Review by New York Times Review
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. (Penguin, $17.) Dialogue is a gateway to developing introspection and compassion, Turkle argues, but as technology mediates more of our conversations, our interpersonal and emotional skills have deteriorated precipitously. Turkle cautions against the unquestioning embrace of technology, calling instead for a return to face-to-face talks and more personal interaction. THE VISITING PRIVILEGE: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. (Vintage, $16.95.) Gathered in part from her previous collections but including 13 stories new in book form, these tales exhibit Williams's trademark blend of grim humor and despair; in the title story, a woman finds unexpected solace in visits to her friend being treated for depression. The book amounts to what our reviewer, Ben Marcus, called "one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen." TRANS: A Memoir, by Juliet Jacques. (Verso, $19.95.) The author, who chronicled her sex-reassignment surgery and transition in columns for The Guardian, writes lucidly about her coming-of-age and experiences of feeling out of place. As she puts it, "I felt trapped not by my body but a society that didn't want me to modify it." AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING, by Elizabeth Poliner. (Lee Boudreaux/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Three Jewish sisters converge on a familiar summer destination, a stretch of Connecticut's coast known as Bagel Beach, and find comfort in domestic rituals, religion and one another. Poliner's wideranging novel, narrated by one of the sisters' children, flits back and forth in time over a nearly hundred-year period, with a family tragedy at the story's center. BIG SCIENCE: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the MilitaryIndustrial Complex, by Michael Hiltzik. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, played a role in the Manhattan Project, and his inventions helped set a trend of enormous projects. But chief among his contributions was developing, as one admirer put it, "the modern way of doing science." By forging closer ties between science and politics, he helped make science far more interdisciplinary. THE GREEN ROAD, by Anne Enright. (Norton, $15.95.) The members of an Irish family, after years in far-flung locales, return for what might be a final Christmas holiday together. In this masterly novel, Enright, the 2007 Man Booker winner, writes as expertly about the AIDS crisis in New York and humanitarian work in Mali as she does about Ireland. THE NIXON TAPES: 1973, edited by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.95.) In these illuminating transcripts, the president's words from a turbulent period speak for themselves. At the outset of this volume of the tapes, Nixon has won re-election but soon turns to obsessing over the gathering Watergate scandal and plotting his response. ?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's the odd details that get you in Williams' meticulously composed, acerbically dark short stories disquieting, axis-tipping, heat-stroke tales of mental breakdown, alienation, divorce, car accidents, environmental disaster, and death. In In the Park, one of 13 new stories in this mighty retrospective embracing four decades of daring literary excellence, precisely calibrated imagination, and uncompromising candor, a ranger too gloomy about our destruction of nature to lead hikes for children actually sweats blood. Sneaking a smoke in the parking lot, he watches a raven investigating the interior of an open convertible. The bird, with its aura of Poe, picks up a pen, then drops it in favor of an empty beer huggie, a choice rife with many-chambered irony, which is one of Williams' many fortes. Thirty-three stories from past collections, including the perfect Rot, are gathered here scorching works that have established Williams as a virtuoso with a subversive, sure-footed sense of humor and an unsparing perspective on the marauding strangeness of the human condition. Williams' brooding, wry, and unpredictable new tales, including the somberly gorgeous Revenant and the sardonic Cats and Dogs, feature dementia, funerals, a boy channeling his dead grandparents, outlaw self-destruction, imperiled animals, mothers of infamous murderers, and unsupportive support groups. Jolting, tonic and valiant in their embrace of the ludicrous and the tragic, Williams' masterful stories belong in every fiction collection.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Williams (The Quick and the Dead) is a writer's writer, acclaimed by Rick Moody, Ann Beattie, and Karen Russell, among many others, and compared to Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor. However, O'Connor's stories are direct, while Williams takes a more oblique approach. This new collection includes 33 of the author's older pieces and 13 new ones. These mordant, ambiguous, and disturbing tales share a sensibility with the films of David Lynch, and although some are both highly detailed and disarmingly vague, Williams delivers a powerful jolt, as in the recent "Brass," about an Arizona family facing tragedy. Throughout, her characters seem familiar yet unknowable, and she's brilliantly original, whether depicting strange hospital visits, a teenager with a dying mother, or the death of a German shepherd. Verdict Williams's award-winning fiction isn't for everyone. Yet this collection may attract new readers to the select group of devoted fans who appreciate her fierce and unsparing way of viewing the human condition.-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Four dozen stories by one of the form's greatest practitioners. Like pitchers, some writers are openers, and some are closers. Few are as accomplished as Williams (Honored Guest, 2004, etc.) in condensing the whole of a large, often painful world into a few closing sentences: "She coughs, but it is not the cough of a sick person because Pammy is a healthy girl." "It was like he was asking me which flavor of ice cream I liked. I thought for a moment, then went to the dictionary he kept on a stand and looked the word up." "She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back at her as though it had no idea who she was." Not that Williams can't open a story well (one lead: "My mother began going to gun classes in February. She quit the yoga"); it's just that her most arresting moments come well after we've stepped into the world she's created. That world has less dirt for its characters to get under their fingernails than, say, Raymond Carver's, but it has some of the same uneasiness: if people are doing OK one minute, they're going to stumble the next, and it's often the things unnoticed or unspoken that will trip them. In the title story, for instance, it's not just the protagonist's offhand comment that ends a long-crumbling friendship: "We're all alone in a meaningless world. That's it. OK?" Just because it's meaningless doesn't mean it shouldn't be feared, though; in another singular moment, a young girl is terrified that birds will fly out of the toilet. Why wouldn't they? And why don't all short stories feature Gregory of Nyssa and javelinas? Williams, to belabor the metaphor, isn't just a closer, but a utility player at the top of her game. If you want to see how the pros do itor simply want to read some of the best stories being written todayyou need look no further. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
