RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"The novel is filled with wickedly sharp commentary and well-aimed digs at hypocrisy and injustice...but Isabel Waidner never lets the characters become simple devices ... Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is, perhaps surprisingly, both sentimental and optimistic in its depiction of love (for ourselves and those around us) as a radical act.\
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Dorthe Nors writes short fiction that is precise, brief and shattering ... Lyrical stream-of- consciousness prose is intercut with short, blunt sentences, enacting the push and pull of revelation between her protagonists and their environment. Misha Hoekstra’s translation delicately renders Nors’s intensity, along with her subtlety, by sticking to a straightforward and intentionally repetitive vocabulary. The almost standardized formula of Nors’s short fiction, more rigid here than in previous collections, can be frustrating, as we quickly begin to anticipate capricious plots and untrustworthy narrators. This is not, however, always to the detriment of Wild Swims . The twists here are often not conclusions but opportunities to look at matters slantwise; meanwhile, our expectations of narrative instability encourage close reading, and Nors frequently leaves statements open. In the absence of satisfying conclusions, such lines can be reinterpreted on each new reading, presenting wildly different possibilities.
Meena Kandasamy
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)[Kandasamy\'s] polemical voice is present on almost every page, providing commentary on her research for this book, and its messy personal and political intersections, in the margins by the text. There’s an inherent challenge here for us to let the main narrative stand without necessitating either a separation from, or conflation with, Kandasamy, as a person, artist and activist: \'did I manage to evade my activism by living abroad and staying in the margins?\', she asks, tongue firmly in cheek ... Kandasamy’s activism does not stay in the margins, of her life or her art; she recalls, in her own voice, friends and fellow activists being arrested for their opposition to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi; and being asked to speak \'as a feminist\' on women’s prisons in India.
Julia Armfield
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Social and cultural anxieties, often drawn from psychoanalysis – such as the figure of the sexually predatory adolescent female as threateningly feral, requiring \'mummification … a guard against temptation\'; or fears surrounding reproduction and evolution in a world riven by climate catastrophe –are given physical form ... Physical transformation and strange textures also imbue Armfield’s prose ... Armfield’s techniques are on the whole effective (at times chilling, often carnivalesque, regularly funny), and bring to mind those used by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber or Samantha Hunt’s dripping prose in The Dark Dark. ... [questions] whether we can adapt as a species to survive, or whether we will be mutated by our environment, culture, or technology into something altogether different.
