The Extinction of Irena Rey
Reader Score
72%
72% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 15 reviews on
National Indie Bestseller
Named a must read by People, Vanity Fair, Electric Literature, Nylon, Alta Journal, CrimeReads and Debutiful
Named a most anticipated book by Elle, The Millions, Bustle, Lit Hub, Dandelion Chandelier, Zibby Mag, Bookpage, and The Rumpus
Book Details
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date: Mar 5th, 2024
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Dimensions: 9.40in - 6.30in - 1.20in - 1.25lb
- EAN: 9781639731701
- Categories: • Literary• Psychological• Thrillers - Suspense
About the Author
Croft, Jennifer: - Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is the author of Homesick, a Saroyan Prize winner, and numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"Croft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators . . . .This is a blast." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Croft . . . makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviors involved in the translator-author relationship. At the same time-even in the midst of a joke-she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation." --Kirkus Reviews "A wild and wonderfully unruly novel about translation and transmission, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a showcase for Jennifer Croft's acrobatic intellect, delicious humor and voluptuous prose." --Katie Kitamura, author of INTIMACIES "The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun and absolutely alive." --Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of CHAIN GANG ALL STARS "Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists." --Megha Majumdar, author of A BURNING "Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN "In The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft mines the complexity of translation, adoration, and symbiosis. At once a meditation on the networks required to bring literature to worldwide readers and a page-turner about the inevitable fallibilities of those systems, Extinction's push and pull is both thought-provoking and thrilling. I was rapt." --Emily Nemens, author of THE CACTUS LEAGUE "Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity." --Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of FLIGHTS and DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD "An exquisite pleasure. Croft unearths the interconnection between land and communities, revealing the collaborative networks of forests as clearly and incisively as she does that of the literary world. In this exquisite pleasure of a novel, in which I luxuriated on every page, Croft mines the vicissitudes of the translation world to reveal quite plainly that everything is connected, and translators deserve more." --Chelsea T. Hicks, author of A CALM & NORMAL HEART "Homesick, is . . . boundary-pushing, or boundary-expanding . . . a translator's Bildungsroman, one in which art is first a beacon, then a home." --NPR on HOMESICK "Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around." --The New York Times on HOMESICK "Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." --Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of SABRINA & CORINA and WOMAN OF LIGHT on HOMESICK