Catherine the Great and the Small – Olja Knežević
Knežević’s relentless chronicling of the ravages of heterosexuality and women’s centering of men invites us to read the novel as a quiet act of queer subversion in a hostile Eastern European climate.
Andre Gide invites the reader’s doubt into the ability of the novelist (both himself and his narrator) to control the meaning of his novel.
The Distance – Ivan Vladislavić
His interest in the potential of the fragment as a form of fiction that bears witness to political truth, is ever yielding.
Igifu – Scholastique Mukasonga
As her characters find themselves unable to articulate what has transpired, her stories verbalize the horror of genocide in ways drastically abstract, beautifully and imaginatively rendered.
That Hair – Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
Narrator Mila’s story — or stories — of her hair, the different phases of treatments, evolving senses of attachment, dissociation, indifference, and reinvigoration concerning her hair, are naturally diminutive allegories for a larger postcolonial existential journey.
By narrating natural destruction in a neutral tone, Fauna models one way that climate-fiction can serve environmentalism.
CHRONOLOGY is a polyvocal text, a poetics of archive. The act of reading feels akin to debriefing with a friend. The impulse to help pull it together collectively.
Little Eyes – Samanta Schweblin
In the cyborg fable, it’s not just the perpetrator who suffers at the end.
Exposition / The White Dress – Nathalie Léger
Nathalie Leger’s triptych is a balletic interpretation over the line between fiction and criticism.
Natural History – Carlos Fonseca
Taking the allegory of camouflage to its limits, Natural History forces us to think about the unstable role of truth and art in a world where the mediated copy becomes more important than the original.