July’s Best Reviewed Fiction
Featuring Gary Shteyngart, Michael Clune, Ed Park, and More
Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith, Michael Clune’s Pan, and Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis all feature among July’s best reviewed books.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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1. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
(Random House)
10 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Vera, or Faith here
“Times like these demand great comic novels and thank God we have Gary Shteyngart to provide. His shortest, sweetest and most perfectly constructed novel ever, Vera, or Faith is here to save the day … This is probably the most endearing book about anxiety ever written … More heart, but as funny as ever.”
–Marion Winik (The Star Tribune)
2. Pan by Michael Clune
(Penguin Press)
6 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Pan here
“I am protective enough of the strange, idiosyncratic beauty of this book to worry in turn that some readers might not be up to the challenge of following his more baroque trains of thought … A testament to the novel’s powers of enchantment; it seduces you into thinking like a child again … Clune has achieved a remarkable sleight of genre, threading realism’s dull needle with a semi-magical thread.”
–Jessi Jezewska Stevens (Bookforum)
3. An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park
(Random House)
6 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an interview with Ed Park here
“After the ornate sprawl of the novel, he revels in the shorter form, a palpable joy on the page. Irony has never had it so good … What are we to make of Park’s fusion of comedy and danger, his puns and wordplay and arcane theories? He’s testing our patience for excellent reasons: We’re complicit in his fiction, perpetrators at the scene of a crime, the act of reading a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all directions like a spray of bullets.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Los Angeles Times)
4. Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie
(Doubleday)
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an essay by Charlotte Runcie here
“This is a smart, sharp and compulsively readable first novel that provides food for thought on a variety of complex topics … A novel isn’t carried by its big ideas alone. It needs strong characters to convey them and react to them. Fortunately, Runcie’s creations are forceful presences, all the more so because they are intriguingly multifaceted and resist cut-and-dried classification … All of which sounds serious and thought-provoking. This is only partly true, for the novel is also fun and frequently witty.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)
5. Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann
(W. W. Norton and Company)
6 Rave • 1 Postive • 1 Mixed
“Beautiful … Elegantly spare and precise language heightens and underscores the woman’s anxiety and unease. A quietly absorbing portrait.”
–Anne Foley (Booklist)
