“Reading Pajtim Statovci’s fiction is like entering a lucid dream: life and death intertwines in an intimate dance the nostalgia for the past is akin to the nostalgia for the future. Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers “Anyone who has ever known what it’s like to leave home in pursuit of happiness and belonging will most likely love this tender, beautiful novel as much as I did.” NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names “ Crossing will devour you this is some fierce, dazzling, and heartbreaking shit.” searching tale of a young Albanian whose struggle to understand his sexual orientation and gender identity is interwoven with his struggle to survive in foreign lands.” The matter-of-fact depiction of numerous traumas intensifies the impact.” “An excellent and evocative novel about the intersection of migration and gender.” “ story told with great sensitivity and empathy, highlighting Statovci's development as a leading voice in modern European literature.” Tommy Sanders, The Post and Courier (Charleston) A gritty, gut-wrenching and heartbreaking read.” Pajtim Statovci’s sophomore novel Crossing falls in the latter category. “There are novels that you read because they entertain you, and there are novels that you read because the prose commands you to do so.
“A challenging and brilliant work of fiction.” It is a powerful phoenix of a book that rises from the ashes of the previous century.” The brutal beauty of Crossing comes from its almost cellular understanding of belonging and exclusion, love and cruelty. The sensitivity and poetry of David Hackston’s translation match the original. With considerable literary panache, Statovci treads a line between raw tragedy (the boys’ tormented bodies and hearts are a microcosm of a collective agony) and a more formal aesthetic of abjection bordering on existential horror, in the best European literary-philosophical tradition from Camus to Kafka, Kadare to Kristeva. wonderful gothic scenes, a visceral sense of alienation and desire. The novel memorably portrays the pain those labels can cause.” and have begun to recognize how inadequate such labels are to encompass the reality of individual lives. Crossing arrives at a moment when many of us have grown suspicious of monolithic categories. Crossing, in its rejection of fixed notions of identity, has a kind of kinship with recent books by other young queer writers, among them Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. at its best, longing and rage compressed in a single sentence at once sweepingly plangent and rooted in granular detail.
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