The project of the book—to make literary the body horror and psychological turmoil that are part of so many women’s lives—is an exciting one that, in the hands of a more inquisitive writer, could be culture-shifting.
That Tokarczuk's Nobel nomination was rumored to be greatly based on the accomplishments of this book has only magnified the anticipation. And now, it is here.
The episodes of The Swank Hotel are weird because the world is weird. And the world is even weirder when the person you love most on earth might be dead but you still have to go to work.
I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude.
It’s a book that celebrates the delights of amateurism, the facts that you stumble upon when you’re reading for something else, or the rare bird you happen to notice when you’re out on a whale watch.
Derviş was a prolific novelist, writing since the age of 16, setting her fictions in the manner of social realism, a genre that, when she wrote, was surpassed by interwar postmodernism.
Shaky Town is a tough and beautiful mural of a novel constructed with interwoven short stories that explore the streets of East Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The Free World is unflinching in chronicling the Cold War era’s “deeply entrenched ideology of gender difference” that manifested itself in vicious, often violent misogyny.