We The Animals – Justin Torres
This world, through which the reader all-too-quickly passes, is etched cleanly and sparsely, and nonetheless seems complete. Description, dialogue, and the narrator’s own youthful viewpoint create a realm almost tangible, both in the squalor of the low points and the beauty of their family’s wary intimacy.
The Art of Fielding – Chad Harbach
While Harbach successfully captures the elegant, romantic aspects of the game, his attempts to evoke its baser elements are less convincing.
Set two years after 9/11, Amy Waldman’s debut novel opens with a jury presiding over an anonymous contest to select the design for a memorial and chronicles the political and cultural fallout that follows.
Lightning People – Christopher Bollen
Unlike lesser character-oriented writers, Bollen manages to create lives that seem to have already been in motion before the book began.
Simply inverting realism through surrealistic distortion and discordance (as if “realism” is still the primary enemy of innovation in fiction rather than conformity of practice more broadly) is a limited strategy that can become just as conventionalized as realism. Working toward a hybrid of fiction and poetry would perhaps encourage writers–and readers–to focus more on language as the essential element of both.
Everything Beautiful Began After – Simon Van Booy
Great novelists hand readers the keys and ride shotgun, pointing out turns and exits whenever necessary, but never spoiling the destination. Van Booy is a backseat driver.
Hamlet’s Blackberry – William Powers
It is not the technology itself that Powers wants to criticize, but the tacit, unexamined philosophy with which we have so far invited these gadgets into our lives.
My Two Worlds – Sergio Chejfec
But what if this annoying character is a demonstration of how—deep down—freedom, truth, and everything modernity promised us from transcendental experience is what’s annoying?
Humiliation – Wayne Koestenbaum
Humiliation provides no solutions, and there is no satisfying sense of resolution, but as an exploration of an unwieldy concept, it is disarmingly vulnerable, and as eloquent as it is revealing.
The Magician King – Lev Grossman
The existence of this sequel—it turns out it will be a trilogy, in fact—does not ruin the memory of the original, but certainly dims it a bit.