Rico's Reviews

A long-time Santa Cruz resident and the author of The Cactus Eaters, White dazzles with this funny and very engaging history of camping in America. From 19th-century woodcraft to backpacking to family tent camping to “glamping” (glamour camping, where your every outdoor need is met—for a price), he covers it all. The chapter in which he rents an RV and tries to drive his family across the backroads of Arizona is worth the price of admission alone.  —Rico

In this debut collection of stories, Majka shows herself to be a smart and unique new voice in American fiction. Eschewing many of the standard short-story tropes, she moves effortlessly through the life of her main character, a young woman trying to recover her equilibrium following a divorce. With subtlety and grace, Majka connects seemingly small epiphanies to create moments of profound insight and beauty.  —Rico

One of the most highly praised and anticipated story collections of recent memory, Night at the Fiestas is set in northern New Mexico and follows hardscrabble lives haunted by loss and enlivened by dreams of a better future. Quade’s writing is lushly detailed, her characters lovingly drawn, and her stories achieve astonishing emotional power. By turns tragic and very funny, this is a terrific debut.  —Rico

The story of a female graduate student in Anthropology who goes to Africa to study a utopian society set up by a charismatic and idealistic outsider, this is one of my favorite books period and definitely one of my favorite books about Africa. Rush’s writing is gorgeous and erudite, and he has deep compassion for his vast panoply of carefully drawn characters.   --Rico

As a winner of the Nobel Prize, Marquez probably doesn’t need further recommending from the likes of me. But I do want to put in a plug for this, my favorite of all of his books. Though set in a single day, and barely a 100 pages, it nonetheless tells the story of an entire town, indeed an entire culture. Taut, gorgeous, heartbreaking, it’s one of his great artistic achievements.  --Rico

Set in Nigeria in the mid-1990s, this terrific debut tells the story of four brothers whose fortunes change for the worse when their father takes a job in a faraway city. The plot feels as solid and classic as something out of the Old Testament--an African version of Cain-and-Abel--and the writing is unique, creating tension in oblique and unexpected ways. I found this a profound and moving reading experience.

If there was still any doubt that Jonathan Franzen is the best living American novelist, this book crushes it. In addition to the wide array of great characters, unsurpassed erudition, and astounding prose that we've come to expect from him, Purity offers a globe-spanning plot. I laughed, I squirmed, and I gasped, but mostly I stayed up into the wee hours greedily turning pages.

Set in a dismal, semi-rural town in the west of Ireland where jobs are few but boredom and idiotic drunken violence are plentiful, this brilliant collection of stories reads like the love child of Dubliners and the first Arctic Monkeys album. Barrett's protagonists are young, male and lost, with dim prospects. He explores their physical and emotional terrain with precise, slightly arch prose filled with spot-on descriptions and fresh turns of phrase. A single collection might be too small a sample size to add Barrett's name to the list of great Irish short-story writers, but Young Skins is one hell of a strong opening argument.

Between glowing reviews everywhere and multiple articles in The New Yorker and virtually every European newspaper speculating about her true identity (she writes under a pen name and does zero publicity), the last twelve months have been Ferrante’s year—deservedly so. This, the fourth and final book in her excellent Neapolitan series, completes the saga of bookish Elena and strong-willed Lila, childhood friends who’ve spent their lives navigating friendship, womanhood, and family in the violent world of working-class Naples, Italy.

One of the greatest literary stylists of our time, the Man Booker Prize–winning John Banville has written a dark masterpiece about art and greed. His narrator, Oliver Ormy, a successful painter who also enjoys stealing things, suddenly finds himself caught out, both as a thief and as a human being. Fleeing everything he knows and loves in life, he hides himself away and tries to discover the cause (and possibly a cure) for the sickness of his soul.  —Rico