Review by Meghan Houser

Dispatched from the divide between life and art, Valeria Luiselli’s writing is deeply, inventively concerned with not only defining identity but freeing it from the constraints of definition. Her metaphors are spatial—cities and maps, architecture and navigation—and while she explores how her characters inhabit their physical surroundings, the architecture she’s ultimately concerned with is writing itself, that most elastic human construct. How do we inhabit the invented spaces of language, which, to Luiselli at least, occupy at least as much of our consciousness as the world in which we move? Layering artifice and accident, what she creates are houses of ghosts, but not Allende’s; invisible cities, but not Calvino’s; visceral realism, but not Bolaño’s . . .

Review by Meghan Houser

Is it necessary that a novel be constructed to “connect” with its readers? People Park, Pasha Malla’s big, glorious mess of a debut novel, is in many ways a book-length answer this question, at once challenging and exemplifying the idea of art as a means of human connection. People Park is ultimately a monument in defense of the difficult novel . . .