MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe italicized passages not only give a deep view of Miranda’s interior mind, but they also ring true. They demonstrate the sensitive ear—perhaps verging on paranoid but nonetheless acute—that Miranda has for what motivates the remarks characters actually do make ... When this dissolution of reality moves from internal dialogue to actual events, the situation becomes blurry. Readers don’t ever learn if Miranda truly gets away with it, if her vengeance is real or not, and whether she’ll have to pay the piper or else risk a fate worse than her former painful loneliness. Meanwhile, the male characters don’t change much or at all, really ... Whether there is any real resolution to the psychic drama of All’s Well remains unclear ... Perhaps Mona Awad is putting the reader in the position of victim, someone who experiences pain and has no recourse to any real resolution. The setup resembles the writer’s deepest dilemma: what if all her careful plotting, her effort to resolve things for the reader, turns out to be a trick of her imagination, is only in her head?
David Bezmozgi
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThose in power would have us draw dividing lines between races. But the meaningful distinction between immigrants may be that between foreigners of \'storied pomp\' and the \'tired, poor, and wretched.\' That is the distinction drawn in Emma Lazarus’s \'The New Colossus,\' the sonnet inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes refugees to the shores of the United States. The poem is of immense meaning in our society at this moment. Immigrant City, the latest collection of short stories by the Canadian author David Bezmozgis, should be as well. Yet the book will appear only in ebook format in the United States ... No matter the path taken in immigration, all the immigrants trace their story back to the event of immigration. This rupture is impossible to seal, neither by familial love...nor by carnal passion. The rupture is impossible to seal because it is the only portal to the life left behind, to the Old World ...
Ross Barkan
PositiveFiction Writers Review\"Barkan accurately depicts the complexity of the technocratic age ... The satire of Barkan’s dystopia, meanwhile, hinges on a neoliberal vision of the future, not that of Archie Bunker. This is especially true with regards to the identity of the future president, the one blamed for all the future’s problems in the novel. But Demolition Night still resonates ... Barkan’s canny satire rightfully takes aim at our own complicity. And this is the strongest insight in the novel.\
Tatyana Tolstaya, Trans. by Anya Migdal
RaveFiction Writers Review\"Simple but essential, this piece of writing feeds people. If aspic inspires such language, why does it matter whether the cook is Tolstaya or a character she created? ... Tolstaya’s writings provide no absolutes, just a window between worlds.\
