RavePopMattersWhile reading Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, you are likely to make strange noises. Gasps of astonishment, anxious finger-tapping, laughter when seeing a super-specific moment from your past characterized in unvarnished terms ... Translator Megan McDowell’s ability to capture the novel’s Chilenismos beyond the usual linguistic chasms between English and Spanish is a remarkable achievement ... In Chilean Poet, Zambra strikes a perfect balance of self-aware yet sincere. He reaches the sublime through descriptions of everyday routine. He never takes himself too seriously while acknowledging the gravity of introducing a child to the world in all its glorious contradictions.
Antonio Muñoz Molina tr. Guillermo Bleichmar
PositivePopMatters... provides the reader with the far-reaching ruminations of a witty middle-aged man taking long walks through cities. His thoughts run beyond the point of overload and into the realm of being talked at while at a party filled with writers and want-to-be-writers. His intellect is never in question. It just tends to get annoying ... brings elements of modern life to the page that go ignored on a conscious level out of a fundamental need to filter the deluge of stimulus to remain sane ... Few writers would attempt this type of exploratory work and fewer would be able to pull it off. One of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary authors, Muñoz Molina makes it work more often than not–if you give him and his unnamed narrator an inordinate amount of patience. Most fiction is considerate of the reader, if for no other reason than an author’s well-founded fear of beta readers putting the book down and telling their family and friends to take home something else from the bookstore ... This is certainly not the case with To Walk Alone in the Crowd...The lackadaisical approach comes through loud and clear. A writing experiment is drawn up across several hundred pages and, presumably, miles of sidewalk ... The overstimulation is intentional; the moments of unadulterated beauty and clarity that shine through are all the more worth it as a result ... Does any of this sound appealing? Do you want to read something that only further reminds you about how exhausting the day-to-day tends to be during the early decades of the 21st century? Do you want to follow a smug man’s meandering thoughts, clever as they may be, as he meanders through Madrid and then New York City? ... If the answer is no, that is fully understandable. To Walk Alone in the Crowd is not for everyone, especially if literary life paths are not of interest. But those that decide to relinquish hours of their precious free time to this strange novel might find something worthwhile on the stroll.
Brenda Peynado
RavePopMattersIn the hand of a less deft writer, the collection could have become a joyless read within a few dozen pages. Peynado’s penchant for fantastical reimaginings of contemporary ails, however, makes for a page-turner ... In centering these [Latinx] characters, the limits of who gets portrayed in speculative fiction—a genre notoriously lacking in diversity—are expanded a little further. The stories are all deeply grounded in struggles and questions from the culture, even when they don’t appear to be at first glance ... Pulsing with imagination, The Rock Eaters is a bold statement of intent from an emerging voice worthy of the hype. Peynado’s daring alchemy of literary styles into weird, funny and deeply, compassionate stories are only a hint of the intriguing mixtures to come.
Quiara Alegría Hudes
RavePopMatters... electrifying ... a rousing manifesto of Boricua pride ... Though injustice is never far from the narrative...Hudes doesn\'t get lost in a catalog of oppression. To do so would lose sight of her family\'s indomitable will to survive and thrive ... My Broken Language\'s evocative specificity carves out paradigms...for further exploration by generations of writers from the Latin American diaspora to come. Every sentence is filled with joy and resistance, every anecdote with the women\'s resilience that pulls the family forward ... Hudes writes with melody and rhythm ... She synthesizes the words to tell it how it actually is.
Nona Fernández, tr. Natasha Wimmer
PositivePopMatters... a gripping read that situates the scale of the atrocities in the reader’s imagination. When words fail, which they often do in the face of sheer horror, she turns to an eclectic array of cultural allusions ... harrowing ... Almost everyone likes to believe that they would have the courage and wherewithal to refuse an order to harm another person ... Holding to this conviction might be essential to performing the duties of a police officer, with the good, old sheepdog parable providing a compass when lost in a forest of doubts. Fernández’s The Twilight Zone tells a more tangled and disturbing story, one that requires wading through an unsettling fog in a \'dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.\'
