This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him. He does not dispense two-dollar words he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. It’s a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. Rave The New York Times The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. Moore stretches for deeper themes in this novel, and of course they’re there: It’s a book about loss, and about the patience and endurance it takes to treat the dying with respect, and about the shaggy and multiform varieties of love. It’s as if you are a child again, and someone has stolen your hot dog. Then a different story comes along to replace it. There’s a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s recent cosmic-circus high jinks. In terms of Moore’s own high standards, it’s a C at best. In terms of the other fiction published so far this year, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home is an easy A. But when her books don’t work, they can seem especially futile. So many of them you want to frame and hang. Moore is a consummate user of the English language her moisture-wicking sentences confirm and reconfirm your sanity. I did sometimes think about how I’d rank it. Mixed The New York Times Fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent. Everything is desperate, to paraphrase the old Adam Ant song, but somehow not serious. Your eyeballs begin to glaze over, as if they were ceramic plates. There are conversions and renunciations of conversions. There are prophecies and rising souls and forbidden loves every tear is bitterly wept. Khalifa buries his story under a late-Rushdie-like muchness, with embellishment upon embellishment. Khalifa’s too often flop between stereotypes - saints or sinners, lovers or fighters. But Faulkner’s characters feel more real than those in No One Prayed Over Their Graves. The intricacies of Khalifa’s plotting, and his occasional vagueness, have led critics to compare him to Faulkner. This narrative shifts back and forth in time. But Khalifa goes to great lengths to frustrate his readers. Nadine Gordimer said in her Paris Review interview that she didn’t mind being puzzled when reading a novel. This is a secular novel about religious madness. A tension between faith and reason plays out in each of these stories. Few living writers pay as much attention to smell as Khalifa does. Pan The New York Times The sensuality of his fiction is frequently related to olfaction.
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