Colombe Schneck, trans. Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSwimming in Paris reads like the act of stripping down for a swim; it involves baring herself, but oddly, the story stops there. We don’t follow her for long into the water, that open space that allures and frightens her ... More time spent in the pool, the uncomfortable place where Schneck learned to dispel her illusions, quiet her anxieties, and write with stunning directness, might’ve made these stories more faithful homages.
Miranda July
PositiveThe BafflerOn aging, July is often blunt...funny...and wise ... July has always written unabashedly about the private lives of women. But this collection of perspectives, a casual ethnography, feels less like an ah-ha moment, a revelation of some taboo, and more like an intricate story with layered perspectives ... She’s not forced to grow up, to commit to a plan, or to accept the world as it is. But she’s not just escaping, either; she’s standing in a small space between fantasy and reality, where, for a moment, something near hope can be felt.
Emma Cline
PositiveThe Brooklyn RailCline manages to balance her heroine’s willful delusions, her desire for security and her itchiness once she has it, her shrewdness, and her real, embodied desires, without slipping into cliches herself. While there have been plenty of books and films written recently about women antiheroes—enough to spawn an even greater number of think pieces against what’s been named as a trope—The Guest uses the genre as a deliberate social critique. So long as these hierarchies exist, Cline suggests, so, too, will these stories.
Felix Salten, Tr. Jack Zipes
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksZipes regards the novel’s ending as a tragedy: although Bambi hasn’t yet been killed by Him, he’s conscripted to a totally self-protective existence, living only to survive, as a member of a persecuted group ... The book is a rich and busy ecosystem — much like a Viennese café.
