Olga Ravn, trans. by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
RaveBrooklyn RailOf course Ravn’s book is anything but normal, though it is an ambitious one ... Displays...power ... Ravn has created a truly unique project which is not so much a story as it is an accumulation.
Sam Pink
RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksGarbage Times basically picks up where his last book left off ... It’s a very good, solid novella ... But The Garbage Times are followed, almost giddily, by the up-and-away of White Ibis. And in this book, Pink has done something so new, so different, that I’m struck by what a stroke of genius it was to put the Chicago book right up against it for contrast. Up against his cramped vision of Chicago, the Florida book is so expansive, so wild and lovely, so full of normal-ish people and exotic animals and the oddest thing of all in a Sam Pink book—a fleeting inner calm that almost borders on happiness ... There’s not that much to celebrate in the human world, and yet that’s precisely why White Ibis is so powerful and so full of hope. It’s small relationships, animals, the odd details – those are the things that have always saved Pink’s narrators from total ruin in his previous works.
