RaveThe Guardian (UK)They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar...occupying a space between dystopia and horror. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work ... Art is strangled: capitalism, commerce, governments, institutions, bigots, scolds, cowards. In this context, They feels nearly paralysing. What is to be done in the face of this loss, evil, calamity? Kay Dick tells us. Or, at least, she gives us an opening, a small and meaningful door[.]
Aminder Dhaliwal
PositivePublishers WeeklyDhaliwal’s art is charming and expressive ... Dhaliwal places funny, surprising details ... The struggle of the cyclops unfolds in metaphors for race, sexuality, gender, and disability, tangling with ideas about fetishization, interracial relationships, passing, and representation. But it also can slip, frustratingly, into didactic tendencies ... despite these missteps, when it works, it works ... I challenge any marginalized person to say that they haven’t had the exact same conversation about a book or film or television show created by someone with their shared identity—the overwhelming sense of responsibility placed on glass-ceiling breakers, yes, but also the desire to be seen as you truly are, and on your own terms.
Matt Bell
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksNothing good can come of this world, and nothing does. Though it starts in a place of inoffensive and even lovely magic, every chapter brings some new horror or perversion. Everything human leaks away and is replaced with doppelgängers and monsters, ursine hybrids, people-turned-animals, bodies deprived of anything that might make them real ... The strangeness is unrelenting. When trying to follow the novel becomes a challenge, the reader becomes like the husband: blindly groping deeper and deeper into the darkness ... While thematically appropriate, [the] language can occasionally become exhausting — the diction is so lofty that it is easy to feel a little lost ... In the end, the problem might be as simple as the text running too long — what is 300 pages could have easily been half that ... I am supportive of Bell’s career and a fan of much of his work, but I found this particular project to be messy and ultimately unsatisfying ... But I will continue to follow Bell’s future work with interest—because despite his efforts to isolate, there is ultimately something deeply tangible and haunting about this non-place, about the people who are living and suffering there.
Danielle Lazarin
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewI loathe the word 'polished' in the context of prose. It’s too clinical, implying that the work was dull before the author intentionally spruced it up. So I’d prefer to say that the sentences in these stories are living and seamless, as if Lazarin had run her hand over them until they became smooth and gleaming with the evidence of her touch. Yet they are not without viscera; sublimated rage fills the crevices between them. Lazarin’s style succeeds in part because the stakes for her characters are wide-ranging, because the implications of their actions ripple outward. In Back Talk, the theme of internalized misogyny is, to be quite blunt, terrifying ... joins a growing canon of quietly realist stories that establish women’s experiences as worthy of literary attention. And not just women’s experiences: These stories also explore the exhausting, slow poison of masculine power, the grind of the patriarchy on even the most privileged of women, the subtle ways in which men have trained women to minimize themselves.
Samantha Hunt
RaveNPRLike the best short story collections, The Dark Dark chews on some delicious, evergreen themes in extraordinary ways ... This is liminal fantasy with a solid literary sensibility; sure to please fans of Karen Russell and Lidia Yuknavitch. Hunt is the master of the lovely and strange tableaux vivant ... she is at her best when her stories seem to almost get away from her, crescendoing into feverish, manic beauty. Horror and strangeness are her allies. But once you boil away the horror, these are stories about middle-class women imprisoned by the domestic in some way or another. Hunt's female characters are full of deep trenches that overflow with sorrow and rage.
Jessie Chaffee
PositiveNPRLike the appealing anguish of those women's lives, Florence in Ecstasy is a beautiful but exhausting novel. Hannah is perpetually precarious; every accomplishment feels hard-won, and every loss feels inevitable ... As you might expect, this is not a light beach read; it is something that must be taken in small doses and savored page by page. But if you can ride out the unyielding waves of pain, there is a classic but reimagined narrative at work here: a person's existential reckoning on unfamiliar soil. In this case, a woman on the edge, in a liminal city that sits between the past and the present, searching for her missing body — which is to say, herself.
John Darnielle
RaveNPRDarnielle's prose is lucid and precise, the sort of clear-eyed, knife-jab sentences that defined both his debut Wolf in White Van and his whole songwriting career. He moves through the plot with an enviable looseness ... in its own way, a fairy tale — an old, un-Disney-fied one — filtered through the fragrant, dusty Iowan air; a ghost story that's all too real; a detective story with no simple solution ... The novel strikes at the heart of the realities of small-town existence — not just their downsides, which would have been a cheap and easy shot, but their pleasures and comforts and truths. In White Van, Darnielle wound around a single act of violence like water orbiting a drain. But here, the violence is larger, more existential, more terrifying. It is not a single a moment that changes everything, but instead a culmination of choices, tempered by the ordinary details of daily life.
Vi Khi Nao
RaveNPRThat Nao is a poet is on full display — the prose here is expressive, muscular, and strange; almost exasperatingly precise ... This journey across the boundaries of form and genre, to write about what is un-write-aboutable, is a smart maneuver — it permits the reader to experience what has been written about over and over in a way that is fresh and absorbing in its difference ... As with so many of my favorite novels, Fish in Exile is less about plot (though there is one, loosely speaking) and more about its immersive experience. It asks a lot from the reader, but rightfully so. Yes, you must pursue meaning through chaos, wring beauty from brutality, grasp for solace among the slow-motion turmoil, but then again, isn't that also how you survive grief?
Amie Barrodale
PositiveNPRThe conflicts [in YAHAGT] are, of course, nothing new — haven't people been having subtle social skirmishes in literature for centuries? — but here, the old struggle is freshened by these characters' voices, and how they justify the low-grade, unyielding stubbornness of their desire to do what they are doing, consequences and reality be damned ... It is worth mentioning that while these stories aren't interwoven, precisely, they often echo each other in odd, deliberate ways. Not just the themes (affairs, Buddhism, therapy) but specific images that repeat and reference each other ... This uncanny repetition only adds to the collection's unsettling mood. There is a fascinating grotesqueness here, from the mean, broken, oblivious characters to the funny, ugly scenarios they're placed into. Even the structures of the stories are disconcerting: They always open so deep midscene — so breathlessly ready to go, so breathlessly already going — it's disorienting, like a film that starts with a character in midfall off a cliff. But the grotesqueness is also cut with moments of beauty.
Kelly Link
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksLink’s range, compassion, and ability to unsettle — whether writing about the South, deep space, or anywhere in between — are on full display ... What Link evokes at the end of her stories — in the case of stories like the 'The Lesson,' exactly at the end — is the sort of magic every reader hungers for. It’s the desire to come away from a text feeling slightly altered — whether there are tears snow-globing on the lenses of your glasses or you have to put the book down and bite your thumb or there’s a weird feeling of pressure behind your nose or you utter an involuntary 'Oh'
Vladimir Sorokin, Trans. by Jamey Gambrell
PanNPRThis setup is intriguing and rich with possibility. But mostly, The Blizzard left me cold. The prose is uneven: at its best moments, it's clear and straightforward, but at its worst it is positively cringe-worthy.
