Andrew Martin's reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review,The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, VICE, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Early Work, was published in 2018. He lives in New York with his partner Laura and their dog, Bonnie.
Banal Nightmare (2024) Halle Butler "Banal Nightmare is a blistering assault on contemporary pieties about art and love, an epic Woolfian tapestry of perfect comic rants, terrifying panic attacks, and, most gratifying of all, sincere attempts at human connection. This is the best, most ambitious book yet by one of my favorite writers."
The Vegan (2023) Andrew Lipstein "In his engrossing new novel, Andrew Lipstein has produced a feverish, fantastically surprising parable about guilt, money, and (curveball) the lives of animals. It reads like the unholy offspring of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Julio Cortazar's cosmic short fiction, or Crime and Punishment for the Brooklyn brownstone set. I tore through it."
Hope (2023) Andrew Ridker "In Hope, Andrew Ridker reinvigorates the family novel with wit and grace. Roaming fluidly across a broad canvas, Ridker finds the humanity in each of his characters, even (especially!) at their most exasperating and self-destructive. It was such a pleasure to spend time with a book of such warmth and intelligence."
Flight (2022) Lynn Steger Strong "In her brilliant new novel, Lynn Steger Strong reaches astonishing new depths of moral complexity in her depiction of family life in the aftermath of loss. Gripping, tender, and very funny, Flight proves once again that she is one of the great chroniclers of our strange and perilous times."
The Midcoast (2022) Adam White "The Midcoast is a brilliant, ferocious debut novel about ambition, class, and crime in coastal Maine, simultaneously propulsive and nuanced. Adam White brings his powerful gifts to bear on a story that speaks directly to our troubled moment with eloquence and heart. After this, Vacationland will never look the same."
The Bachelor (2021) Andrew Palmer "Andrew Palmer's debut is a fantastically original chronicle of romantic mishap and artistic ambition. In its counterintuitive pairing of reality TV and confessional poetry, this book asks sneakily profound questions about the underlying structures of desire that dictate our lives. I loved it."
The Scapegoat (2021) Sara Davis "The Scapegoat is a brilliant, mysterious book that challenges every tired idea of what a novel should be. Fast, funny, and deeply disturbing, it reads as though it's been beamed in from some alternate universe, one where the rules of time and space operate just differently enough to create an entirely new kind of storytelling. Sara Davis is some kind of sorcerer. I'll be haunted by this book for a long time to come."
Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac "Pola Oloixarac's Mona is, simultaneously, a hilarious satire of literary pretensions, a sincere exploration of a damaged psyche, and a brilliantly unnerving new chapter in this writer's inimitable body of work. It reads as though Rachel Cusk's Outline Trilogy was thrown in a blender with Roberto Bolaño's 2666, and then lightly seasoned with the bitter flavor of Horacio Castellanos Moya. In other words: Oloixarac is one of my new favorite writers."
The Life of the Mind (2021) Christine Smallwood "Christine Smallwood's debut novel is that rare thing: an intellectual page-turner that commands one's attention completely from the first sentence to the final line. In painfully funny prose, Smallwood's X-ray gaze seeks out the rich seams of anxiety and loneliness running just below the surface of our culture's exhausting performative enthusiasm, taking in everything from the complex social politics of karaoke to the head-spinning paradoxes of an academic conference in Las Vegas. A worthy heir to contemporary classics like Paula Fox's Desperate Characters and Gary Indiana's Horse Crazy, The Life of the Mind is urgent, essential reading for our troubling times."
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020) Christopher Beha "Ranging effortlessly from baseball statistics to insider trading, and from street-corner prophecy to Romantic Poetry, Beha finds the nuance and humanity in every subject he takes up. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is that increasingly rare thing: a big, ambitious novel that boldly explores contemporary life in all of its complexities and contradictions."
Last Summer in the City (1970) Gianfranco Calligarich "Charming, decadent, and emotionally ruthless, Last Summer in the City is equal parts Fitzgerald and Antonioni, burrowing deep into the kind of unhappiness that can only be soothed by afternoon movies and very strong cocktails. It's wonderful to have this devastating gem at large in the world again."
