Katy Waldman Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Katy Waldman

The towering doctor + thinker (+ my college bestie) @ilanayurkiewicz has a book out today. It’s a brilliant, sensitive reckoning with the fragmentation of the health care industry and only she could have written it.

Katy Waldman

“Dinosaurs” is sharp and implacably funny; it evades the sanctimony you’d expect. Millet writes in the simple, enigmatic language of books for young people.

Katy Waldman

I reviewed Esther Yi’s “Y/N,” a perfectly feral book, you want to draw closer and touch it knowing it will bite your hand off…https://t.co/DT1qohACNE

Katy Waldman

The book is a bleak and scalding satire of the cult of selfless caregiving, and also a soulful meditation on the bond between parents and children.

Katy Waldman

Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.

Katy Waldman

A ravishing début ... The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet ... There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free.

Katy Waldman

Tse’s prose curls around Q like a vine, dropping him in landscapes that are equal parts Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged. Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney’s “Fantasia”; Alexander Portnoy on acid; a Losing Your Virginity theme park brought to you by Mephistopheles.

Katy Waldman

Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node, or victim, in the net, moving suspensefully inward.

Katy Waldman

Tom Lake is a fairy tale, a conjunction of person, time, and place, and it is as transient as any idyll… The early pandemic, with its claustrophobic intimacy, seems almost tailor-made for Patchett’s interests. “Tom Lake” is about being caught in an intractable family situation.

Katy Waldman

...fandom has started to feel like a phenomenon akin to cryptocurrency or economic populism—a history-shaping force that we’d be foolish to ignore... One Direction makes for a good case study.