Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., and Shalom Auslander’s Feh: A Memoir all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
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1. Liars by Sarah Manguso
(Hogarth)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Liars here
“Seethes with rage … With a surgeon’s precision, Manguso painstakingly autopsies a couple’s unfolding—and increasingly toxic—relationship, chronicling each and every symptom of its pathology. If that sounds like a formula for an unsettling novel, you wouldn’t be wrong … In recent years, it has become commonplace for writers to portray marriage—and motherhood, too—as a cross between joy and horror. There’s much horror here, minus the joy, except that Manguso is a masterful sentence writer and a brutally honest surveyor of the disadvantages women endure.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
2. The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames
(Knopf)
2 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an essay by Juliet Grames here
“Deeply compelling, well-crafted … Yet the literary heart of this brilliant novel, its probing meditations on class, power, and the inevitability of crime, is rendered with the same nuance and intensity as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.”
–Olivia Kate Cerrone (The Boston Globe)
3. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
(One World)
4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Pan
Check out Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s annotated nightstand here
“A singular, owned, undaunted achievement … She has composed a great lyrical novel that transcends origin. It is neither American nor Latin American nor Pan American. The spotlight on Catalina’s searching heart is of Villavicencio’s own making. It is her original bel canto, in her superlative voice.”
–Marcela Davison Avilés (The Washington Post)
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1. The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson
(W. W. Norton & Company)
3 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Deftly interwoven … Gibson’s own balancing act, skilfully managed, is to highlight the extraordinary place these women carved out for themselves against the odds in 18th-century society, without glossing over aspects less congenial to 21st-century readers. It is often tempting to uncritically champion pioneering women in history with a sort of proto-girlboss feminism. Bluestockings is much more sophisticated stuff than this, and all the richer for it.”
–Hannah Rose Woods (The New Statesman)
2. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum
(Doubleday)
2 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Applebaum rightly places kleptocratic institutionalized thievery at the center of her analysis … A valuable book for many reasons, but the focus on illicit wealth creation and on those in democracies who enable it is especially timely. So is Applebaum’s recommendation that we wage war on autocratic behaviors wherever they occur.”
–Ruth Ben-Ghiat (The Washington Post)
3. Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander
(Riverhead)
3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Feh here
“Blends both a sense of despair and a self-deprecating whimsy … A page-turning memoir that shouldn’t be missed.”
–Jennifer Moore (Library Journal)