What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Featuring Mark Twain, Ocean Vuong, Malcolm X, and More
Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain, Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness, and Mark Whitaker’s The Afterlife of Malcolm X 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. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
(Penguin)
10 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Magnificent and melancholy … Its opening pages are as melodic as a symphony … This is a novel that percolates and simmers, provoking questions about the reader’s privilege while prompting awe at the writer’s singular empathy—and his subjects’ humility.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Sleep by Honor Jones
(Riverhead)
5 Rave • 2 Mixed
“A masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone … This is a woman—and a novel—determined to avoid confrontation and drama, and it’s surprising just how hypnotic that is to witness in Jones’s carefully calibrated telling … Margaret’s plight may feel tragic, but it’s transformed by sheer force of will—and Jones’s tempered prose—into something heroic, even hopeful.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
3. The Boy From the Sea by Garrett Carr
(Knopf)
5 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Carr’s beautiful and beguiling debut offers many delights. The characters live and breathe on the page. Masterful depictions of hardscrabble existences on land and perilous escapades at sea are offset with moments of wry humor … A novel that will bewitch many readers.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Star Tribune)
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1. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
(Penguin)
13 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Chernow here documents Twain’s failings, as well as his triumphs, in exhaustive fashion … More than simply a book about America’s seminal writer, this is a long and winding story about the quintessential American—clothes and buttons, mind and heart, warts and all.”
–Kevin Duchschere (The Star Tribune)
2. Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
(W.W. Norton & Company)
5 Rave • 3 Positive
“Drawing as it does on both of these discoveries, Sue Prideaux’s new biography has real bite … The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin ‘smashed the established Western canon’ … Gauguin’s artistic and sexual primitivism was, as Prideaux’s edgy and engrossing book shows, always both radical and deeply traditional.”
–Elizabeth Lowry (Times Literary Supplement)
3. The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America by Mark Whitaker
(Simon & Schuster)
6 Rave
“Luminous, nuanced … Whitaker’s book kicks off with a spellbinding account of the lead-up to Malcolm’s assassination … A sumptuous, essential book that draws us to the real man while acknowledging him as somehow unknowable, an American sphinx.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Star Tribune)
