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by Fleur Jaeggy (author), Gini Alhadeff (translator)
As concentrated as bullets, new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy.
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don't rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.
"Starred Review. It is thrilling to live in Jaeggy's worlds, which are so intense they threaten to boil over, yet pull back just enough to keep their secrets." - Publishers Weekly
"In prismatic translation from the Italian, these tiny tales sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom." - Kirkus
This information about I Am the Brother of XX was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The London Times Literary Supplement named Fleur Jaeggy's S.S. Proleterka as a Best Book of the Year; and her Sweet Days of Discipline won the Premio Bagutta as well as the Premio Speciale Rapallo.
The author of The Sun at Midday and Diary of a Djinn, Gini Alhadeff translated to great acclaim Patrizia Cavalli's My Poems Won't Change the World. .
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