that the most these semiretired potentates of the great secret machinery of government can imagine amounts to a rip-off of more professionally written TV shows and mid-tier Hollywood action properties.”

–Jacob Bacharach on James Comey’s Central Park West (The New Republic)

“It would be nice at this point to confirm Hanks’s book as a satire. That way we could applaud the means by which it deftly—even affectionately—pricks the pompous self-regard of Hollywood’s inner circle, complete with a star who unwinds by taking her Cirrus jet for a spin and a gonzo method actor who insists on sleeping in a tent. We might then go on to laugh at the idiotic footnotes that provide a needless justification for the use of slang and blithely mis-explain Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. Alarmingly, though, this tale is deadly serious. Johnson is great and Knightshade is amazing and therefore everything about them is a source of endless fascination. The production, says Hanks, runs for 53 days. Somehow his book makes it feel even longer …

A bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction, a bungled behind-the-scenes tour that can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s crying out for an editor. The plot is borderline incontinent … aking a movie is tough; writing a novel is hard, too. So accentuate the positives, draw a line and move on. On a pure sentence level Hanks’s book is at times pretty good. Overall I confess it was very much not for me.”

–Xan Brooks on Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (The Guardian)

“Ms. Streisand is a woman of many talents. Curating memories of the way she was—well, that isn’t one of them … This plaintive observation would have packed a greater punch had it not been buried in an avalanche of minutiae about Ms. Streisand’s grade-school crushes, her pastries of choice at the local bakery, her ideal bagel toppings, her preferred beverage at the drugstore and her favorite treats at the movie theater … There may be gold there, but readers will have to pan diligently …

For 40 years, Ms. Streisand says, editors, including Jacqueline Onassis, asked her to write an autobiography. She steadfastly declined because of her desire to live in the present rather than dwell in the past. It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that, having finally acceded, Ms. Streisand charged full-bore into yesteryear. In so doing, she failed to remember her reaction to the overemoting Mr. Patinkin in the early days of the Yentl shoot: Sometimes less is more … Doesn’t have an index, so there are no shortcuts for impatient readers … Even her most devoted followers will be crying uncle or, more to the point, Yentl.”

–Joanne Kaufman on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The Wall Street Journal)

“What of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (The Los Angeles Times)

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Thirsty for more takedowns? 
Reacquaint yourself with the most scathing book reviews of 2017 , 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Another year, another crop of newly-minted literary honorees.

From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2023.

Congratulations to all!

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PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Awarded for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.
Prize money: $15,000

Trust by Hernan Diaz
(Riverhead)

“[An] enthralling tour de force … Each story talks to the others, and the conversation is both combative and revelatory … As an American epic, Trust gives The Great Gatsby a run for its money … Diaz’s debut, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trust fulfills that book’s promise, and then some … Wordplay is Trust’s currency … In Diaz’s accomplished hands we circle ever closer to the black hole at the core of Trust … Trust is a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery … He spins a larger parable, then, plumbing sex and power, causation and complicity. Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read.”

–Hamilton Cain (Oprah Daily)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper)

“I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love … In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate—and singe—the darkest recesses of our country … Kingsolver has reconceived the story in the fabric of contemporary life. Demon Copperhead is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth … There’s the saving grace. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism … With Demon Copperhead, she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

Finalists: Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton & Company)

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Recognizes an outstanding work of literary fiction by a United States citizen.
Prize money: $10,000

Blackouts by Justin Torres
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“Torres’s lyrical new novel, Blackouts, these two forms—erasure poetry and queer history—collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators … The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality—a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult … Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.”

–Hugh Ryan (The New York Times Book Review)

Finalists:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon)
Aaliyah Bilal, Temple Folk (Simon & Schuster)
Paul Harding, This Other Eden (W. W. Norton & Company)
Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time (Henry Holt & Company)

BOOKER PRIZE

Awarded for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
Prize money: £50,000

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

“If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song … The book is also reminiscent of Anna Burns’s Milkman in that it’s an important story aching to be told, heavy with the reality it bears. While Burns wrote of sexual harassment, Lynch’s dystopian Ireland reflects the reality of war-torn countries, where refugees take to the sea to escape persecution on land. Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries. This is a story of bloodshed and heartache that strikes at the core of the inhumanity of western politicians’ responses to the refugee crisis … Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.”

–Aimée Walsh (The Observer)

Finalists:

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (Knopf Canada)
Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You (MCD)
Paul Harding, This Other Eden (W. W. Norton & Company)
Chetna Maroo, Western Lane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

Awarded for a single book in English translation published in the UK.
Prize money: £50,000, divided equally between the author and the translator

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, tr. from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
(Liveright)

“Mr. Gospodinov…is a nostalgia artist … His books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction. He is most drawn to minor and personalized details … The book flows between the remembered and the purely imagined as easily as it wanders through time … The novel rambles among elaborations of its fantastical conceit, flashbacks to the narrator’s youth, and meditations on the current condition of Europe with no apparent cohesive structure. Caveat lector: This makes for an extremely diffuse and piecemeal book. But the absence of a stabilizing center of gravity is symptomatic of a continent still recovering from the hammer-blows of World War II and the Cold War … Mr. Gospodinov also grasps the dangers of escapism … This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict—an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality.”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

Finalists:

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, tr. from Spanish by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories)
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, tr. from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Archipelago)
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, tr. from French by (World Editions)
Standing Heavy by GauZ’, tr. from French by Frank Wynne (Biblioasis)
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, tr. from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey (Bloomsbury)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

Given annually to honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. Judged by the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely “professional book review editors and book reviewers.”

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“The strangeness of living in a body is exposed, the absurdity of carrying race and gender on one’s face, all against the backdrop of an America in ruin … Ma’s meticulously-crafted mood and characterization … Ma’s gift for endings is evident … Ma masterfully captures her characters’ double consciousness, always seeing themselves through the white gaze, in stunning and bold new ways … Even the weaker stories in the book…are redeemed by Ma’s restrained prose style, dry humor, and clever gut-punch endings. But all this technical prowess doesn’t mean the collection lacks a heart. First- and second-generation Americans who might have been invisible for most of their lives are seen and held lovingly in Ma’s fiction.”

–Bruna Dantas Lobato (Astra)

Finalists:

Percival Everett, Dr No (Graywolf)
Jon Fosse with Damion Searls (trans.), A New Name (Transit Books)
Mieko Kawakami with Sam Bett and David Boyd (trans.), All the Lovers in the Night (Europa Editions)
Namwali Serpell, The Furrows (Hogarth)

KIRKUS PRIZE

Chosen from books reviewed by Kirkus Reviews that earned the Kirkus Star.
Prize money: $50,000

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
(Riverhead)

“If you think this novel is beginning to sound too nice, too pat, you don’t know McBride’s writing. He crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences … McBride’s roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy … McBride looks squarely at savage truths about race and prejudice, but he also insists on humor and hope. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels I’ve read this year. It pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting.”

–Maureen Corrigan (NPR)

Finalists:

Jamel Brinkley, Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Elanor Catton, Birnam Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (Random House)
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend (Scribner)

WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper)

Finalists:

Jacqueline Crooks, Fire Rush (Viking)
Louise Kennedy, Trespasses (Riverhead)
Priscilla Morris, Black Butterflies (Knopf)
Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (Knopf)
Laline Paull, Pod (Pegasus)

PEN/FAULKNER AWARD

Awarded to the author of the year’s best work of fiction by a living American citizen.
Prize money: $15,000

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“Eerie and intimate … Though the literary ruse drives its plot, The Book of Goose is mainly concerned with the lack of personal agency afforded to two very different girls—and how this shapes their destinies. Both want more than their village can offer, but until they write their book, only Fabienne has some power in her dealings with adults—because she scares them. When their book’s success gives Agnès a measure of control over her future, the friendship takes a stark turn. Not since John Knowles’ A Separate Peace has a novel wrung such drama from two teens standing face to face on a tree branch … In prose shorn of unnecessary modifiers and frills of any kind, Li capably depicts the way a strong-willed sadist can browbeat a peer into subservience.”

–Kevin Canfield (The Star Tribune)

Finalists:

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You (MCD)
Laura Warrell, Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (Pantheon)
Dione Irving, The Islands (Catapult)
Kathryn Harlan, Fruiting Bodies (W. W. Norton & Company)

PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION

Awarded to an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.
Prize money: $25,000

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
(Tin House Books)

“Talty depicts the relationship between David and Paige perfectly—the siblings clearly care for each other; it’s evident beneath the bickering and the long periods when they don’t see each other … The story ends with both mother and son experiencing terrifying medical emergencies; it’s almost excruciating to read, but it’s undeniably powerful, and, in its own way, beautiful … Talty’s prose is flawless throughout; he writes with a straightforward leanness that will likely appeal to admirers of Thom Jones or Denis Johnson. But his style is all his own, as is his immense sense of compassion. Night of the Living Rez is a stunning look at a family navigating their lives through crisis—it’s a shockingly strong debut, sure, but it’s also a masterwork by a major talent.”

–Michael Schaub (The Star Tribune)

Finalists:

Sindya Bhanoo, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (Catapult)
Meron Hadero, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times (Restless Books)
Morgan Thomas, Manywhere (Picador)
Jasmine Sawers, The Anchored World (Rose Metal Press)

ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION

Awards established in 2012 to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year. Administered by the American Library Association.

Prize money: $5,000 (winner), $1,500 (finalists)

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
(Knopf)

“Brief quotes give the text the veneer of nonfiction, and keep the narrative at arm’s length, rather than pull you close as fiction often attempts to … We leave the pool in the novel’s second half, and are firmly anchored aboveground with Alice, diagnosed with dementia, and her unnamed daughter … Otsuka’s prose is powerfully subdued: She builds lists and litanies that appear unassuming, even quotidian, until the paragraph comes to an end, and you find yourself stunned by what she has managed … It’s in [the] dissonance that the novel’s halves begin to meaningfully cohere … The puzzling narrative structure makes a kind of poetic sense as myth … The Swimmers makes an archetypal story wholly personal … In a time of monotony and chaos, when death is as concrete as it is unimaginable, and when cracks can and do appear in the pool for no discernible reason, The Swimmers is an exquisite companion. Though it doesn’t answer the unanswerable, the novel’s quiet insistence resonates: that it is our perfectly ordinary proclivities that make us who we are.”

–Rachel Khong (The New York Times Book Review)

Finalists:

David Santos Donaldson, Greenland (Amistad Press)
Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez (Tin House Books)

INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

An international literary award presented each year for a novel written in English or translated into English.
Prize money: €100,000

Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, trans. by Jo Heinrich
(Peirene Press)

“Every now and again, you come across a book you instantly know you must read and will devour … Oskamp tells their stories with a refreshing compassion—no poking fun at the former GDR as with Thomas Brussig and co., nor the anger and outrage of Jana Hensel. Oskamp is a curious observer and gleans intimate insights into the lives of the many who carried on as best they could when things got tough. Chapter by chapter, we are invited into their private sphere and bear witness not only to their tragedies, illnesses, and bereavements but also to their triumphs and their great fortitude. Marzahn, mon amour captures a piece of modern German history and brings it right down to the human level.”

–Catherine Venner (World Literature Today)

Finalists:

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner)
Kim Thúy (translated from French by Sheila Fischman), Em (Blackstone)
Ivana Sajko (translated from Croatian by Mima Simic), Love Novel (Biblioasis)
Fernanda Melchor (translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes), Paradais (New Directions)
Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf)

CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

An annual award presented by The Center for Fiction, a non-profit organization in New York City, for the best debut novel.
Prize money: $10,000

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White
(Astra House)

“A gorgeous novel about loss, survival and community … The structure of We Are a Haunting is inventive; the switching of viewpoints makes it feel like an extended conversation between Colly and Key … White’s characters are masterfully drawn, and his use of language is brilliant … This is a stunningly original and beautiful novel of devotion, a book that gives and gives as it asks us what it means to be part of a family, of a community.”

–Michael Schaub (NPR)

Finalists:

Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore (HarperCollins / Ecco)
Christine Byl, Lookout (Deep Vellum / A Strange Object)
Eskor David Johnson, Pay As You Go (McSweeney’s)
Jamila Minnicks, Moonrise Over New Jessup (Hachette / Algonquin Books)
Tracey Rose Peyton, Night Wherever We Go (HarperCollins / Ecco)
Esther Yi, Y/N (Astra House)

LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

Recognizes outstanding literary works as well as champions new writers.
Prize money: $1,000

(ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION)

The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad
(Riverhead)

“With each character’s journey, author Ahmad explores the multifaceted nature of longing and loss and what the loneliness they engender is all for. This novel has everything a reader could ask for: a sizzling, noirlike plot; political intrigue juxtaposed with a rich intergenerational family saga; capacious, conflicted characters, including women who may be marginalized by society but are masters of their own narratives; and sublime sentences. A debut novelist, Ahmad manages this complexity seamlessly … A feat of storytelling not to be missed.”

–Kirkus

Finalists:

Maayan Eitan, Love (Penguin)
Sidik Forfana, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner)
Oscar Hokeah, Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin)
Morgan Thomas, Manywhere (Picador)

(FICTION)

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, tr. Sean Cotter
(Deep Vellum)

“…a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist’s cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of García Márquez and Bruno Schulz’s labyrinths are all recognizable in Cărtărescu’s anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature … he also affirms the possibility inherent in the ‘bitter and incomprehensible books’ he idolizes. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself.”

–Dustin Illingsworth (The New York Times Book Review)

Finalists:

Anna Dorn, Exalted (Unnamed Press)
James Hannaham, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (Little, Brown and Company)
Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking)
Fernanda Melchor (translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes), Paradais (New Directions)

EDGAR AWARD

Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, honoring the best in crime and mystery fiction.

(BEST NOVEL)

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
(William Morrow and Company)

“… poetic and mesmerizing … It’s an impossible weight for a mother to imagine, but Kukafka handles it with grace and empathy and terrible, enduring beauty … a victim-forward narrative that is a relief to read after years of serial killer hagiography. It’s also no less thrilling … a career-defining novel—powerful, important, intensely human, and filled with a unique examination of tragedy, one where the reader is left with a curious emotion: hope.”

–Tod Goldberg (USA Today)

Finalists:

John Darnielle, Devil House (MCD)
Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home (Mulholland Books)
Nita Prose, The Maid (Ballantine)
Kellye Garrett, Like a Sister (Mulholland Books)
Chuck Hogan, Gangland (Grand Central Publishing)

(BEST FIRST NOVEL)

Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor
(Soho Crime)

“Don’t Know Tough takes the adage of ‘Faith, Family, and Football’ and reveals it to be a vicious canard, or at least a decent cover for the common failings of god and men, the violence on the field an acceptable proxy for the violence that exists behind closed doors. A major work from a bright, young talent.”

–Tod Goldberg (USA Today)

Finalists:

Erin E. Adams, Jackal (Bantam)
Ramona Emerson, Shutter (Soho Crime)
Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow & Company)
Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief (Tiny Reparations Books)

NEBULA AWARD

Given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the best science fiction or fantasy novel.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
(Harper Voyager)

“Babel has earned tremendous praise and deserves all of it. It’s Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass by way of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season: inventive and engaging, passionate and precise. Kuang is fiercely disciplined even when she’s playful and experimental: In an author’s note, she invites readers to ‘remind yourself this is a work of fiction’ before proceeding to footnote the text with the vicious hindsight of a historian. Like the silver bars at its heart—like empires and academic institutions both—Babel derives its power from sustaining a contradiction, from trying to hold in your head both love and hatred for the charming thing that sustains itself by devouring you.”

–Amal El-Mohtar (The New York Times Book Review)

Finalists:

Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes (Tor Books)
Nicola Griffith, Spear (Tordotcom)
T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone (Tor Books)
Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth (Tordotcom)
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea (MCD)

HUGO AWARD

Awarded for the best science fiction or fantasy story of 40,000 words or more published in English or translated in the prior calendar year.

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
(Tor Books)

“… clever and bold-hearted … Marra’s hard-fought journey from third-string princess to hero will delight fantasy readers. Kingfisher’s signature offbeat humor remains as entertaining as ever, and her treatment of domestic abuse is filled with compassion and dignity. This rollicking feminist fairy tale is filled with redemption, community and courage, its dark passages the road to a satisfyingly uplifting endgame.”

–Jaclyn Fulwood (Shelf Awareness)

Finalists:

John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society (Tor Books)
Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes (Tor Books)
Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth (Tordotcom)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey Books)
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Spare Man (Tor Books)

BRAM STOKER AWARD

Presented by the Horror Writers Association for “superior achievement” in horror writing for novels.

The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
(Mulholland Books)

“… riveting … a barrio noir that invites readers to consider the depths of darkness in this world, its material effects, and the cycles of violence we both willingly and perforce enter into … written in both English and Spanish—the former outweighs the latter, and any Spanish dialogue too important to the plot or mood is translated—and takes readers on a journey to hell and back. Whether hell is the American racism, the Mexican cartel industry, Mario’s grief and increasing comfort with violence, or all of the above, it works … The mix of religious, superstitious, and supernatural elements add a dimension to the novel that heightens its horror, but also its social commentary … may not be a cheerful book, but it still allows glimpses of love, moments of connection, and glimmers of beauty to exist. Even if those can’t save us, they point toward what, with some effort and luck, just might.”

–Ilana Masad (NPR)

Finalists:

Alma Katsu, The Fervor (G. P. Putnam’s Sons)
Gwendolyn Kiste, Reluctant Immortals (Gallery / Saga Press)
Josh Malerman, Daphne (Del Rey Books)
Catriona Ward, Sundial (Tor Nightfire)

The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in.

Yes, all year long the diligent and endearingly disgruntled Book Marks elves have been mining reviews from every corner of the literary internet. Brows furrowed, stomachs growling, they’ve worked from break of dawn to blink of dusk, seven days a week, scouring the book review sections of over 150 publications—from the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Toronto Star to the London Review of Books—all so that we can now say with certainty that these are the best reviewed fiction titles of 2023.

Happy reading!

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright
(W.W. Norton & Company)

18 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an interview with Anne Enright here

“So convincingly has Ms. Enright conjured the archetype of the wandering Irish bard who leaves behind him a legacy of abandoned women and melodious, honey-tongued verse … Is it possible for poems to be fictitious? In fact, these nostalgic odes to love and Ireland are limpid, lilting, wholly credible stand-alone works … One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity. The fullness of Ms. Enright’s talent is reflected as well in her treatment of what has come to be known, a bit glibly, as the ‘art monster.’”

–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)

2. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
(Harper)

19 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Ann Patchett here

“Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom … This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel … Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant.”

–Marion Winik (The Washington Post)

3. After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley
(Knopf)

15 Rave • 6 Positive
Read an interview with Tessa Hadley here

“This new collection is a great introduction to her work and for those of us already familiar with Hadley, it’s a great addition. Throughout the collection, Hadley spins out character studies of (mostly) women at odds with themselves, their partners, their families, or life in general … Hadley does a wonderful job of weaving past and present together as the sisters are forced to confront their memories and relationships. And, of course, there are those moments of shining prose … Rife with deft and often beautiful prose, and astute but compassionate characterization, this is a wonderful collection.”

–Yvonne C. Garrett (The Brooklyn Rail)

4. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
(Knopf)

20 Rave • 9 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Lorrie Moore here

“Moore excels in…[the] neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done … Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story … A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.”

–Abhrajyoti Chakraborty (The Guardian)

5. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
(New Directions)

15 Rave • 9 Positive
Read an excerpt from Kairos here

“A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early … If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory … She is writing more closely to her own unconscious … I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did … Profound and moving.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

6. August Blue by Deborah Levy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

13 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections … August Blue,which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.”

–Heller McAlpin (The Wall Street Journal)

7. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

18 Rave • 5 Positive • 5 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Bee Sting here

“The Bee Sting…ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful—there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.”

–Jonathan Russell Clark (The Los Angeles Times)

8. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Birnam Wood here

“Bold, ambitious … A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns … Birnam Wood moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose … Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands … Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters … I’ll unabashedly state that Birnam Wood is a brash, unforgettable novel.”

–Lauren LeBlanc (The Boston Globe)

9. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday)

15 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Colson Whitehead here

“Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked … Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture … Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory … A…reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.”

–Chris Vognar (The Los Angeles Times)

10. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
(Penguin Press)

20 Rave • 6 Positive • 9 Mixed • 1 Pan

“It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters … Touchet is the most morally intelligent character Smith has written … The book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently … But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing … As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.”

–Karan Mahajan (The New York Times Book Review)

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Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
The ten books with the highest points totals are then ranked by weighted average