The Critics : Print

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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The New York Times Book Review on Junot Diaz's "electrifying" This Is How You Lose Her

“Junot Díaz  writes in an idiom so electrifying and distinct it’s practically an act of aggression, at once enthralling, even erotic in its assertion of sudden intimacy…[It is] a syncopated swagger-step between opacity and transparency, exclusion and inclusion, defiance and desire…His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz  subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status.” To read more...
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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The San Francisco Chronicle gives Emma Straub’s “entertaining” novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, a rave review

“[With] effortless prose and precise observations…Straub's novel explores themes of identity, career and motherhood through the filter of one woman's life experience…an entertaining narrative.” To read the full review, click here.

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Thursday, September 20, 2012

The New York Times on Junot Diaz's THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER

"Junot Díaz has one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully eclectic, capable of conjuring for the reader everything from the sorrows of Dominican history to the banalities of life in New Jersey." Read more...
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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Entertainment Weekly gives Emma Straub’s “fantastic debut,” Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, an A-

EW gives Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures an A- and calls it “a stunningly intimate portrayal of one woman's life.” They also included it on their Must List! To check out the full review, click here.

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Monday, July 23, 2012

The Washington Post on Roberto Ampuero's The Neruda Case

"Ampuero offers a provocative depiction of Neruda, a man reevaluating his marriages and love affairs and feeling fresh remorse for having forsaken a hydrocephalic daughter to concentrate on his poetry... Vivid... Although The Neruda Case is a prequel for his international readers, here in the United States, it should be a prologue for more novels from this shrewd and serious-minded novelist." Read more...

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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The Washington Post raves about Francine Mathews's Jack 1939

"Jack 1939 is most assuredly a work of fiction, but it takes skeins of history we all know well...and ravels a hair-raising tale....Mathews’s ability to weave fact into her tale is nothing short of remarkable....It’s going to be a long, hot summer in Washington, and there are precious few entertainments this captivating."  Read more...

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Monday, July 16, 2012

USA Today on Francine Mathew's "brisk thriller" Jack 1939

"[A] brisk thriller that defies the odds… It's no small feat to take a historic figure who looms as large in real life as John F. Kennedy, place him in an improbable fantasy and not strain credulity. But in this case, Mathews has accomplished her mission.” Read the full review here.

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Thursday, June 28, 2012

The New Yorker on Roberto Ampuero's The Neruda Case

"The twists and turns of the quest through Mexico City, Havana, East Berlin, and La Paz deftly weave the personal and the political in a doleful exploration of the ways in which romantic and revolutionary ideals inevitably founder. Neruda himself...is unforgettably conjured." If you have a subscription, you can read the whole Briefly Noted review here.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Washington Post raves about Laura Moriarty's "captivating and wise fourth novel" The Chaperone

"Too often, the Roaring Twenties in film and fiction is reduced to its most simplistic stereotypes: flappers doing a frantic Charleston while swilling champagne, swells in roadsters speeding through a computer-generated Times Square....In 'The Chaperone,' Moriarty gives us a historically detailed and nuanced portrayal of the social upheaval that spilled into every corner of American life by 1922....[An] inventive and lovely Jazz Age story." Read the full review here.

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Monday, June 25, 2012

The New York Times on Alberto Manguel's All Men Are Liars

“The simmering mysteries here are among the elements that keep you moving forward… [A] foxy intellectual treatise on mendacity and its discontents…. [S]erious and worthy: its best moments imprint upon the mind.” Read the full review here.

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