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.
The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse – Iván Repila
“Small goes on dying for days, and his brother goes on keeping him alive. As if they were playing.” This is Repila’s game, and he’s good at it.
Beauty Is A Wound – Eka Kurniawan
The concern takes us back to the original question: genre-based marketing labels risk reducing the individuality of books and flattening them into kitsch. But I’d like, hesitantly, to argue back: isn’t this only true if we think of magic realism as an ossified thing?
The Roar of Morning – Tip Marugg
The Roar of Morning is quite anti-climactic — in a digressive and descriptive mode it falls well short of self-knowledge or it fails to intimate truths, those buried umbilical cords, that an apocalyptic event is waiting to disinter.