With his skilled take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, Montes’ Perfect Days is a worthwhile, pleasantly creepy English-language debut.
What might be taken for granted as comfortable or soothing or beautiful in a novel that subscribes to bourgeois realism becomes intentionally alienating or disconcerting and potentially hostile in a novel about the subaltern.
The Art of the Publisher – Roberto Calasso
The publisher is not dying, it is adapting in order to survive.
The book is, at its core, an argument, even a challenge: to bypass a country’s literature is to also ignore its history, its people, its love and its pain, and to care about them is to read them.
Now and At the Hour of Our Death – Susana Moreira Marques
Moreira Marques captures something essential about death in her book’s first half by touching only lightly on the specifics of the people she encounters, and rarely mentioning herself.
Never Goodnight – Coco Moodysson
Moodysson so accurately nails the conflicting tones of preteen anxiety and exuberance that even the sweetly childish games the girls play may be read as personal and somewhat embarrassing.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish – Andrus Kivirähk
Deeply anti-religious, the novel questions society’s ability to believe one set of mystical explanations while rejecting behaviors as primitive that have directly enabled their survival for generations.
If creating great historical fiction requires more than an intellectual curiosity about the past but also an appreciation for the nuanced way that history’s shadows accrete to color our present, then Hungarian author György Spiró’s Captivity stands with the best of the genre
A Raskolnikoff – Emmanuel Bove
There are crucial realities here the writing is doing its utmost to convey, realities our realisms can’t confront, realities that require other aesthetics.
The figure of the flâneur is generally a de-politicized one; it is typically a man who observes the world from a safe, distanced, detached perspective.