RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is the problem Deagler poses: How to turn the act of staying sober — which has no arc, no urgent movement toward anything but its own continuation — into a narrative worth reading? ... At times, the book reads less like a novel than a series of disjointed episodes... with new settings and characters. But somehow it works. The novel adds up to more than just a chronicle of near misses ... Early Sobrieties builds into a moving, comic meditation on the impossibility of imposing narrative structure on our lives.
Kyle Dillon Hertz
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGripping and savagely beautiful ... Not the courtroom narrative of pain and testimony and justice one might expect from this setup. It is more like a journey into hell ... At his best, Hertz sheds the trappings of traditional realism, adopting instead a swerving, almost psychedelic style that mirrors the abrupt and mercurial perceptions of a turbulent mind ... Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment. It’s an achievement of language, of style, in which the process of finding one’s way back to the world is considered at least in part as an act of learning to \'speak the unspeakable.\'
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. by Daniel Levin Becker
RaveGawkerA deft English translation ... Mauvignier steadily unravels the shared illusions that prop up these domestic patterns, so familiar and drained of heat ... Mauvignier’s style is particularly well-suited to depicting this frame of mind, plumbing the subterranean operations of paranoia and denial. He writes in billowing, propulsive sentences, sometimes multiple pages long ... The grim achievement of Mauvignier’s seething, recursive, semi-improvisational style lies in how he manages to portray a muddled mind...with precise lucidity ... This is not — or not merely — a domestic drama, or a portrait of masculine anger and perplexity. It is, above all, a thriller ... A chilling, masterful work. It dwells in that dim, haunted space between violence and mundanity, repression and revelation — that rare thing, a genre-bending novel that sacrifices neither its literary merits nor its pulpy thrills.
Barbara Molinard, tr. Emma Ramadan
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... malevolent and disorienting tales ... Through Ramadan’s spare and exacting translation, Molinard presents a terrifying portrait of violence and mental illness. The reader is immersed entirely in the minds of her characters, seeing the world only through their warped gazes with no purchase on external reality. These surreal, claustrophobic stories bear similarities to the works of Samuel Beckett and Leonora Carrington, but Molinard writes in a voice that is entirely her own ... Her stories were not written for any reader. Their existence seems like a miracle. Upon encountering them, there is the sense that one is stealing a glimpse of something intensely private, unmediated, a soul in anguish.
Halldor Laxness, trans. by Philip Roughton
PositiveBaffler[Laxness\'] first attempt to integrate his sense of socialism’s liberatory promise into a cohesive artistic vision ... The language of the various worldviews that dominate the village seep subtly into the initially detached narration, inflecting the story with a claustrophobic sense of how ideology shapes perception ... By turns caustic and lyrical, funny and forlorn, Salka Valka is far from a triumphant portrait of the labor movement ... Perhaps the novel is best considered as a meditation on failure: on not living up to one’s ideals or sustaining a movement, as well as the more existential failures behind these strategic ones—the failure of characters to reach beyond the bounds of their selves, to overcome the fundamental loneliness at the core of Laxness’s melancholy vision. This loneliness is the dark undercurrent of Salka Valka, an invisible, inexorable hindrance to meaningful connection and collective action.
