Critics' Picks Out in Paperback in August 2024

"Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love …Kingsolver has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late 20th century" – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with a dazzling new collection... Wednesday's Child is full of woe, but Li's fictions are never one-note–rather, they capture the full tapestry of the human condition. Packed with extraordinary beauty and quiet devastation, these stories cut quick and deep, like a knife in the dark." –Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"Magnificent... The book does what all good stories should do – it unfolds both minutely and epically at the same time. It does not moralise, and yet it does not shirk its responsibility to knock our sense of comfortable balance all to hell... Horrific... The nature of injustice is such that we may not always see it in our own times, but history will hold us accountable. That’s why Thrall’s book, and those like it, are so important." – Colum McCann, The Irish Times

"Enright at her lyrical, storytelling best. A portrait of a family living with the legacy, years after his death, of the abuse and neglect of their patriarch – a famous Irish poet... It’s a story of relationships, trauma, self-discovery and the healing powers of art and nature." – Nicola Sturgeon, The New Statesman

“Takes readers on a woozy, affecting dive into desire, domination and memory… [Genberg has an] empathetic approach to the quirks and failings of her characters. All there is to the self, observes the narrator, are the 'traces of the people we rub up against'. The greatest achievement of this short and affecting novel is its presentation of those encounters as one long fever dream." – Christian House, Financial Times

"Knoll doesn’t make Pamela’s journey (or ours) an easy one, but it ends in a cathartic, long-bottled-up scream that more people need to hear. And, one hopes, the telling of this tale (and more like it) will shred the myth of the 'murderer/genius' one cut at a time." – Patton Oswalt, The New York Times

"The most interesting question about Wilson’s new translation is... whether it is the definitive Iliad for our times. My answer is yes... Wilson has forged a poetic style in English that captures the essence of Homeric Greek... the rhythm comes alive only when you read aloud, the words whistling up the windpipe, animating the tongue and striking the ear. No other translation communicates the oral nature of the poem so brilliantly... A genuine page-turner, and it is all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read." – Naoíse Mac Sweeney, The Washington Post

“Leichter creates an insular, sometimes claustrophobic world only to stretch it, delicately, until it becomes seemingly limitless... Leichter understands the importance of incidental pleasure. What’s more, she, like the deepest surrealist authors, knows that supporting incidental pleasure is a rigorous task... The pleasure and heartbreak of reading Leichter’s work: the knowledge that sometimes stories have no beginning or end.” – Emily Hunt Kivel, Bomb Magazine

"With painstaking research, an award-winning journalist reveals the crucial roles undertaken by women in the intelligence arena... The result is a vivid, compelling, and important book. Another winner from Mundy, who tells a story that deserves to be told about women who deserve to be remembered." – Kirkus Reviews

"Brinkley pierces the superficial and obvious... Tapping into the sticky stuff of humanity, each story is a gift of the highest quality, reminding us that we are all both in the audience and on life’s stage, even if we don’t know it. Forever the witness and the witnessed." – Mateo Askaripour, The New York Times