Editorial reviews

About Convenience Store Woman

It’s a sign of excellent literature to be able to effortlessly hold up multiple interpretations at once. Murata’s book is no exception: It’s all of these things while also rendering an artful grotesque of modern personal branding.

About Treeborne

Johnson is a capable participant in a grand tradition of Southern literature, giving readers indelible images of corpses, snakes (so many snakes), and glimpses of magic and mystery.

About Number One Chinese Restaurant

Li expertly crafts a deeply felt and beautifully evoked multigenerational narrative.... She skillfully maintains the balance of how families and loved ones can harm you more than anyone, and also can be there for you when no one else is.

About Convenience Store Woman

Simultaneously disturbing and enthralling, Murata’s short work, a bestseller in her own country, speaks volumes about society and the role of the outcast.

About Mothers and Other Strangers

A reader who knows what to expect will take pleasure in this book.

About Kudos

Kudos strips away the noble, glamorous veneer to reveal the profane guts of the book industry.

About Kudos

Another terse, smart, sometimes witty glimpse of contemporary life, filtered through the perception of its highly intelligent and observant central character and an assortment of literate, articulate people who cross her path.

About History of Violence

The novel is superb at vividly recording the post-traumatic repercussions of rape.

About Convenience Store Woman

Murata tells her story very sympathetically, showing that finding your niche, even if it as a lowly as convenience store worker, is what matters, particularly if you do not fit in with the way society thinks you should fit in.

About Jillian

It’s a frank depiction of modern indecency, and a reflection of a generation that lacks any shred of a moral compass.

About Kudos

This leads to a surprising, provocative finale — more exclamation point than full stop — which captures the wary standoff between the sexes that runs through these three novels. It also aptly underscores just how daring and remarkable a literary feat Cusk's trilogy is.

About Upstate

It's a book that fulfills its basic requirements; the sentences are in the right places, and many of them are fine. But it's impossible to read without thinking that Wood the critic would demand so much more from a book than this.

About Motherhood

This is less a book than a tapestry – a finely wrought work of delicate art.

About Rubik

Whatever your jam is — mind-bending logic, beautiful, lyrical writing, or a deep dive into contemporary life — there is something brilliant here for everyone.

About My Ex-Life

Like the best of comic fiction writers — I'm thinking, in particular, of the immortal Laurie Colwin — McCauley draws his readers into reflecting on some of the big questions — sexuality, mortality, failure — with the lure of laughter.

About The House of Impossible Beauties

The House of Impossible Beauties does not provide full biographies of its leading figures such as Angie Xtravaganza, Venus Xtravaganza or Dorian Corey, perhaps using fiction where their friends and acquaintances were unable, or unwilling, to fill in the gaps, but it does offer a convincing insight into the world in which they lived.

About In the Garden of the Fugitives

Sweeping both geographically and intellectually; a literary page-turner.

About That Kind of Mother

Alam’s novel, in addition to providing a striking portrait of one privileged woman’s inattention to the particularities of her black loved ones’ lives, vividly illustrates just how far our country still has to go when it comes to recognizing and celebrating the humanity of our fellow human beings...

About Motherhood

Some readers may implore Heti’s narrator to decide already, while others may immerse themselves in the vital questions she raises --- questions that shatter many of the assumptions we (still) make about the true value and purpose of women’s lives.