The Books Critics Are Raving About Now

"It luxuriates in language. Everett, like Twain, is a master of American argot; he is the code switcher’s code switcher. In James, he puts his skills to incandescent use... What sets James above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful... It should come bundled with Twain’s novel." – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"An eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans, it is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors' stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity... Orange has a predilection for repeating words that concern endurance and survival, which results in incantatory phrases that loop and curl in on themselves, as does his narrative. His language soars." – Heller McAlpin, NPR

"The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty... Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising." – Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

"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

"One of the most memorable characters in recent American literature, and Bertino’s novel is a stunning look at her life... The premise of Beautyland might seem high-concept and possibly twee at first, but the novel is anything but... A monumental accomplishment, a shimmering masterpiece from an author with talent to spare. It’s also a novel that offers, but doesn’t insist upon, hope and freedom from isolation." – Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe

"Incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn’t put it down... Mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art." – Fiona Maazel, The New York Times

"Try to read 10 pages of this book and resist its fairy dust. This story sinks the reader into its dreamlike world as surely as the Morningside subsides into the island it occupies... Obreht is a pure, natural storyteller with a direct hotline to the collective unconsciousness. She blends humor and tragedy, warmth and grit, mystery and magic, constructing her plot out of human curiosity and connection." – Jenny Shank, The Star Tribune

"I find her writing about her own mother so poignant and beautiful, about the model of motherhood that she had set for her, where love is intuitive and unconditional... I don’t know how to review a book so beautiful that it feels painful to share it with anyone else, so tender and raw that it feels sacrilegious to treat it as a mere piece of writing, with a writer so skillful and honest that it feels as if she is only writing for me." – Pragya Agarwal, The Irish Times

"Feels a bit like watching a prestige TV series. There are expansive casts of characters, many of whom happen to be good-looking. The plots are pacy and compelling, motored by flashbacks and cliffhangers and twists, while also dealing with social issues – particularly race and class – that add intellectual heft. Dialogue is hyper-realistic... [and] it also raises deeper questions about how we view the lives of other people, as material for our own consumption." – Gabrielle Schwarz, The Guardian

"Sober and thorough... One gift of The Rebel’s Clinic is that it amplifies the radical nature of Fanon’s work within the hospital setting... Shatz spends enough time complicating the language around violence that we lose sight of the fact that Fanon saw the undivided collective—rather than any particular means to bring it about, violent or otherwise—as the key to resistance, that which he celebrated, codified, and offered back to the world." – Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns