Dwight Garner Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Dwight Garner

Funny, foxy and fleet... The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they're wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition. You often feel you're listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party.

Dwight Garner

It’s hard to overstate how central Milan Kundera was, in the mid-1980s, to literary culture in America and elsewhere. He was the best-known Czech writer since Kafka, and his fiction brought news of sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression.

Dwight Garner

A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you ... Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading ... This book charmed and moved me.

Dwight Garner

Her book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful… This biography’s best set piece might be the lead-up to a public debate in the winter of 1997 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, between Wilson and a less generous critic, Robert Brustein of The New Republic.

Dwight Garner

It’s hard to overstate how central Kundera was, in the mid-1980s, to literary culture in America and elsewhere. He was the best-known Czech writer since Kafka, and his fiction brought news of sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression.

Dwight Garner

As it percolates along, [the book] has many extra-fine moments. It contains one of the most sensitive and intricate portraits of alcoholism I’ve read in a long time — the joy and dread that accompanies slipping into old vices.

Dwight Garner

Mariel Franklin’s first novel, “Bonding,” is about next-level dating apps, existential pharmacology, mass psychology and the marketing of the libidinal economy...You know from the first pages that you’re reading the work of a novelist, not just someone who has written a novel.

Dwight Garner

Brash and busy ... It’s a piece of late-career showmanship...from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing ... It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages. It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.

Dwight Garner

This is one for the introverts -- the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear... take it or leave it.

Dwight Garner

This is a simple thread on which to hang beads of perception. Coetzee, who is 83, retains a sure touch. This is a convincing late-period novel... It’s a pared-down book that avoids the excess philosophizing that has dragged down some of his more recent novels.