PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe three novellas in Cowboy Graves seem like a functional draft of his masterpieces such as The Savage Detectives, 2666, Distant Star, and Nazi Literature in the Americas. The prose is not quite Bolañoesque yet. However, it must be said, the blueprint of a masterwork is always worth reading. Cowboy Graves shouldn’t serve as an introduction to Bolaño’s oeuvre; rather, the experienced Bolaño readers can survey it to glimpse into his artistic process, into the fountain of his creativity. Bolaño simply didn’t need any muse besides his readings and his recollections ... His writing is global and encyclopedic, curative and addictive, and vibrant and visceral. The immediacy of the prose is almost palpable ... But if you’re a Bolaño novitiate, do not start with Cowboy Graves.
Julian Barnes
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... readily challenges the tacit boundaries of conventional biography. Its panoramic gaze captures the vagaries of life, full of vanity and vainglory, during La Belle Époque ... Full of meta-commentary on what writers risk when reconstructing the past, the book seamlessly weaves the stories of numerous personas navigating the demands and fashions of fin de siècle France ... No gaps are filled with his usual novelistic prowess. What compelled this change in method for Barnes this time? Also, why write about Pozzi when a comprehensive biography, written by Claude Vanderpooten in 1992, already exists? ... truly eclectic in its telling, full of pithy aphorisms and ardor ... Barnes’s writing, once again, is clear, erudite, and deeply insightful ... Barnes is, without a question, that kind of writer, whose wit, intellect, and pleasant irony incite a lasting thrill in us.
Hwang Sok-yong
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...compelling and heartrending ... The setting early in the story is late-1990s North Korea, and Hwang is peerless in his depiction of the mass starvation during the famine ... [Hwang] has traveled to all the places traced in Princess Bari, and it shows in his nuanced descriptions of landscapes ... Unlike many foreign-born novels that are written to be agreeable to translators to target as wide an audience as possible, Princess Bari retains aesthetic originality and difficulty. Regional allusions, references, and traditional lyric songs abound. To top it all, the book is awash in North Korean dialect and onomatopoeic adjectives, which Hwang employs to affect poetry in his prose ... translator Sora Kim-Russell does an admirable job of recreating the narrative in smooth English ... Unfortunately, some musicality endemic to the original Korean has been lost ... With Princess Bari, Hwang challenges the hegemony of Western norms and myths in world literature, which rarely uses Eastern myth in its storytelling.
Susan Orlean
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Susan Orlean’s The Library Book is ostensibly an investigative report on this catastrophic event and its cultural context. In its essence, however, the book is a treatise on the value of our public libraries, the most democratic spaces in our country. It is a call to protect these sacred places of collective memory ... this book is [Orlean\'s] most personal yet ... Orlean’s book encourages us to make necessary trouble in order to keep our public libraries alive, and ends with a bit of lasting wisdom...\
