No paean to Montreal’s transformation into a global capital of commerce and culture . . . [Bock’s novel] imagines one of the countless souls who built contemporary Montreal, giving their bodies for the city . . .
The Garden of Seven Twilights – Miquel de Palol
The tales and tellers of Palol’s novel compose a meticulous alignment of points and lines, a rigorous intellectual structure resembling the mysterious sculpture in the center of the titular Garden.
Blue Notes – Anne Cathrine Bomann
Blue Notes is no quiet meditation on grief: it’s a well-paced and highly readable medical thriller.
Hjorth reworks that old aphorism: unhappy stories are all alike. It’s the ones that eke out a kind of happiness that set themselves apart.
The Buddha learned to extinguish desire. For [Debré’s] narrator, desire appears as liberation, what the rigid world of shitless boredom kept from her.
The Singularity – Balsam Karam
Karam has written a surprising work of horror, embedded in two motherhood plots that briefly connect in an unnamed harbor town half-recovered from a violent conflict.
Capitalist modernity renders mothers and daughters as autonomy-desiring “units”; SALT reveals the ache of this separation.
Lonespeech is a dialogue edited down to a poem, its minimalism acknowledging the blank space around its “cut-out” phrases.
A hypnotic novel, itself seemingly hypnotized by bodily fluids.
Like a Sky Inside – Jakuta Alikavazovic
Alikavazovic’s writing is contemplative and digressive, roving like the insatiable gaze of a consummate museum goer.