TV & Radio
Seth Meyers – Part One
Reviews
The New Yorker “Fast-paced and unflinching…Yapa vividly evokes rage and compassion. Underlying the novel, and at once reinforced and rejected, is the chief’s mantra: “Care too much and the world will kill you cold.”
The Seattle Times “Yapa’s melding of fact and fiction, human frailty and geopolitics, is a genuine tour-de-force.”
The Chicago Tribune “In this beautifully written, kaleidoscopically shifting novel….Yapa penetrates to the human connections and disconnections at play between the lines of history in the era of the global village.”
The Washington Post “The new year explodes with a fantastic debut novel…What is so enthralling about this novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps around these participants — some peaceful, some violent, some determined, some incredulous. “Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist” ultimately does for the WTO protests what Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night” did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it meant.”
Time Magazine “Sunil Yapa has chosen to set his tale of social change not on the streets of Ferguson or in the squares of Cairo but a less recent site of unrest: the 1999 World Trade Organization Meetings in Seattle….but there are echoes of current strife in the lead characters, Bishop, an overwhelmed white police chief, and Victor, his adopted black son…”
Denver Post “An expressive collage of experiences…a much-needed and refreshing pivot point.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Sunil Yapa’s voice and ambition leap off the page. Here is a writer to watch.”
The Rumpus “The harmony of discord, of empathy and opposition, makes this book sing.”
The Dallas Morning News “Sensitive and urgent…there are many reasons to love this book. Yapa finesses the tricky work of alternately conveying panoramic crowd views and focusing on individuals that reminded me of Don DeLillo’s technique. The key difference is that in DeLillo’s fiction, crowds are often cold entities, and in Yapa’s world they are warm, the sum of thousands of beating hearts.”
Citations for “Most Anticipated Books of the Year” in Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Ploughshares, Bustle, TheMillions, BuzzFeed, The Oregonian, The San Diego Union-Tribune, River City Reading, Indigo
Amazon Book of the Month
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Indies Introduce Pick
Top 25 Books of January Apple iBook
The Toronto Star “Those who came of age politically in the 1990s when anti-globalization slogans and lumberjack shirts were all the rage need generation-defining books and Sunil Yapa’s debut novel should be among them.”
The National Post “it is the province of novelists to imagine, to divert from reality in order to open some other window on the experience of living a life; Yapa’s novel is a startling and perceptive depiction of life during wartime.”
The Miami Herald “Ultimately explores the myriad ways we react to searing emotional pain.”
The Wall Street Journal “Editorial director Lee Boudreaux picked this debut novel to launch her first imprint at Little, Brown and Co. “I just got so blown away by the voice,” she said.”
Book Page “This much buzzed-about book establishes Yapa as a first-rate literary talent.”
Bustle “The energy and humanity of Sunil Yapa’s debut will grab you, wrap you in and won’t let go — and that’s just the start of why you’re going to love this.”
Publishers Weekly “Chilling…a memorable pulse-pounding experience”
Library Journal (starred review) “Yapa’s writing is visceral and unsparing. Noteworthy, capital-I Important and a ripping read, his novel will be on many “best” lists in 2016.”
“Violence spins at the heart of a story that unfolds on a November day…seven narratives twist and converge as tumult and misrule reign in the streets…As the title promises, your heart will flex and surge as you read Yapa’s voltaic debut.”—Ploughshares (“Most Anticipated Books of 2016”)
Yapa shines in the thickness of here-and-now, amid the gas, fear, courage and flawed humanity of the street battle, in passages that are enigmatic and even moving… the novel reveals… a deeper, quieter knowledge of ‘the whole ugly beautiful thing’ that’s the world.”—The New York Times Book Review
