RaveThe Cleveland Plain DealerIt is the human side of Colombia’s story that Vasquez wants to tell, not the geopolitical or tactical struggles, and he tells it through the dark and wounded memories of Antonio Yammara, a young lawyer living in Bogota … This is a novel about the after-echoes of a life lived during wartime — a war without a transcendent, inspiring, justifying ideology. But the descendants, in this case, are not the wildly and brashly cinematic Tony Montanas...The characters in The Sound of Things Falling are the forgettable extras, the trembling, unnamed figures in the background of the movie, silenced and frozen by casual savageries, still choking, even after the passage of years, on an inarticulate, wormy grief. And it is those figures that Vasquez brings to life, those stories that his book reveals – and honors.
Rabih Alameddine
RaveThe Cleveland Plain DealerAn Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine’s newest novel, is about a woman who reads. But – in the daringly transgressive prose that characterizes all of Alameddine’s work – it’s about much more than that. It is about a woman who herself is read and misread, who becomes a kind of continually evolving text ... Yes, she is a prodigious reader and translator. But to use postmodernist terminology, Sohbi is not so much an individual but a 'site' simultaneously occupied by those whose work she reads... Emptied of identity – an unnecessary woman – she is made essential by the texts she has literally incorporated into herself ... Those looking for linearity and plot in Alameddine’s works will be frustrated. An Unnecessary Woman is fundamentally a meditation on being and literature, written by someone with a passionate love of language and the power of words to compose interior worlds.
Toni Morrison
RaveThe Cleveland Plain DealerGod Help the Child is a slim novel; it can be read, and wants to be read, in a breath. The prose is lean, uncluttered. Morrison's novelistic architectures have always been exceptionally well-designed; she crafts the vessels, carefully and uniquely to each story, before pouring in the water, and God Help the Child is no exception. By arranging Sweetness, Bride, Brooklyn (Bride's best friend), Booker and Sofia in antiphonal choruses, she orchestrates dialogues between truths and fictions in a manner that mirrors the book's meanings.
Mia Alvar
PositiveThe Cleveland Plain Dealer[Alvar] doesn't always succeed – when she stumbles, it is because she too fervently labors to lead the reader to conclusions, as in several stories here. But when she succeeds, she is extraordinarily adept and insightful ... Alvar is gifted; of that there is no doubt. And she has important things to say. She knows how to make the reader pause, and think deeply, feel. And hunger, as I am already, for more.
