John

one million stars.

it's redundant to give five stars to a collection of award winners but read these.

[asterisk: much funnier w general Old Testament familiarity]

maybe less fun if you haven't read bone clocks but I think it would probably stand alone

5* esp if you love George Saunders stories

very very funny

skippable except maybe chapter 2.

that crafty nixon.

I guess I'm in a cult now.

Interesting, but slow. I definitely wouldn't have picked it up if I wasn't fascinated with the Manhattan waterfront to start with, and the memoir-y parts don't interest me at all.

This collection is good for completists but I could have lived with just “Entropy” and “The Secret Integration” (but I did love “Entropy”). Also pretty sure “Under The Rose” is almost entirely contained in “V”.

Looks nice on a shelf & fun to pick up and read one or two entries, but I'm not sure how accurate some of the anecdotes were.

all right.

2.75 average? I loved this story! I thought Jonathan Lethem wrote with an impressive grasp of independent alternative rock and (some overlap) the more pretentious niches of conceptual art. I also like that the protagonists occasionally made themselves difficult to like and that some of the initially repellent characters wound up sympathetic and near-endearing. Read this!

I feel like everything gets four stars lately - but I haven't read a short story anthology as gripping as this one in a while. It took the easiest routes to my heart: crime, variety, and a New Jersey backdrop.

I made the mistake of opening this book on a Friday evening while waiting for someone else to get out of work. I was two hours late and left the party early to go home and finish it. Very funny but never glib.

Try to read it quickly since everyone has the same name. This isn't too difficult since it's a very good book.

The story is short but dense (in the best possible way). Distressing how well Magdalena Tulli writes. Read with a pen in hand.

It's a little frustrating not knowing who to root for (I think the right answer is no one) but similar to The Sound and the Fury, there were scenes that evoked painfully realistic desperation and hopelessness and characters who I wanted to reach into the pages and throttle. I've only read this, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, and I would place this one somewhere in the middle in terms of quality.

Excellent except that the ending underwhelmed me. It's possible that there was something to get that I just missed, but it seemed like he had hit some sort of predefined page limit and was like “Well, time to wrap it up.”

I'm not a morning person and I found myself getting up every day at 6 am - in the middle of December - so that I could read as much of this book as possible before leaving for work at 8. I can't recommend this book highly enough. I'm trying to figure out who specifically I would recommend it for and I'm pretty sure that the only people I wouldn't recommend it to are the kinds of people who never enjoy fiction in any form and even they might find something to love here.