RaveThe New YorkerA capacious container for our space-related concerns ... Part of the pleasure of reading Terrace Story is figuring out how its peculiar architecture works ... There’s both something old-fashioned about these flicks of the magic-realist wand...and something distinctly of our moment ... Leichter is interested in the bewitched space of narrative itself. The fable, with tidy generic conventions but stretchy moral lessons, performs a kind of magic on the novel, giving a slim work legend-like scope ... Leichter doesn’t moralize about her craft, but her book ventures a compelling case for it: for all of us who lack superpowers, storytelling may be the surest way to grasp the elastic dimensions of life.
Marlen Haushofer tr. Shaun Whiteside
RaveThe Baffler... a book that uses a calamitous rip in time to expose the very ordinary ruptures that, smoothed over by the relentless turning of the clock, we cavalierly disregard ... Ceasing to be a human being can mean something literal (death) or something harder to define (a loss of humanity). The Wall is interested in both, and it is most interesting because of what it reveals about the effect of one on the other: how the specter of losing your life changes the desire to hold on to your self. On its surface, the book seems like a fairly predictable piece of survival literature...Yet the matter of life and death, foregrounded in all its practical details, looms over the novel as more than just a test of self-reliance. The central question of the story is not how to sustain existence but how to understand identity—what it’s really made of, and whether it was made to endure.
Claire-Louise Bennett
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... books that the bored reader finds small and dull — is this fiction, or a guide to interior decorating? — but that the patient reader appreciates precisely because it can’t be so neatly described. It is neither a small project nor a big one, but rather a reckoning with the very question of scale. What, really, is the size of a story? Of a life? How much is there to be gained in capturing the big picture — and what is there to lose? ... Bennett’s brilliance is that the exchange of pickles and paperbacks between strangers can indeed be made into a story, one that is told twice: first in a sober, straightforward style, and then again in a scrambled, surrealist form — a breakdown in narrative coherence that captures both what is unsettling about the man and what is unreliable about the narrator.
