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

Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism, and Jayne Anne Phillips Small Town Girls 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. Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh
(Avid Reader Press)

5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“[Mackintosh’s] terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.”
–Katie Kitamura (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
(Flatiron)

5 Rave 

“Gonzalez once again artfully delivers insightful, nuanced commentary of place, race, and class in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.”
–Israt Abedin (Library Journal)

3. No Way Home by T. C. Boyle
(Liveright)

1 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“I love the pulpy way this novel keeps ratcheting up the violence, the cringe-inducing humiliations, the face-planting missteps!”
–Ron Charles (Ron Charles Substack)

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Nonfiction

1. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff
(Harper)

6 Rave • 5 Positive • 3 Mixed

“A well-researched account of how we have arrived at a point where so many resources are concentrated in the hands of just one man, and how this fact alone will inevitably shape the future.”
–Christopher Webb (The Guardian)

2. Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips
(Knopf)

8 Rave

“Phillips brings to this memoir the kind of resonant details and sharp insights that have enriched her fiction.”
–Heller McAlpin (Christian Science Monitor)

3. If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn
(Knopf)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Hahn provides a series of illuminating glimpses into the problem-solving that is integral to the craft, while exulting in Shakespeare’s capacity to resonate.”
–Henry Hitchings (The Wall Street Journal)