PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The encounters are brief: Salama travels quickly, rarely spending more than a few days in each place. The result is a series of vignettes of everyday life along the river, described with great energy and warmth. The book’s most moving and memorable scenes, however, come when Salama stays somewhere long enough to form friendships—to slot into the rhythms of riverside existence ... Salama combines an appetite for adventure with a sense that adventure is not what it used to be, making Every Day the River Changes a curious mixture of youthful exuberance and wistful elegy.
Paul Theroux
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Theroux...writes vividly ... Perhaps a gringo on a road trip will always be an outsider looking in. But this gringo also happens to be a masterly travel writer, with irrepressible curiosity and a keen eye for detail, and as his journey progresses he weaves these fleeting encounters, snapshots of landscapes and snippets of information into a kaleidoscopic and deeply compelling portrait of a complex and many-sided country ... he becomes a diligent collector of their experiences ... The sheer number of these stories in On the Plain of Snakes, overlapping and diverging like the migrant routes themselves, makes the book all the more powerful.
Maria Gabriela Llansol, Trans. by Audrey Young
RaveTLSGeography of Rebels conjures up a dreamlike, shapeshifting world in which characters can be human one minute and animals the next ... The Dallas-based publisher Deep Vellum is to be commended for the bold and inspired choice, and Audrey Young for a bewitching translation in which each word feels both carefully weighed and feather-light. This is an astonishing, otherworldly and utterly original book, and it reveals Llansol as one of the most fascinating Portuguese writers of the twentieth century.
