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

Saba Sams’s Gunk, Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition, and Terry Tempest Williams’s The Glorians all number 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. Gunk by Saba Sams
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 3 Positive

“Gunk is an elusive, idiosyncratic book that I would not want to have been written any differently. It deals in relationships that literary conventions were not built to hold.”
–Naoise Dolan (The Irish Times)

2. Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth
(Verso)

6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A powerful sliver of a book—it really doesn’t have enough pages to contain as much life as it does. It transcends the trauma plot by, counterintuitively, immersing us completely in the past: not in one devastating event, but in the whole past, of moment after moment.”
–Honor Jones (The Atlantic)

3. Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg
(One World)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Exultantly brazen, a zinger of a novel: equal parts reckoning and memorial and pained, bitter laugh.”
–Megan Milks (4Columns)

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Nonfiction

1. The Glorians by Terry Tempest Williams
(Grove Press)

4 Rave • 2 Positive

“The language, the landscape, is that of apocalypse, and Williams does not look away. Her intention, rather, is to remind us that none of this is conditional or reversible … Nonetheless, and in spite of everything, Williams continues to look for grace.”
–David L. Ulin (Alta)

2. El Paso by Jazmine Ulloa
(Dutton)

5 Rave

“Ulloa is a terrific storyteller, and as she explores her hometown, she breathes life into dusty names from its past … An important contribution to understanding a fascinating, complicated, vibrant, richly diverse city.”
–Paul Begala (The New York Times Book Review)

3. The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit
(Haymarket)

4 Rave • 1 Mixed

“Slim but powerful … Solnit writes with moral clarity and philosophical vigor, in a voice that jumps off the page and into the reader’s consciousness. Like so many great essayists, she has a gift for conveying rich ideas in language that aims for inclusivity.”
–Chris Vognar (The Boston Globe)