MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleCohen has taken an interesting risk in Moving Kings. With its pivoting point of view, the book lacks anything in the way of a singular protagonist. David, Yoav, Uri and Imamu all seem to share equal billing, raising the question of whose story is being told. And though the novelty of the approach is exciting, the end result misses the mark. Cohen’s close third-person prose is textured and authoritative (if a touch patronizing at times), and it provides a unifying force for all its moving parts. But there’s a regrettable diffusion of energy at the denouement — energy Cohen has meticulously accumulated — with some of the primary characters either absent at the moment of crisis or obscured and witnessed from a distance ... Moving Kings gets close to troubling issues but has too much restless energy driving it to stay put and hold focus when it really needs to.
Édouard Louis, Trans. by Michael Lucey
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle\"The book, a slender thing but no more slender than it needs to be, sets off at a brisk gallop and never lets up ... Louis’ tone throughout is as measured as a coroner’s in depicting the ways that the villagers of Picardy boast of being independent and untamable while tethering themselves to the dismal perpetuation of racist attitudes and destructive ignorance ... Everywhere there’s tension between a \'simple\' pastoral surface and the crushing conformist mentality hiding behind it. Breugel’s ironic, enigmatic landscapes, dating from the 1500s, capture this tension and can still make one shudder with familiarity. The End of Eddy has a similar, haunting power.\
Darryl Pinckney
MixedThe San Francisco ReviewAs a protagonist, Jed is curiously frustrating. Pinckney endows him with a voice that’s knowing, wryly romantic, fresh with insights and bitingly funny. Yet he continually disempowers him and takes him through one debasement after another ... Pinckney is better than this, and his book is bafflingly jumbled. And yet, in the final chapter, with its quietly elegiac tone, Pinckney miraculously pulls Jed’s life into a kind of anamorphic perspective — and damn near redeems the whole thing. Black Deutschland is a mess. But it’s a fascinating mess, written by a crucial, one-of-a-kind writer.
