“Richly imagined, reflexively neurotic and frequently quite dazzling.” — New York Times Book Review
“Row’s magisterial latest (after the essay collection White Flights) traces the complex dynamics of a New York City family on a geopolitical scale. . . . Moments of levity draw the reader in . . . and the author pulls off many moving metafictional moments. . . . This is Row’s best work yet.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Stupendously good…. Like Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), this is a family saga with a global perspective, sweeping across borders and time, from Israel to Chiapas to the northeastern U.S., from the utopian communes of the 1970s to the present, and exploring the impending climate disaster, colonialism, race, identity, and wealth, along with some metafictional musing. Each character’s story is a fascinating portal into contemporary life, adding up to a deeply moving, wonderfully engaging, and truly remarkable novel of the times.” — Booklist
“Jess Row interrogated American whiteness with great creative power in Your Face in Mine and White Flights. The New Earth extends his thinking on historical amnesia and erasure, race and family, in extraordinary ways.”
— Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
"Riveting and brilliant, The New Earth throws down a gauntlet around Jewishness, diaspora, and the historical production of whiteness in America with such tremendous force that the novel feels epochal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the American literary landscape will be quite the same after the effects of this work are felt. A novel at once sprawling and deeply intimate, I had to stop reading many times simply to marvel at Row’s creation of this family and the book that holds them." — Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“[A] deeply ambitious, genre-defying work, which hops back and forth in time, shifts between various points of view, and incorporates a massive amount of politics and theory on race, Zen Buddhism, climate change, the history of Israel and Palestine, and, among other things, the novel itself as a literary form.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A rich, rollicking novel about a dysfunctional Jewish clan from the Upper West Side and the 2003 West Bank tragedy that derailed them. . . Row] gracefully balances multiple registers to craft a reader’s delight. . . . Row retains a deep affection for his cast, arguably more than they deserve. He breathes wondrous life into them. Their neuroses — so many neuroses — click into place. Each character’s thoughts scamper like mice through mazes, a science experiment gone wrong, and yet the data they yield bolsters a tale that’s both experimental and Balzacian, lighthearted and dead serious." — Washington Post