Sam Sacks Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Sam Sacks

To make such worked-over material new and interesting, in other words, you have to be extremely good. Well then, Ms. McFarlane must be extremely good indeed, because her novel is a thrilling success.

Sam Sacks

Effortlessly readable... The novel is conscious of intractable global crises yet it focuses on local problems that can be confronted and overcome in honorable ways. It wants to pioneer a trail out of generalized despair and into active goodness.

Sam Sacks

Mr. 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 commune’s precarious existence on the Florida swamplands is depicted with pleasing fullness ... Banks has created a quietly beautiful memorial to a transitory way of life that would soon disappear behind the theme-park attractions of contemporary America.

Sam Sacks

It’s the particularity of those voices that makes Mr. Fofana’s debut a standout achievement. Each first-person story is written in vivid dialect… American speech is an underused commodity in contemporary fiction and it’s a joy to find such a vital example of it here.

Sam Sacks

The infusion of technical jargon throughout Mr. Calder’s balanced prose has an eerie effect on the stories, as though the algorithm had begun colonizing the writing as well.

Sam Sacks

Ms. Hildyard’s feat has been to create a novel that presents itself not as a story but as a complex ecosystem…the beauty of “Emergency” is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own.

Sam Sacks

The book flows between the remembered and the purely imagined as easily as it wanders through time... [it] rambles among elaborations of its fantastical conceit, flashbacks to the narrator’s youth, and meditations on the current condition of Europe.

Sam Sacks

Antic, hammy, caustic and very often funny, “America Fantastica” is a different kind of fiction than the novels and stories for which Mr. O’Brien will likely be remembered…It, too, appreciates the addictive pleasure of spinning a story, of making things up.