Taylor again proves himself to be a master of creating recognizable, fallible humans, but the novel’s unvaried tonal character becomes wearisome and smothers too many of its virtues of canny observation.
Thrillingly bold, this collection is at once unique in approach, mischievous in its navigation of ideas, and lush yet controlled in its use of language, rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends.
A playful, incisive, and deeply human novel of cultural and personal disconnect that should appeal to fans of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts.
The Passenger is proof that McCarthy still has plenty in the tank, and if it doesn’t quite rise to the heights of his finest work, it’s certainly his strangest. It’s a thrill to find the author still making such beguiling moves.
Keegan offers further evidence of her facility at imbuing short fiction with immense feeling and invoking a deceptively grand scale; a rich, compassionate work that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Highly recommended as a sincere, sometimes brutal, but always sturdy study of the burden of both art and adolescence and a wonderfully evocative treatise on how we imprint ourselves on the world and learn to survive in that tumultuous wake.
A go-for-broke work of literary comedy that successfully blends rib-tickling eccentricity with affecting and stealthily moving discourse on race, wealth, and the failures of neoliberal institutions; you’re unlikely to read anything funnier this year.
Less traditional “novel” than a ruminative constellation of ideas regarding colonial trauma, heteropatriarchy, and the innate sociality of writing; Belcourt’s boldest, freest, and most linguistically assured work yet.