While there is a plot to Apparitions of the Living, the narrative contained within the text is mere subplot to the larger plot of the reader’s engagement with the composite of the object and textual qualities of the book.

Constructing personae as a defense against death. The knowability of others. His whole artistic project has been a long eulogy. A multimedia patchwork of suicidal ideation.

Shiv manages it, you know. He manages to talk about love, or talk about talking about love and how talking about love mucks up love. But he doesn’t muck it up, at least not when he’s writing, even though his writing is so tempered by fears of and apologies for mucking it up that surely, you’d think, he must muck it up.

As an artifact, it initially seems incredibly bare, reducing an experience to the simplest of visual symbols and the tersest of prose. Upon close study, it becomes clear that there is much contained within North Was Here which does not demand detailed explication and which lay teeming under a cold, glacial surface.

You, Jana Beňová, are, of course, fated to the lineage of Lispector, Lefebvre, and Cixous, women who do not bother to pin their words down to the ground but let them swirl up above, overhead.

Reading Motoya, you forget what weird is. You forget what is normal… When Yukiko Motoya sets out to write a story, whether it be situated in marital strife or at the market, she takes our mundane observations and concerns, cracks them, and cooks with the weird egg gunk

For the inmates in Revueltas’s The Hole, as with Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the hopelessness of their outcome in life breaks them, their physicality and humanity also warped around a banged up idea of time.

It’s poignant that Mieko Kawakami selected for her protagonist a boy, capable of delighting in the world without judgment, for whom realizations are more novel, and enamoration is not distorted by the harshness of adulthood.