Antonio Ruiz-Camacho recommends
Home Reading Service (2021)
Fabio Morábito
"In the tradition of the wittiest and wisest Mexican storytellers such as Jorge Ibarguengoitia, Juan Villoro, and Juan Pablo Villalobos, Fabio Morabito has written a fable about contemporary Mexico that is both hilariously entertaining and soberingly profound. Home Reading Service reads both as a beguiling page-turner and a tender and compassionate elegy about the social unraveling of a country devastated by corruption, organized crime, and collective solitude. Weeks after finishing this slim but muscular novel, I'm still haunted by it."
The Jungle Around Us (2016)
Anne Raeff
"The stories in The Jungle around Us do not try to make sense of the world-they are the world. A world of uncanny sharpness that is as bold as it is striking in its uncompromising, haunting depictions of longing and uncertainty and grief and bliss. The jungle Anne Raeff proposes that we enter is, in reality, not around us, in the intricate destinations of displacement where this book takes place-from Bolivia to Austria, from Leningrad to Albuquerque, from Harlem to El Tambor-but within ourselves. The protagonists in these stories are commanded by loss and desire and uprootedness and the scalding need for human connection, but unlike those from any other work of fiction that might be too self-conscious of its own ambitions, they struggle handling these emotions. Raeff's characters are too complex, too fully fleshed out, too human to know what step to take next, and this is, perhaps, the biggest feat of many she has achieved with this ravishing collection. Her talent is rare and transfixing, and this book marks the arrival of a marvelous new voice."
