Empty Set – Verónica Gerber Bicecci
How do you render negative space, and if you can accurately describe it, is it really negative?
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
It’s a work wherein that which is nascent only moves in a single, inevitable line, to onomatopoeic beats of the novel’s closing words, “widdeboom, widdeboom.”
Typescript of the Second Origin – Manuel de Pedrolo
It was, perhaps, as if Frank Herbert had accidentally written THE HUNGER GAMES.
The Right Intention – Andrés Barba
Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible.
The Consequences – Niña Weijers
How often can refusal be appropriated, marketed, sold and consumed by those who possibly cause it, before the only chance an earnest human has is stop making art?
The question of how we create meaning or value — which, Consiglio reminds us, are far from the same thing — when moving through a place serves as a structural principle in this collection where each story stretches out like a corridor with different rooms attached.
The Influence Peddlers – Hédi Kaddour
If increasingly Islamophobic western cultures can be collectively taken as Troy, THE INFLUENCE PEDDLERS at its best is a Trojan Horse in which not all the soldiers fit — or at least fit comfortably.
My Heart Hemmed In – Marie NDiaye
NDiaye, who is half French and half Senegalese, drains the narrative of the usual markers of identity, leaving behind elemental psychological processes and beguiling allusions.
Autopsy of a Father – Pascale Kramer
What Kramer depicts is the resulting virus of hate that infects not only victims and the oppressed, but perpetrators, the oppressors, and their families.
Odd Jobs and District – Tony Duvert
Duvert creates a world in which economic necessity and the demands of labor produce desire and sexuality — in other words, a world quite similar to our own.