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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 9/10

In literary land this week: Stephen King has released a new short story, with profits going to support the ACLU; The Guardian published a Judith Butler interview—and then deleted an answer about TERFS; and Nicaragua has ordered the arrest of prominent writer and intellectual Sergio Ramirez, who won the Cervantes Prize in 2017.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

FICTION

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

 22 RAVE • 16 POSITIVE •  13 MIXED

“Rooney knows that it’s the small dimensions of her fiction—the close, funneled, loving attention she pays her characters—that allow her books to trap within their confines anxieties of huge historical breadth.”  –Hermione Hoby (4Columns)  

2. Matrix by Lauren Groff

12 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE

“With masterful wordplay and pacing, Groff builds what could have been a mundane storyline into something quite impossible to put down. The writing itself is a demonstration of power.”  –Keishel Williams (NPR)  

3. The Magician by Colm Tóibín

8 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“It takes a writer of Tóibín’s caliber to understand how the seemingly inconsequential details of life can be transmogrified, turned into art.”  –Jay Parini (The New York Times Book Review)  

4. The Archer by Shruti Swamy

5 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“The Archer's beauty resides in Swamy’s sequential narrative form, which reads like music—at times almost exactly like reading a musical score—but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer’s intersection with air.”  –Marcela Davison Avilés (NPR)  

5. No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

6 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE • 2 MIXED

“This novel is built out of the shadows in the corner of a dark room, out of disembodied voices and meta-universes, out of blood, conspiracy, and mind control.”  –Leah von Essen (Booklist)  

NONFICTION

1. Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert

7 RAVE

“Rembert’s memoir is not just a lens through which we can view American history; at its heart it is a love story.”  –Jeannine Burgdorf (The Chicago Review of Books)  

2. Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner

5 RAVE • 2 POSITIVE

“Recalling their youth, Turner describes the girls’ unchaperoned roaming through the asphalt landscape with attentive detail, hitting all the familiar touchstones of ’70s Black girlhood.”  –Linda Villarosa (The New York Times Book Review)  

3. On Freedom by Maggie Nelson

5 RAVE • 7 POSITIVE • 2 MIXED • 3 PAN

“Readers of her previous work will anticipate the engagingly idiosyncratic way in which she draws on all of her lives: as poet, theorist, critic, mother, spouse.”  –Kwame Anthony Appiah (The New York Times Book Review)  

4. Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

5 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE

“This is a book about pain and growth; a narrative that shines a light on compassion and stresses the importance of rituals.”  –Gabino Iglesias (NPR)  

5. Karachi Vice by Samira Shackle

2 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE

“Samira Shackle’s prose is nimble and propulsive, as she expertly combines interview, anecdote and reportage with in-depth sociopolitical analysis.”  –Rabeea Saleem (TLS)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, and Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom are some of the biggest new titles hitting shelves this week.

Book Deals: Critic and journalist Sarah Ditum's Upskirt Decade, revisiting the figures who defined celebrity in the aughts—from Britney Spears and Janet Jackson to Whitney Houston and Jennifer Aniston—and how they were devoured by fame, has been sold to Abrams; author of California Edan Lepucki's Time’s Mouth, a novel about a couple on the run from the cult where they were raised, whose young child may be manifesting powers, to Counterpoint; and Rae Meadows's Motherland, a novel set in 1970s Soviet Union, in which a young girl whose mother has disappeared is tapped to be one of the chosen by the state-sponsored gymnastics machinery, to Holt.

Adaptation Announcements: Pride and Prejudice is becoming an all-female pop musical, and an animated series based on Robert C. O'Brien's Rats of NIMH book series is in the works at Fox.

Awards Circuit: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi has won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has received a $150,000 award from the Library of Congress, and the winners of the 2021 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize have been announced.

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

According to traffic data from Book Mark's widget and website

1. ↑ 169.98% Beautiful World, Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

2. ↑ 1,373.86% Matrix  LAUREN GROFF

3. ↑ 95.20% The Magician  COLM TÓIBÍN

4. ↑ 998.15% Second Place  RACHEL CUSK

5. ↑ 218.45% Cultish  AMANDA MONTELL

6. ↑ 90.58% Harlem Shuffle  COLSON WHITEHEAD

7. NEW L.A. Weather  MARÍA AMPARO ESCANDÓN

8. ↑ 55.99% Braiding Sweetgrass  ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

9. ↓ 57.77% The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois  HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS

10. ↑ 208.94% On Freedom  MAGGIE NELSON

(*Percentages based on week-to-week change in total views.)

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