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 StarsCroft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators This is a blast.
--
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity.
-- Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prizewinning author of
Flights and
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the DeadWittily tracks eight translators in search of a writer whos gone missing in a Polish forest.
* Financial Times *
A feast of reading, writing, and translation, by a master of all three.
* Foyles *
A wild and wonderfully unruly novel about translation and transmission, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a showcase for Jennifer Crofts acrobatic intellect, delicious humour and voluptuous prose.
-- Katie Kitamura, author of
IntimaciesCroft makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviours 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 *
Youll cancel plans to keep reading this addictive novel.
-- Panashe Nyadundu * Elle *
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 BurningGenerous 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 SunIn 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, Extinctions push and pull is both thought-provoking and thrilling. I was rapt.
-- Emily Nemens, author of
The Cactus LeagueAn 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 HeartEmbark on a literary journey like no other in Jennifer Crofts latest masterpiece, where eight translators converge in a mystical Polish forest to decode the magnum opus of the revered author Irena Rey Crofts storytelling is both intellectually stimulating and truly enthralling, offering a plot that is genuinely distinctive and captivating. This narrative stands apart from any book Ive encountered, delivering a reading experience that is refreshingly unparalleled.
-- Lana McLean * Ramona Magazine *
Wild joyous.
-- Lauren Groff * Bustle *
Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered).
-- Malcolm Forbes * The Washington Post *
Croft combines big questions with generous, intuitive humor Its a rare book thats equally gifted at provoking thought and laughter. The Extinction of Irena Rey is certainly strange, but its also strangely beautiful Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about book people.
-- Hannah Weber * World Literature Today *
Delightfully wry.
--
Booklist, starred review
Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire.
* People *
The Extinction of Irena Rey playfully dismantles long-standing conceptions of literary translation Croft holds everything together with the aplomb of a more seasoned novelist.
-- Alice Whitmore * Sydney Review of Books *
A clever literary mystery unfolding within a labyrinth of unreliable narration and translation, it explores with wit and intricacy the ambiguities and contradictions of the translators art. The author knows whereof she writes Jennifer Croft is an award-winning translator and her involuted literary quest should appeal to fans of Nabokovs Pale Fire or Bolanos The Savage Detectives.
--
The Sydney Morning Herald, Fiction pick of the week
Both gossipy and profound, the novel makes hay with intellectual questions of Crofts day job as well as the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the translation trade.
-- Anthony Cummings * The Observer *
Its to Crofts credit that she sustains her claustrophobic narrative so deftly, with plenty of plot twists. What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it cant fail to change the way you think about language.
-- Carrie OGrady * The Guardian *
Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery.
* Vanity Fair *
An interpersonal cacophony that crackles outward a cleverly layered, multivocal novel that plays with our expectations of who is speaking and how meaning gets made in between authors, translators, and readers.
* Chicago Review of Books *
An astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery.
* On the Seawall *
The Extinction of Irena Rey puts translators first, and with humour and grace explores art, celebrity, and the power of language.
* Lit Hub *
The building unease of the plot is offset by the back and forth between Emis text and Alexiss footnotes, which add humour even as they cast doubt on events. Readers are left unsure what to trust, as the novel questions if true, accurate translation is possible and what is lost along the way a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes.
The building unease of the plot is offset by the back and forth between Emis text and Alexiss footnotes, which add humour even as they cast doubt on events. Readers are left unsure what to trust, as the novel questions if true, accurate translation is possible and what is lost along the way a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes.
--
Library Journal, starred review
Incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldnt put it down What I did not expect was that Crofts debut would frolic so joyfully, so rigorously, in the absurd, the inane, and stay there from start to finish. Or that Id end up frolicking with her. Reader, if youre looking to get your heart thrashed, this may not be the novel for you. But if youre up for a romp through a wilderness of ideas, innuendo and ecological intrigue (who knew there even was such a thing?), stay with me None of this craziness feels frivolous. On the contrary, the novels staked in anxieties about climate change, extinction and the unbalancing of nature thanks to art Mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art.
-- Fiona Maazel * The New York Times Book Review *
For all its cleverness, The Extinction of Irena Rey is serious about the collective nature of art-making and its interconnectedness with the natural world. What is more, Croft is superb on approaches to literary translation and its orthodoxies (Nabokov hovers at the edges of the text), and she takes some good shots at the cult of the upper-case author into the bargain.
-- Laurel Berger * The Spectator *
In time with the steady unveiling of Irenas skeletons, the novel muses through questions related to aestheticism, Anthropocene ethics, method writing, awards-committee politics, and personal rivalries. Grey Eminence is unpacked, including its dystopian perspective that art is the uniquely human impulse to relentlessly transform whatever we come into contact with, to undo in order to do or redo. Exciting developments temper the storys headiness leading up to its final, disillusioning confrontation. The Extinction of Irena Rey is an incisive literary novel that troubles the divide between art, its interpretation, and real life.
-- Michelle Anne Schingler * Foreword Reviews *
Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles, and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.
-- Cat Acree * Bookpage *
Praise for Homesick:
Through photographs and prose, Crofts genre-blending memoir investigates how chronic illness sickens an entire family A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir.
* Booklist *
Praise for Homesick:
Haunting and visually poetic, Crofts book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique.
* Kirkus Reviews *
Praise for Homesick:
In this marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable, Croft follows Amys tortured path as she asks how far, and in what way, we are responsible for how loved ones lives play out. In her struggle to answer such questions, Amy learns the extent and limitations of loves power.
* Foreword Reviews *
