What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, and John Banville’s Venetian Vespersall feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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Fiction

1. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
(Penguin)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 6 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance—and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open … Pynchon may not have lost a step in Shadow Ticket, but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now … For most of the way, though, Shadow Ticket may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl.”

–David Kipen (The Los Angeles Times)

2. Venetian Vespers by John Banville
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Venetian Vespers here

“Maps out a territory halfway between Banville’s supreme fictions and his more forthright entertainments … An intricate thriller that is also a slyly fashioned work of art; a pastiche that is also indisputably the real thing. John Banville, up to his old tricks.”

–Kevin Power (The Irish Times)

3. Near Flesh: Stories by Katherine Dunn
(MCD)

3 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“The collection is a welcome reminder that literature can be not only a showcase for polished, refined sentiment but also an arena in which both reader and writer grapple—with imminent challenges, with their own psyches, with the uncertainty of survival … Dunn’s pieces have an almost irrepressible kinetic energy.”

–Alexandra Kleeman (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction

1. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade
(Scribner)

9 Rave • 3 Positive • 3 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife here

“The structure…allows its readers to understand something that usually goes unmentioned in literary biographies. A writer is not merely the sum total of known events that occurred to her between birth and death, she is also the network of readers created by her work during that period and afterward … When Wade is confronted by writing she doesn’t understand, curiosity rather than resentment wins the day … The superiority of Wade’s approach can be measured by the insights into Stein’s work that she gleans from it … Thoughtful and thorough, with insightful interpretations of her work embedded in a compelling narrative of her and Toklas’s life, Wade’s biography makes a convincing case that, while her status as a cultural figure is secure, her writing remains, if anything, underrated.”

–Ryan Ruby (Bookforum)

2. 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands
(Knopf)

7 Rave
Read an excerpt from 38 Londres Street here

“Remarkable … It is the relentless pursuit of this hidden and repulsive past that gives 38 Londres Street its startling originality, turning it into a tour de force that extends its reach far beyond what we typically envisage from a book about human rights.”

–Ariel Dorfman (New York Review of Books)

3. Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy
(Penguin)

4 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Paper Girl here

“Both wide-ranging and strikingly intimate, Paper Girl is an affirmation of faith in humanity, and Macy lights the way ahead, even as the darkness stretched before us threatens to swallow our conviction.”

–Vanessa Willoughby (BookPage)