“The colors that come to mind when reading Antoine Volodine… approach those of Francis Bacon: I see phthalo greens, cadmium red spikes, and the possibly-carcinogenic purples derived from coal tar. As in the work of Bacon, Volodine’s fundamental materials seem to carry some kind of psychic weight. Can one describe hell in a non-pejorative sense, as a blurring between the living and the dead, as a matter-of-fact erasure of stability itself with the background hum of electricity and an ever-present urge to howl? If so, this seems to be the territory Volodine is mapping, which I recommend following closely.” —Will Chancellor, The Brooklyn Rail
“As if Beckett and Pynchon have been stranded in a surreal and bloody wasteland . . . Waters navigates the novel’s astonishing profanity with imagination; the Monroe Girls have all retained the violent, vulgar language of the dead.” —Regan Mies, Asymptote
“This postmodern masquerade of a mystery . . . might be the strangest work of espionage fiction ever crafted. Fans of China Mieville’s The City and the City and John le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy will find much to appreciate.” —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
“Enigmatic . . . The narration is a series of discoveries we share with the bifurcated narrator, Breton, and our perplexity only increases as we stumble towards each disclosure in this slyly humorous and subversively inventive novel.” —Declan O’Driscoll, The Irish Times
“An elusive, centrifugal story of a grim near future that might stop George Orwell in his tracks . . . lively and beguiling.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Fascinating and sardonic . . . Volodine maintains control of the vivid images and wild flights of fancy, which range from spiders and sea urchins sprouting from human flesh to talk of cosmonauts and telepathy, thanks to his grounded and ironic prose. It’s a delight.” —Publishers Weekly
“Navigating this farcical book of the dead, readers may glimpse elements of the dreary dystopia of George Orwell, the black-comic absurdity of Samuel Beckett, and the occult surrealism of Leonora Carrington, but this astonishing novel is a creature unto itself, a fever dream of haunted bureaucracies and the shamanistic psyops of strange political parties. Hilarious, bleak, incantatory, The Monroe Girls is a revelation.” —Julia Elliott
“For over twenty-five years now, post-exotic literature has been making its mark on our pre-apocalyptic world. Its most illustrious representative, the only one whose face is known to us, is possibly Antoine Volodine . . . It is a laugh of despair and resistance that runs through this book, a chilling, terrible laugh, but one that is also innocence itself: he bears witness to mankind and never falters, even in the face of the worst indignities . . . In this sense, post-exotic literature is also, perhaps above all and fundamentally, an enormous, masterful joke.” —Eric Chevillard, Le Monde
“The Monroe Girls is by turns grimly comic and brightly horrifying, one of the finest entries yet into Antoine Volodine’s strange, moonlit, shapeshifting body of work. Like the Hirsch glasses that inaugurate its plot, it allows its readers to ‘take a look at a street that doesn’t exist on any map’ and through that vision acknowledges the activities of existence that literature often disavows. In a publishing landscape with too few surprises, thank god for Antoine Volodine, and thank god for Alyson Waters, too.” —Kevin Brockmeier
“Antoine Volodine is the most exciting and unique French contemporary writer. His work mixes an unapologetic shamanistic fabulism with a socialist political ethos. The result is an eccentric post-apocalyptic world in which a weirded-out struggle for the Party leaks between the world of the living and that of the dead, with unpredictable but satisfying results. The Monroe Girls is a perfect entry into his vertiginous work.” —Brian Evenson
“Built up text by text, year after year, Volodine’s world—instantly recognizable but never quite the same twice—is always a dark delight to revisit. In Alyson Waters’ noirishly poetic translation, the singularly beautiful, achingly sad The Monroe Girls mesmerizes from first page to last.” —Jordan Stump
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