RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOmar Robert Hamilton’s debut, The City Always Wins, is a chronological disruption of a novel, beautifully and mostly cinematically capturing the majesty of ‘bodies and rage and grief’ on the ground and memories in broken hearts … He upturns all senses of temporal comfort, infusing the novel with Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘time out of joint,’ a zone of opaque possibilities. This intertextual technique shakes the reader out of her ontological slumber, to engage with Hamilton’s narrative rather than read his dispatch-like writing as a bystander … The City Always Wins is a brooding read, one that is manifestly rich in its gritty juxtapositions of pain, satire, elation, and the corporeal textures of blood and bodies, Cairo ever melancholically present.
