Jia Tolentino

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“These days, in certain corners, it?s something akin to a truism that every woman is a warrior, a badass, a queen. It is, for that reason, a profound relief to meet Hazel, the passive, hapless, magnificently abject protagonist of Alissa Nutting?s deranged new comic novel. I loved Hazel immediately, the way I love drunk women who instigate alarmingly personal conversations in bar bathrooms. She is the rare literary heroine in whose company it would be a pleasure to absolutely wreck my life.”

“The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. It seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become.”

“At some level I'll spend my whole life wishing that I'd ever really lived, if just for a little while, the way Babitz did in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. No one writes about pleasure, recklessness, and evanescence better. This book is like a night with perfect velocity; a lavender sunrise; a pharmacological whisper that you can do this forever and never die.”

“Jenny Zhang?s astounding shortstory collection, Sour Heart, combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain. The collection?s organising theme is familial love that warps a person beyond all recognition: specifically, a type of immigrant devotion with a power that is both creative and entropic, and which affects its recipients in idiosyncratic ways.”

“The Longing for Less, a new book by the journalist and critic Kyle Chayka, arrives not as an addition to the minimalist canon but as a corrective to it. Chayka aims to find something deeper within the tradition than an Instagramfriendly aesthetic and the ?saccharine and predigested? advice of selfhelp literature. Writing in search of the things that popular minimalism sweeps out of the frame?the void, transience, messiness, uncertainty?he surveys minimalist figures in art, music, and philosophy, searching for a minimalism of ideas rather than things.”