It stars Rachel Aviv, Daniel Mason, David Thompson and others
Rachel Aviv’s You will not be free from thisDaniel Mason’s people of the countryand david thompson sudden flicker of light All of these are among the best reviewed books of the week.
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1. people of the country by Daniel Mason
(random House)
5 rev • 3 positive • 1 mixed
read an excerpt from people of the country Here
“Mason favors an elastic, lightly satirical voice that flits between observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative structure is playful, sometimes intrusive and permissive; it wanders, doubles down, includes fragments that seem, at first, peripheral. The humor – dry, humane, sometimes absurd – is always present … The Vermont setting, spare and bracing, is a quiet amplifier of these peculiarities. While Mason remains familiar with the natural world he introduces a thread of the supernatural into the landscape, a local legend that oscillates between conspiracy theory and genuine mystery.
-Bill Kelly (book list)
2. great anywhere by Shannon Sanders
(Henry Holt and Company)
5 rev
“A surprisingly satisfying debut novel… Sanders provides contextual information in a careful and controlled manner. The four lambs are the ghosts of the family… What might seem an overly eccentric device works here, partly because these are such rich characters in their own right, not idealized souls but lived-in complex people… Sanders keeps all the narrative plates spinning, the story lines slowly building to an ending that feels surprising but inevitable, as all good endings do.”
-Kate Tuttle (boston globe)
3. the sump By Roshan Sethi
(Simon & Schuster)
3 rave • 1 positive
“Underneath the novel’s bleakness, a stinging depiction of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, the sump In Sethi’s hands, it also explores the painful but, bleakly comic ways that race and colonial history collide with the dream of fame… sometimes, refracted through cultural sources… Yet, this extremely smart and funny novel ultimately suggests that unless the world is run by rich, entitled monsters, most of us will spend at least a portion of our time on Earth in some degree of simplicity.”
-Sam Lipsyte (New York Times Book Review)
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1. You Won’t Get Free From This: Stories of Mothers and Daughters By Rachel Aviv
(knopf)
4 rave • 3 positive
“Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects in the next, as if you were reading a short story told in the third person…Nobody who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.”
-Thomas Beller (4Column)
2. Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–1991 By Mark B. Smith
(WW Norton & Company)
5 rave • 1 positive
“The Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith has written a fascinating history of the Soviet Union… No single volume can adequately explain the collapse of the Soviet state, but exit stalin It is a bold effort. Smith paints a collage-like picture of how ordinary Soviet citizens endured repression and food shortages, yet clung hopefully to the 1917 Revolution’s promise of a better life… Effortlessly readable… though at times overwhelmed by the overload of information, exit stalin Presents a brilliant history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously delusional ideology.
-Ian Thompson (reviewer)
3. Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by david thompson
(Simon & Schuster)
4 rev • 4 positive • 1 mixed • 1 pan
“So much film criticism is trite or adventurous – he tackles it with a bullwhip, a magnifying glass and a sarcastic grin… Is this really his last book? There’s definitely an air of finality and futility in the way he ties things up at the end, or resolves them… He still cares and after reading this you will too.”
-Ed Potton (many times)
