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.
Performative writing promises no buttoned-up endings, no achievement of perfection. It refutes the notion of a progression, of a moving forward, the reaching of a completed end-point.
Being Here is Everything – Marie Darrieussecq
How can a biography of any woman not be about her sad fucking life?
I Am the Brother of XX – Fleur Jaeggy
The private self will not be saved by rationality.
The Last Wolf & Herman – László Krasznahorkai
If Bernhard was, however reductive the term, the Alpen-Beckett (Beckett of the Alps), then László Krasznahorkai might in turn be called the Alföld-Bernhard, the Bernhard of the Great Hungarian Plain.
Go, Went, Gone – Jenny Erpenbeck
A system that uses and relies on lists and numbers never can account for lives, but only for bodies — dead or alive.
The toggling between and stacking up of intensifiers and alternatives vividly brands the narrative of August with a symbol of equivocation and transition.
When we die, we all become fictional characters.