“Seeing People Off is a fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR
“Stunning… [Beňová] has created that unique and uniquely satisfying phenomenon of a page-turner that must yet be read slowly and precisely.”
—Bronwyn Averett, Necessary Fiction
“The setting of Jana Beňová’s first book in English, translated by Janet Livingstone and published by Two Dollar Radio, is mirrored in how the novel itself is built. The bursts of narration — as short as a few words and rarely longer than a page — are recurring contained units, and they provide a stabilizing uniformity to an otherwise eccentric set of characters and scenes.”
—Nathan Scott McNamara, Electric Literature
“These stories explore death and other kinds of leaving in wry, fresh ways. The end of childhood, the end of an affair, the end of sanity—when I arrived at the end of this book, I found myself returning to the beginning. This is a merry-go-round one can hold on to.”
—Paige Webb, Kenyon Review
“[Beňová] is in the first generation of post-Soviet writers for whom scarcity and censorship is a recent memory, and the political is always lurking just behind the breezy Aimee Bender–like prose.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Beňová’s prose… bounces through a fragmented narrative in ways that are both unexpected and beautifully resonant. The many moments of profound sadness are wisely cut by a sardonic underbite that keeps the writing sharp, fresh, constantly renewed.”
—Elizabeth DeMeo, The Arkansas International
“Beňová’s short, fast novels are a revolution against normality. Unlike so many others, her novels not only claim to be a revolution but actually achieve this feat through their minimalist narratives that go against all conventions; in fact, Beňová manages to subtly and intelligently poke fun at conventional categorizations.”
—Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF
“[Seeing People Off] must be read for a long time. It will be receiving awards, translated and made into a film, it will be put into anthologies. They will declare it as one of the most important works of new Slovak prose.”
—SME
