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

Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Todd S. Purdum’s Desi Arnaz, and Melissa Febos’ The Dry Season 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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Fiction

1. Flashlight by Susan Choi
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

6 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Susan Choi here

“Prickly, gorgeous … There are no moments of total illumination here, just a beam shining briefly on a target before scanning restlessly onward … One thing that hasn’t changed is what an outlandishly talented writer Choi is, her prose possessing an iron confidence in its own beauty. She favors complex, lightly punctuated sentences whose payoff comes late … Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking—about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.”

–Sam Worley (Vulture)

2. Endling by Maria Reva
(Doubleday)

8 Rave

“Remarkable … In another author’s hands, these departures might be experienced as digressions, draining suspense and power from the story, but Reva they alchemizes them into something between imagination and reality, an original way to investigate the artifice of the novel—its limitations but also its expansiveness … Reva places her metaphorical arms around all of it—with the intention of using language to express the inexpressible: senseless violence, loneliness, extreme suffering and grief … Wildly inventive.”

–S. Kirk Walsh (The Washington Post)

3. The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater
(Viking)

4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an essay by Maggie Stiefvater here

“tiefvater has brought her magical prose with her to her first adult novel … Humanizing and detail-oriented, The Listenersis a story about both people management and self-regulation … It was well-researched and tactful, handling dark issues with sensitivity and embedding colorful detail onto each page.”

–Rachel S. Hunt (Associated Press)

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Nonfiction

1. Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television by Todd S. Purdum
(Simon & Schuster)

5 Rave • 1 Positive

“Purdum’s deeply researched, insightful and enjoyable biography, gives Arnaz his due as an entertainer and a savvy businessman … With sympathy but open eyes Purdum chronicles Arnaz’s descent into alcoholism, which sapped his creative energy and the goodwill he had established over the years.”

–Douglass K. Daniel (Associated Press)

2. How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast
(Viking)

4 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an essay by How to Lose Your Mother here

“Jong-Fast…examines this ‘annus horribilis’ with exacting detail, unflinching honesty and raw emotion, managing to leaven the pain with self-deprecating humor and a mighty reservoir of love. Her prose is direct, simple and filled with bits of wisdom, asides to the reader, all of which creates an experience of intimacy with an adored friend … A midlife coming-of-age story in the extreme. Jong-Fast has put to words the tumult of the worst year of her life, captured and harnessed the experience so that the rest of us can know that we are not alone. She’s Job with a sense of humor.”

–Martha McPhee (The Washington Post)

3. The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 1 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Melissa Febos here

“Febos’s great power as a writer is pairing structural rigor with emotional disclosure … Febos has venerated literary ancestors while scrutinizing her own choices. Some might deride attention to personal experience and sexual pleasure while our democracy disintegrates around us, but sex and love are energies that turn us toward each other in an era whose ravages are designed to create lasting isolation.”

–Kristen Millares Young (The Washington Post)