LitHub: Rebecca Rukeyser on Sleaze, Male Rot, and Writing a Horny Novel
Tony Tulathimutte talks to the author of The Seaplane on Final Approach
News & Interviews
The Gloss: The Best Books to Read This Month – at Home or Abroad
“A set of teenage girls wait out the summer in the wilds of Alaska in THE SEAPLANE ON FINAL APPROACH an impressive debut by German writer Rebecca Rukeyser.”
Review: The Irish Times
“Rukeyser’s assured, elegant prose brings colour and outline to the great outdoors … Her debut novel is part adventure story, party coming of age tale, about a woman on the cusp of adulthood, fully of inchoate longing. If moving a character to a foreign world in order to bring about a transformation is a time-word staple of fiction writers, Rukeyser takes that old trick and flies her reader off to a brave new world.”
Review: The Times
“A deftly juggled mix of mercilessly sharp character judgment and gentle compassion […] definitely one for readers who enjoy the sort of dive into dysfunction championed by Ottessa Moshfegh.”
Lit Hub: 35 Novels You Need to Read This Summer
“The Seaplane at Final Approach is, like all great coming-of-age stories, a perfect blend of deep, dark humor, sadness, and (of course), adolescent horniness. It’s also a love letter to the specific wildness of a place—“God’s own country,” as the proprietor of the Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge tells it. Whether the place belongs to God or something sleazier, in Rukeyser’s hands, its strange magic bewitched me.”
Thrillist: 27 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer
“If you never quite thought of Alaska as the center of all things lust-worthy and sexy, Rebecca Rukeyser’s debut will have you thinking otherwise.”
Apartment Therapy: If You’re Going to Read One Book In June, Make It This One
“Fans of the sensuous, droll obscenity of Melissa Broder’s “The Pisces,” exhilarating transgressiveness of Alissa Nutting’s “Tampa”, uncanny sense of unease in Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen,” and claustrophobic domesticity of Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women” will find a lot to love in Rebecca Rukeyser’s debut novel.”
Review: The Telegraph
“A 17-year-old flunks her exams and is sent to Alaska for punishment, in Rebecca Rukeyser’s disreputably funny debut novel.”
“The Seaplane On Final Approach is about how desire ruins everything […] When the end comes, it’s catastrophic, as well as lengthy, gruesome fun.”
TIME: 27 New Books You Need to Read This Summer
“Mira heads to remote Alaska to spend the summer working at a floundering wilderness lodge. While there, she obsesses over her step-cousin and watches as the lodge owners’ dysfunctional marriage implodes. The Seaplane on Final Approach is a snappy character study and a meditation on sleaziness.”
Review: Kirkus
“A strange, dreamlike coming-of-age story. . . The detached perspective through which we experience this unfolding narrative adds to its rarified, dreamy quality.”