RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPham’s straightforward, unpretentious prose is used to devastating effect in the latter half of the novel. Its bluntness makes descriptions of visceral horror...even more searing ... There is a secondary love story told in Twilight Territory, quieter but just as powerful: the kinship between Vietnamese women. Tuyet and Takeshi’s star-crossed romance may fuel the novel’s whirlwind plot, but the love between Tuyet and her aunt and daughter is its core, and the ingenuity and resilience of other women always save Tuyet in her most dire moments.
Eliza Clark
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewShrewd ... Clark is disturbingly gifted at inventing unrealities that feel uncannily believable.
Bora Chung, trans. by Anton Hur
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe wonderfully warped world of Bora Chung\'s fiction ... There is always an ugly, further cost to settling old scores ... Chung has assembled a marvelous tasting platter of genres: classic ghost stories, fairy tales, mythic fantasy, science fiction, dark fables, the surreal and unclassifiable horror-adjacent ... Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice — its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap.
Noviolet Bulawayo
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewEarly on in NoViolet Bulawayo’s manifoldly clever new novel, Glory, she completely removes the vocabulary of \'people\' from the story and the language of its characters, who are all animals ... It is a brilliant, 400-page postcolonial fable charting the downfall of one tyrant—whose counterpart here is an elderly horse—and the rise of a new one ... By taking humans out of the equation, Bulawayo eliminates the hierarchies that their presence would impose. She has succeeded in creating the anti-\'Babar\' ... This is not Animal Farm. Not its remix, nor its translation. Glory is its own vivid world, drawn from its own folklore ... by aiming the long, piercing gaze of this metaphor at the aftereffects of European imperialism in Africa, Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny ... This is also a satire in which female characters are not pushed to the margins, but hold the story together ... In its depiction of transgenerational trauma, of the lineages haunted if not extinguished by the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the novel bears close literary resemblance to Art Spiegelman’s Maus ... If We Need New Names was a call, then Glory is its answer. They paint a country’s past and its present.
