This Strange Eventful History (2024) Claire Messud "A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family."
Reboot (2024) Justin Taylor "For all the talk of an Other America - that underground country whose president is Trump and whose capital is Florida - we have precious few novels of its condition, and none as powerful, passionate, whacked-out, and pathic as Justin Taylor's Reboot."
The Book of Ayn (2023) Lexi Freiman "The Book of Ayn is an exquisitely wicked prosing of the reality-cancellation that now passes for reality by pretty much the funniest writer of a generation that has forgotten to laugh."
The Dimensions of a Cave (2023) Greg Jackson "Greg Jackson's prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last."
The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild (2023) Mathias Énard "All of Enard's books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He's the composer of a discomposing age."
The Vegan (2023) Andrew Lipstein "Andrew Lipstein's The Vegan is a meaty comedy with a bleeding heart, highly recommended for all animals who read."
The House of Love and Prayer (2023) Tova Reich "Moral, mordant, irreparably torn, Tova Reich is the conscience of the diaspora - of all diasporas - as she shows in her outstanding first collection of short fiction, The House of Love and Prayer."
The Red Balcony (2023) Jonathan Wilson "Jonathan Wilson's beautifully paced Palestine novel kept me reading through the night. He knows his way intimately around this colony-as-crucible, a stony outpost of failing Empire teeming with Jews, Arabs, Brits who can be either and Brits who can be neither, High Commissioners, low criminals, artists, barristers, inspectors, and gendarmes, all of them trying to come to terms with Mandatory rule and the mandates of their own passions, which tend to get heated into history through politics and violence. The Red Balcony extends Wilson's previous novels set in the region, this time through the story of what is arguably Israel's foundational murder trial - a tale of multiple identities and loyalties that casts a shadow over the future State even while providing an eye-widening view of its author's bright and fully ripened achievement."
Bad Eminence (2022) James Greer "With eye and ear and tongue--and oh brother, what a tongue!--James Greer is the leading Renaissance Man for our current and possibly terminal Dark Ages."
My Father's Diet (2022) Adrian Nathan West "Adrian Nathan West, one of our best translators, is also one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial-sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion-that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture-of the patrimony-that we, all of us, have ruined."
The Passenger (2021) Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz "The Passenger, a newly recovered classic of the end of Jewish Europe, dramatizes the route to hell with indignant clarity, passion, intelligence, and rueful goddamned humor."
The Appointment (2020) Katharina Volckmer "Katharina Volckmer is a wild new talent, and unlike, say, twentieth-century Europe, The Appointment succeeds in justifying its obscenities."
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020) Christopher Beha "Beha’s marvelous new novel is about, and more often than not exemplifies, pretty much everything good that New York City has lost in the past few bad years: wit, liberalism, journalism, and the dignity of self-destruction."
The Dead (2018) Christian Kracht "The Dead is the beautiful, brilliant, and utterly mad novel that Thomas Mann would have written had he known the East like Yukio Mishima and loved his adopted Hollywood with the gusto of Nathanael West."
(b.1980)
