Review by Alex McElroy

Andrés Barba’s fiction is a zone of transformation, and in August, October and Rain Over Madrid, Barba’s first full-length works translated into English, the author attends to more understated manners of transformation: puberty, fatherhood, and grief. These transitions are not so much physical as emotional, and they signal a shift in Barba’s work, a move away from the gritty realms of prostitutes and orphans to the unspoken depravity of domestic life . . .

Review by Alex McElroy

Andrés Neuman is unthreatened by borders. If writers are born in response to trauma, then Neuman, the writer, emerged when his family fled Argentina for Granada when he was fourteen. Now Neuman, not yet thirty-seven years old, has already published nearly twenty books, and at the center of his literary endeavors are the repercussions of loss and dislocation. Neuman has spent his career crossing boundaries both literary and geographical, and it feels appropriate that he would tell The American Reader that the move to Granada instilled him with "a sense of strangeness towards geography, towards the space in which you're telling a story, towards the origins of the characters" . . .