Critics Picks Bundle: Four 2023 Titles Reviewers Raved About
This year critics hailed the books that weren’t afraid to plumb the darker impulses of human nature, whether murder, seduction, addiction, or infernal desire. Get all four critics picks (and a sharp tote bag) for just $60.
The Nenoquich
Henry Bean
“This debut, or better say rebut, is our first masterpiece this decade—and it was written in 1982 . . . Some readers will recognize the slant of the pen’s I from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) or J. M. G. Le Clezio’s The Interrogation (1963) . . . [A] ruthlessly brilliant novel . . . It is a gift—a literary phenomenon of the first order . . . Bean’s sentences approach the speed of light without any loss of iridescent precision.”
—Vincenzo Barney, Los Angeles Review of Books
The Devil's Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams
Mary Gaitskill
“Gaitskill is an era-defining talent, one of the best American fiction writers working today, and the book is a collage of fiction, autobiography, and fairy tale that seeks, through ‘ordered disorder,’ to approach a fundamental thing about making art—one that defines Gaitskill’s oeuvre . . . The method of her genius has always been radical truth-telling . . . Few people have written as well about broken, dystopian America, both urban and suburban . . . Ugly things are done to Gaitskill’s characters, and they do ugly things in return, all rendered in language that is continually fresh, startling, precise . . . The sum of Gaitskill’s work is the opposite of cruel. Her form of radical truth-telling recovers her characters’ shattered dignity. This mechanism—or mysticism, or alchemy—is the essence of art, and makes the best argument that we ought to place no limits on it.”
—Valerie Stivers, Compact Magazine
Lord Jim at Home
Dinah Brooke
Introduction by Ottessa Moshfegh
“[A] brilliant forgotten novelist . . . [a] superb book . . . a ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction, [it] was published to controversy in 1973 . . . Rich in grotesquerie, including several comically repulsive sex scenes, it has the unhinged realism of a fairground mirror . . . Lord Jim at Home is a masterpiece.”
—Claire Allfree, The Telegraph, Best Fiction of 2023
White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin
Michael W. Clune
With a New Foreword by the Author
“If you’ve ever wanted to know what an exceptional critical mind looks like on drugs, read White Out. This book is full of enduring insights about time, literature, and memory; it is also a hilarious and scandalous and frightening chronicle of full-blown heroin addiction (and graduate school!). This might be the best book about drugs since [Baudelaire’s] Les Paradis Artificiels.
—Ben Lerner, New Yorker, Best Books of the Year