PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksPorter refuses to conform to conventions of narrative prose—even of the ways text is traditionally arranged on the page—which perfectly suits Shy’s chaotic mind. The book is playful despite the heaviness of its subject matter ... One of Porter’s generosities as a writer—even as he shares Shy’s story through the winding roads of what is front of Shy’s mind—is that he refuses to diagnose or pathologize his subject. Shy is troubled, Shy needs help, but Porter resists the temptation to provide his readers with a box into which they can place the character ... An emphatic furthering of this project, written out of love for its bewildered subject.
María Sonia Cristoff, Trans. by Katherine Silver
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksCristoff is a gifted writer, employing a variety of techniques to build the character of her protagonist and give us a sense of how her mind works. One particularly effective technique is Cristoff’s writing of lists ... Her list-making serves as a way of illuminating Mara’s mind ... Include Me Out...puts the reader in an uncomfortable position, forcing them to make judgments that feel like a stretch either way. Neither rejection of Mara and the premises of her experiment, nor unconsidered sympathy for her in her plight, feel right. It’s complicated ... Include Me Out asks its readers to wrestle with questions of how a story is being told, and who is telling it. Without such wrestling, understanding is fleeting. Include Me Out demonstrates an entirely new dimension to Cristoff’s work; I’m eager for whatever comes next.
Maria Tumarkin
RaveFull Stop...[a] powerful new work ... a book that proves Tumarkin to be a clear-eyed excavator of much pain and sorrow in our world ... Tumarkin is attuned to the realities of unconquerable, systemic inequalities, as well as the crushing burdens that often come with one’s familial history, recognizing the real limits of human agency to affect personal change in such circumstances. At the same time, even as she appropriately recognizes the difficulty of such lives and the myriad factors that can doom individuals starting from such perilous positions, Tumarkin refuses to write them off or treat them as lives lost and not worthy of living ... Part of what Tumarkin is trying to do in this book is simply to humanize; to say that this, in all its pain and sorrow, is the nature of our world ... Those portrayals serve to remind the reader of their humanity, reinforcing Tumarkin’s point that to look at such people, be shocked, and live in that shock is, more often than not, to dismiss.
Ida Jessen
RaveThe MillionsThe text shines as an honest reckoning with the death of a spouse—but one in a deeply companionless marriage—and the life of two people who shared little but space ... Jessen is a tremendously gifted writer, and as the book progresses—with our narrator gaining more distance from the death of her husband—we glimpse what our narrator’s life becomes, and the writing really shines. Jessen, the Danish translator of Marilynne Robinson, among others, proves to have a keen Robinsonian streak of her own. She writes with the same narrative generosity, the same belief in the dignity and voice of characters that might usually be dismissed ... This work is firmly grounded, quite literally. The landscape, the heath surrounding Thryegod, the rural town in Western Denmark where our narrator resides, is a character in and of itself. The natural world is not neutral, simply a landscape about which our narrator feels comfortable waxing poetically. Rather, it acts on our narrator ... Furthermore, Jessen remains measured in her descriptions, often opting for the plainer turn of phrase ... Jessen can be lyrical when she likes, but perhaps more impressive is her restraint when it’s exactly what’s called for.
