Dubravka Ugresic, Trans. by Ellen Elias-Bursac and Celia Hawkesworth
MixedWords Without BordersMany of Ugresic’s observations on American life read as slightly too familiar humanist critiques of U.S. capitalism ... long passages about plastic organizers and muffins strain under the metaphorical weight Ugresic assigns to those modest signifiers ... Fortunately, American Fictionary becomes much more incisive when Ugresic narrows her satirical lens. She is scathing on the blithe condescension her status as a European fleeing a war-torn country elicits in many of the Americans she meets. The intelligentsia comes off worst of all ... A poignant, unrequited love underlies Ugresic’s frustration with her host country. One of the best entries in this \'fictionary\' is the chapter \'Yugo-Americana,\' which describes how American popular culture saturated the Yugoslavia of her childhood ... Uneven but bracing, American Fictionary led me to ponder what Ugresic calls the \'protective shields of indifference\' most of us adopt when faced with terrible events taking place somewhere just over the horizon.
Deborah Eisenberg
PositiveChicago Review of Books\"... retrospection, tinged with rueful wisdom and more than a little melancholy, is central to the collection ... That said, even after repeat readings I’m not sure how all of the story’s thematic elements, which grow to include mental illness and theories of language, cohere into a persuasive whole. At the same time, it’s evident that a late Eisenberg story isn’t interested in surrendering its meanings too easily ... Her writing adds to our collective store of wit, empathy, and intelligence. If you haven’t read her yet, by all means start with Your Duck Is My Duck...\
Alfred Döblin, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksThe sheer brio of Döblin’s prose, together with the unstoppable forward momentum of his narrative, makes all this squalor not only bearable but riveting. The story comes at you in a flood of words: Each character’s stream of consciousness is just one tributary in an enormous torrent that also includes newspaper headlines, advertising jingles, weather reports, political slogans, and seemingly every other kind of verbal and aural flotsam that would have been bobbing around Berlin in the years 1927–28, when the novel is set ... That it all flows as naturally as it does in English is a testament to Michael Hofmann’s resourcefulness ... he becomes a kind of one-man band, tossing off rhymes, doggerel, and what feels like several decades’ worth of low-down slang to recreate the working-class patois of Döblin’s interwar Berlin ... This is one modernist monument that nobody should have trouble finishing.
