RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"What is so painfully accurate throughout Taneja’s book is the abyss between India’s excessively, unimaginably wealthy and the dehumanization of the country’s most impoverished ... Taneja has skilfully and knowledgably drawn her network of literary references (not just to Lear but also to Hindu scripture, Dante, the Sufi poet Kabir, and, beautifully, to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) over the political tremors of modern India ... Structurally, what is perhaps most frustrating to the modern reader of King Lear is most satisfying in Taneja’s reimagining. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, only Lear himself seems to have any interiority... Taneja’s novel, however, gives readers a craved-for reality underneath these accessories to the king’s tragedy ... Taneja’s novel is brave and compulsively readable. Her scholarly background in literature and her work as a human rights reporter and filmmaker combine a deep ethics with a keen understanding of human nature, both its dignity and depravity. The absolute mastery of her narrative style and the precision of her language is unforgettable ... We That Are Young’s restaging of the core conundrums of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the light of global capitalism, in an era of competing superpowers, where truth and loyalty, too, comes at a price, will haunt readers for many generations to come.\
Danez Smith
RaveThe Guardian\"Danez Smith...echoes the plural, expanded lyric voices of poets such as Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes. Like Smith’s prize-winning debut collection, [insert] boy, their follow-up Don’t Call Us Dead excoriates America for its violence towards citizens outside a white heterosexual majority … The poem is an extended sequence, a dream-like vision of “unfuneraling” black boys caught up in the US’s insatiable gun battle with itself. Here we find anguish for lives severed in their prime … Smith deserves a willing and sympathetic audience, one that is already swiftly building, to hear it. But one also hopes this book reaches readers who will have the courage to acknowledge their arbitrary power and privilege.\
Lauren Elkin
RaveThe Financial TimesThe arc of Elkin’s book is a personal one, and as a result it takes in her difficult relationship with 'home' as both a place and a concept. It is perhaps surprising that the early chapter on her Long Island suburban upbringing is one of the most stunning and engaging sections, detailing the inbuilt isolation and purposelessness of strip malls, unwalkable streets and disengaged neighbourhoods ... Pursuing an alternate, embedded and often political history of women, Elkin offers a counterpoint to the male flânerie enshrined by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, the 'psychogeography' of the French Situationists and Will Self, and the 'deep topography' of Iain Sinclair. Finding ways to reframe images of women walking and to reverse male gazes, Flâneuse builds on recent work by Elkin’s fellow writer Rebecca Solnit and the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, among others, with striking intellectual vigour and clear, enrapturing prose.