PositiveNew York Times Book Review... disturbing ... [Melchor\'s] translator for both novels, Sophie Hughes, deserves immense credit for capturing the vitality of the prose. But fair warning that this book teems with violence: graphic and aggressive sexual fantasies, anti-gay slurs, incest, murder, torture. If you’re new to Melchor’s work, it might take several pages to adjust. Her sentences contain more clauses than seemingly feasible; single paragraphs run for pages and pages. The visual effect is daunting — an unbroken wall of text — and would perhaps be off-putting if the writing weren’t so seductive. Once you’re acclimated to both the style and the sheer rancor of the prose, you’ll notice other things: flourishes, the attention to the natural world, poetic turns of phrase, shrewd sketches of the indignities of menial labor ... Melchor’s Miltonian talent is imbuing \'evil\' with psychological complexity ... the stroke of genius here is cleaving one monster into two.
Jonas Eika, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... relentlessly thrilling. Many lasting, vibrant scenes involve literal penetration — yes, sexual, but also otherwise, ritualistic, say, or symbolic. And it’s the language, too, that pierces, thrills. The sentences in these stories stretch past the limits of the ordinary to the luridly extraordinary, and some moments feel as if they are breaking through to the sublime ... kudos to the translator, Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, who has managed to capture not just the meaningful absurdities but the energy of a writer determined to defamiliarize everyday usages of language ... Whittling the complexity of financial markets into vibrant prose seems as difficult as it is necessary, if art is going to reckon with the way we live now ... don’t think these stories simply satirize, or hold up a mirror. The majority of happenings in After the Sun are either distorted or utterly unrecognizable, a blend of science fiction and grotesquerie, an orgy of the unpredictable ... The stories are not flawless, and the achievements of stylistic originality, the shocks, often come at the expense of heartfelt connection with characters, but honestly, in this case, it’s more than a fair trade-off, to be pierced and thrilled again.
Maryse Condé, trans. by Nicole Simek
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewScandal is at the center of two of Condé’s newly translated novels, both of which show her at her signature best: offering complex, polyphonic and ultimately shattering stories whose provocations linger long after their final pages ... The book opens in a packed courtroom, the moment after a jury has acquitted Dieudonné Sabrina, our protagonist, of the murder of his lover ... As the book progresses, filtering Dieudonné and his crime again and again through characters major and minor, we slip further from understanding him ... What emerges instead is a fascinating cross section of Guadeloupean society ... The book is filled with...insights, at once everyday and prophetic.
Maryse Condé, Trans. by Richard Philcox
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewFew writers are as skilled at illustrating the ways in which personal abuses of power are not just the result but the praxis of cultural domination ... The conceit is deceptively straightforward ... The book is a reflection on the dangers of binary thinking, and the Wilde line \'Each man kills the thing he loves\' serves as a kind of refrain for the mutually destructive passions between West and East, black and white, purist and pervert ... One is never on steady ground with Condé; she is not an ideologue, and hers is not the kind of liberal, safe, down-the-line morality that leaves the reader unimplicated.
Ocean Vuong
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...it’s an experimental, highly poetic novel, and therefore difficult to describe ... Vuong is masterly at creating indelible, impressionistic images ... although the book’s break into poetic form is perhaps designed to suggest that there are some expressions only poetry can communicate, at times the stylistic switches can feel like adornments on a powerful story that never required dressing up ... Vuong beautifully evokes this boy’s seductive power over Little Dog: This is some of the most moving writing I’ve read about two boys experimenting together (and reader, I’ve read a lot). The sex here is good because it feels honest, messy, joyous, awkward, painful ... The tenderness of the prose feels like a triumph against a world hellbent on embittering the tenderhearted ... the book is brilliant in the way it pays attention not to what our thoughts make us feel, but to what our feelings make us think. To what kinds of truth does feeling lead?
Daniel Handler
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...it’s commendable that Daniel Handler’s newest novel, All the Dirty Parts, is a coming-of-age story that doesn’t shy away from the omnipresence of smut ... A quick read, at just about 130 pages, the book is composed of miniature sections, many just one sentence long, separated by plenty of white space ...message is simple: Go ahead and experiment, but be careful with your heart, and above all, be considerate with the hearts of others ... the book is full of helpful suggestions, and seems most successful if conceived of less as a novel than as a chatty instructional manual for the horny teenage boy...writing is rushed and breathless and very often not good. Sentence fragments and mixed metaphors follow one after the other ...a fascinating and winsome conceit — a coming-of-age narrative composed of the specific parts such narratives routinely omit.
Cara Hoffman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHoffman impressively evokes the combination of nihilism, idealism, rootlessness, psychic and economic necessity, lust and love that might set a young person adrift. Unlike the runaway heroes of many queer narratives, these characters are not cast out but looking to get lost; put another way, they are running away from, not toward, a sense of belonging ... We watch them revel in their own abandon; we watch them scrounge and scheme, living on as little as possible; we watch them drink and drink, and love ... The Athens on display here is the so-called underbelly: hazy, sticky, seedy, a little claustrophobic, explosively violent, and peopled with rebels and runaways of all kinds, idealists, revolutionary operatives, con men, wayward young scholars, squatters — but the focus, hazed with nostalgia, is always on the three ... Although the first half of the book can be frustratingly withholding of information about the circumstances of the tragedy, the plot gets moving in the second half, detailing a dissolution complicated and interesting enough in its political and ethical implications to compensate ... In Bridey and Milo, Hoffman has created memorable antiheroes: tough and resourceful, scarred, feral and sexy. The book and the characters refuse to conform to type, and Running, like all good outlaw literature, takes sharp aim at the contemporary culture’s pervasive willingness to do so.
