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Caleb Crain has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, the Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, n 1, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of the novel Necessary Errors and the critical work American Sympathy. He was born in Texas, raised in Massachusetts, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Caleb Crain recommends
Calling Ukraine (2023)
Johannes Lichtman
"Lichtman's delightful, gripping novel offers screwball banter, a send-up of American start-up culture, an expat romance with a dark Hitchockian left turn, a hero who, despite chronically second-guessing himself, has a knack for saying the wrong thing, and the perception-enhancing defamiliarization that only happens when an innocent with fine antennae ventures abroad--in this case, to Ukraine, a country whose tensions are deftly shown by Lichtman to be crucial to our political moment."
Planes (2022)
Peter C Baker
"How do you come home from an atrocity? Peter C. Baker's absorbing, closely observed novel follows two couples, an ocean apart--one wounded by a war crime, the other just starting to reckon with being implicated in it--as they try to find a way to live in the aftermath. Baker's offbeat, suggestive strategy is to let the stories intertwine, so that subtle resonances emerge: variations on the themes of patience, misdirection, forgiveness, and exasperation that play in every marriage. Planes is an insightful book about the slow, zigzag work of healing that nonetheless moves at the speed of a thriller."
Cool for America (2020)
Andrew Martin
"Overeducated and undermined, the women and men in Andrew Martin's stories fortify themselves with beer, weed, intensely felt verdicts about music and literature, and messing around with people they probably shouldn't be messing around with. Martin's prose is as melancholy and ruthless as Raymond Carver's, and his wit is as dark and sharp as Mary Robison's or Donald Antrim's."
