Tag Archives: experimental fiction
Recounting the Past: Michèle Audin’s One Hundred Twenty-One Days, Translated by Christiana Hills
Reviewed by Amanda Sarasien How to tell the unspeakable story…Perhaps numbers tell what words cannot? Our instinct is to rebel against this notion. We think of numbers, cold stats, as faceless, even violent. The Nazis were obsessive counters, tattooing concentration-camp prisoners with numbers to strip them of identity, performing experiments which transformed human beings into […]
A Catalog of Reviews of The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, Translated by Christina MacSweeney
or, a hyperbolic meditation on the ways in which literary reviews manipulate value and affect sales HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 1: “The Story of My Teeth” Starred Review WRITER: PW Staff PROVENANCE: Publishers Weekly LISTING: 10M The coveted starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, a steadier buzz-generator than an electric toothbrush, set a high valuation bar for […]
Dissecting Layers: Hervé Le Tellier’s Electrico W, Translated by Adriana Hunter
Reviewed by Lara Vergnaud Electrico W is about fragments – of time, memory, language and relationships, which rudely brush against one another, and which don’t seem to cohere until they do. This latest work by experimental French author Hervé Le Tellier, published in France by JC Lattès in 2011, and now available in English thanks […]
At the Intersection of Poetry and Mathematics: Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes, translated by Adam Morris
Reviewed by Amanda Sarasien That the name Hilda Hilst is not more widely recognized by English-language readers, particularly admirers of her contemporary, Clarice Lispector, should come as no surprise considering the experimentalism of Hilst’s work. Thankfully, Adam Morris’ translation of With My Dog-Eyes, “perhaps the most novel-like prose work” (xvi) of a largely poetic oeuvre, […]