There’s a spirited, insightful, and generous review of Overthrow in the Boston Globe by Anthony Domestico this weekend, and I feel very honored and grateful. It’s uncanny to see something one wrote reflected back through a sympathetic critic’s understanding, and it’s sort of only now that I’m realizing how “fantastical,” as Domestico puts it, the novel is.
Category: reviews
NYTBR on “Overthrow”
Julian Lucas has written a very thoughtful and generous review of my new novel Overthrow, published this morning in the online version of the New York Times Book Review:
What follows is, essentially, a 19th-century social novel for the 21st-century surveillance state. Frequently alluding to Henry James’s “The Princess Casamassima,” another story of young radicals, Crain subjects his characters to quandaries that test their precariously entwined identities. The novel almost dares readers to object to its inwardness — “It’s like there’s a new sumptuary law against introspection,” one of the four complains — but its tender, psychologically precise prose feels like a bulwark against the exposure it takes for a subject.
It didn’t use to get better
I reviewed James Polchin’s Indecent Advances, a history of antigay violence and the homosexual-panic defense, for the New Yorker website.
Ives’s “Loudermilk”
I wrote a review of Lucy Ives’s novel Loudermilk for the 9 June 2019 issue of the New York Times Book Review.
Chiang’s “Exhalation”
I reviewed Exhalation, a new collection of sci-fi short stories by Ted Chiang, for the 27 June 2019 issue of the New York Review of Books (subscription required).