What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Featuring Kristen Arnett, McCarthyism, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and More
Kristen Arnett’s Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, Clay Risen’s Red Scare, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft all 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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1. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
(Riverhead)
6 Rave • 5 Positive
Read an excerpt from Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One here
“Wild, luxurious and absurd is also a killer (clown) description of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, a novel in which Arnett’s craft and her comedy are on full and feral display.”
–Annie Berke (The Washington Post)
2. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
(Riverhead)
7 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“There’s something almost disorienting about Gurnah’s narrative as he moves from one person to the next, willfully thwarting our desire to settle on a protagonist … Delicate … Karim develops into a dashing, volcanic, morally compromised character who catches the eye. But Gurnah’s heart—and ours—lies elsewhere in this novel. Writing a story around a young man as subtle and apparently insignificant as Badar is a kind of argument about the value of true character.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, trans. by Sophie Hughes
(New York Review of Books)
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Latronico’s conceit is clever and will delight anyone familiar with his source material, but his execution is ingenious … His novel’s agility in English owes much to its talented translator, Sophie Hughes … His novel is greater than the sum of its cunning substitution of signifiers.”
–Alice Gregory (The New Yorker)
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1. Firstborn by Lauren Christensen
(Penguin Press)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Radiant, rigorous, heart-rending … It is a testament to Christensen’s storytelling talent that the book’s sense of suspense is nonetheless acute … I will never forget Simone or the lodestar that is Firstborn.”
–Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)
2. Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen
(Scribner)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Thorough, impassioned but even-handed … For 480 detailed, tension-packed pages, Risen lays out that line without stepping over it, allowing the past to become prologue … A tapestry of individual dramas and miniature paranoid thrillers.”
–Chris Vognar (The Los Angeles Times)
3. The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer
(Simon & Schuster)
4 Rave
“Engaging … Another pleasure afforded by the book is watching decipherers at work … An engrossing reminder that some of the most exhilarating adventures of all can be had by puzzle-solvers.”
–Dennis Drabelle (The Washington Post)
