RaveThe Washington PostKiesling leaves readers with a troubling awareness of the role we play in our ecological future, and a bleak sense that the new normal is like the old one: simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming ... In Kiesling’s rendering of humanity and our planet, life simply goes on.
Annie Ernaux, trans. Alison L. Strayer
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksLook at the Lights records the mundane routines and behavior that are to be expected in the superstore environment ... Ernaux’s diary is meticulous and spontaneous at once, a collection of details crucial and not. It is also a work in progress, developing in real time ... She is deeply invested in recording the \'present,\' because this is how she can \'distinguish objects, individuals, and mechanisms, and to give their existence value\'—to write, not just see. But this present is already becoming past.
Jenny Uglow
RaveBookforumUglow is attentive to the tensions of Andrews and Power’s curious partnership. She animates their twenty years together through contrasts: courage and caution, nostalgia and newness, London and the countryside ... Uglow’s account itself is diligently chronological and thorough. For a book about artists who insisted on stripping away \'unnecessary\' details, it makes a resolutely contrary case for minding them ... In lingering with Andrews and Power after what seem to have been the most remarkable and terrifying years of their lives, Uglow insists on how the aftermath can make us see the inflection point differently. Like the linocut artists, she is trying to catch a larger sense of movement.
Marguerite Duras, trans. by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe narrator of any story is necessarily a stranger, observing things (or nothings) from the outside. But a narrator needs to be in the story as well, or at least alive in their own world. Francine’s state of aliveness tests the literary boundaries of this disengagement. She is limp and mute ... Classic Duras: the quiet pitilessness ... It is this instability — the intersection of irrepressible desire with intense economic and social constraints, the image of oneself \'at once fraternal and full of hatred,\' the urge to both materialize and to \'disappear, abduct myself,\' a Francine-shaped dress in her wake — that makes Duras’s fiction burn with life.
Kristen Radtke
RaveThe AtlanticThe book combines documentary, memoir, reporting, and stunning art: low, dark colors with the occasional neon, making the reader feel like she’s floating on a reflective surface, a reflection with no original...Through vivid images of people fumbling with house keys late at night, falling asleep on the subway, leaving a liquor store, Radtke shows how recognizable and universal loneliness is—but also how easy it is to remove ourselves from others’ loneliness, to turn theirs into an experience incompatible with our own ... This type of generous reading of other people and their loneliness is what Radtke’s book seems to call for—a willingness to read loneliness where we might otherwise see monstrosity, to read love where we see loneliness. Widespread loneliness is not a problem just for the chronically lonely; it says something ugly and true about all of us. Reading Seek You forced me to rethink my own various brief interactions that left a lonely person feeling lonelier.
Maggie Doherty
PositiveThe Rumpus... a useful reminder that good behavior is usually more interesting than it’s given credit for, and less appreciated than it ought to be ... If The Equivalents is to be read prescriptively, its most important takeaway might be a sense of empathy with these women, and all of the women, in any place or moment in history, who every now and then manages to squirm out from under the gaze of a man and find the day’s freedom and happiness not by loudly proclaiming her intentions but simply by eating her vegetables and reading a book.
