PositiveThe Spectator (UK)\"First You Write a Sentence is an often impassioned attempt to get us to take sentences seriously ... Sentences are everywhere, formed without much attention and used without much thought, but Moran wants to encourage an alertness to their construction.
Some of the book’s most compelling sections seem indeed to be about this very thing: not about nouns and verbs, or monosyllables and vowel sounds, but about care. Moran is advocating attentiveness, deliberateness, absorbedness, slow and studied craft, pushing against ‘the glib articulacy of a distracted age’ ... There’s plenty in Moran’s book to delight grammar and language nerds, too, of course. He argues eloquently for fresh metaphors, and for monosyllables ... He rhapsodises on the pleasures of a long sentence expertly unspooled.\
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
PositiveThe Guardian\"[Schweblin’s] stubborn, unapologetic resistance to revelation is one of the things that makes Mouthful of Birds, her debut collection in English, such a success ... Whole selections of tales with clever twists can suffer diminishing returns, as the reader starts trying to pre-empt the surprises, but that doesn’t happen here – these aren’t narrative twists, so much as persistent underminings. Each story leaves your foundations just a little less firm, and over 20 pieces the effect is cumulative ... As if she is determined to find the deepest way into her readers’ nightmares, many of the fears that Schweblin worries at repeatedly are primal.\
Han Kang
RaveThe GuardianThis is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, and it’s a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions ... The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience.
