RaveThe Boston GlobeEspinoza’s love of the sport — Mexico’s second most popular, after soccer — is evident on every page, and some of the book’s most delightful moments come when he’s giving readers a blow-by-blow, or providing background information about its intricacies ... Espinoza carries the notion of an eternal struggle across his story lines to perfection.
Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe ending of You Dreamed of Empires, the aftermath of that fateful meeting, is both expected and surprising, the author having a bit of cake and eating it too. It has been pitched as a colonial revenge story, restitutive, and revolutionary. But these descriptors shift focus toward what happens and away from what I believe is the novel’s greatest strength: its comfort in the murky could-have-been.
Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAn ambitious horror epic ... The concept of a rich and powerful demonic cult has been well trod in books and films, and yet the breadth of the world Enríquez creates through a perversity of detail is astounding ... Complicity is a recurring theme in the novel, and though there are characters who have a clearer sense of right and wrong, there are no heroes. Just about everyone is guilty, whether by abetting cruelty or ignoring it. Our Share of Night is ambitious because it is not only an immersive horror story but also an expansive family history that works to illustrate years of actual exploitation and repression in Argentina ... Unsettling and tragic, poignant and true, Our Share of Night is a masterwork from a writer with an unflinching gaze. If you can manage to hold that gaze with her, you will be richly rewarded.
Dario Diofebi
RavePloughshares... a sprawling Tolstoy-ian drama ... Part of the joy of the novel is watching how Las Vegas punishes or rewards the characters, how it helps or hinders them on their individual journeys ... The collision between Italy and America is sounded repeatedly in the novel, and some of Diofebi’s most beautiful writing happens when he meditates on poker player Tom’s former life in the shabby Roman suburbs ... There isn’t a single American who doesn’t hold a strong idea of what Las Vegas is, and I believe part of Diofebi’s undertaking in this novel was to show not only the soul of the city, but all the ways in which Las Vegas is imagined in the American consciousness. It is as though Diofebi dropped a dome on the city and meticulously cataloged all that he found. Tolstoy similarly set himself the task of capturing an entire world in his narratives ... To call Paradise, Nevada, then, a poker novel, or a thriller, or a bildungsroman, or a critique of the information economy, while all true, would miss so much. It is a novel that contains multitudes, with characters and places and history and future living inside the pages like Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional infinite tome from his short story The Book of Sand. Each character seems to contain more characters within; each location—Paris, Las Vegas, or a fictional recreation of the Shibuya crossing—functions in triplicate as character, metaphor, and critique. In order to capture something so elusive and grand as the soul of a city, perhaps this has to be the case. Or perhaps, because Las Vegas is the blinking, gyrating fantasy that it is, nothing can be taken for what it seems and everything must stand in for a larger idea. A half-scale model of the Eiffel Tower is either the low point of American mediocrity or a spectacularly maximalist homage, depending on who you ask. Diofebi presents both arguments in his novel, with the truth resting a foot on each side ... What Diofebi shows in his debut is all the thousands of machinations happening in the background, producing what is ultimately a glorious illusion.
