Praise for Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso
* Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, Longlist
“A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song… Moskovich writes sentences that lilt and slink, her plots developing as a slow seduction and then clouding like a smoke-filled room.”
—Shahidha Bari, The Guardian
“A bold feminist novel: it contains a world of love and friendship between women in which men and boys are both indistinct and irrelevant… The Natashas was a fascinating debut, Virtuoso is even better… It is the Blue Velvet to her Eraserhead: a fully realized vision of a strange world.”
—Katharine Coldiron, Times Literary Supplement
“If Ferrante’s Neapolitan series was condensed into one book and that one book was turned into a person who spent a good deal of time at queer punk shows on X, but then they got clean and a job where they wore pumps and a pencil skirt and longed for all the selves they had to abandon to survive—and then that person became a book—this would be that book.”
—Gala Mukomolova, NYLON
“Virtuoso is a fine, fraught, strange novel… it will be fascinating to see what she writes next.”
—Alex Preston, The Guardian
“Virtuoso didn’t simply engage me on an intellectual level, but also on a deep and emotional one… goddamn impressive.”
—Joseph Edwin Haeger, The Big Smoke
“The prose poem-esque vignettes that make up the novel Virtuoso are propulsive and exact and Yelena Moskovich’s language oozes with sensory experience… Virtuoso is a queer and transnational novel that hypnotically dunks the reader into every scene.”
—Nate McNamara, Lit Hub
“Virtuoso is powerfully mysterious and deeply insightful, a page-turner precisely because you have no idea what to expect. In the era of #MeToo, Moskovich’s arrestingly close and complicated view of lesbian relationships and female friendship seems more urgent than ever before. But it’s perhaps the novel’s defiantly surrealist style that is its greatest triumph.”
—Nadia Beard, Los Angeles Review of Books
“This tightly woven feminist novel is a deep exploration of womanhood spanning decades, continents, and digital spaces… Virtuoso is a moving book that defies categorization.”
—Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed
“[Virtuoso’s] prose is lyrical.”
—June Sawyers, Booklist
“Virtuoso is a novel / is a performance / is a dance with movements and variations / is poetry / is film / is a palette splattered with colors / is a body out of breath. Virtuoso is truly a sensual euphoria, one that must be experienced firsthand.”
—Cameron Finch, Michigan Quarterly Review
“Haunted and haunting… Told through multiple unique, compelling voices, the book’s time and action are layered, with possibilities and paths forming rhythmic, syncopated interludes that emphasize that history is now.”
—Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, Foreword, starred
“A Best Small Press Book from 2020”
—Mallory Smart, Maudlin House
“Moskovich breaks almost every rule of contemporary fiction.”
—Kirkus
“[Virtuoso] tells the stories of four queer European women in a filmic, fragmented style… An unexpected reunion ties together all the stories in an emotionally complex and gratifying ending.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Moskovich dwells with indigenous belonging and a native fluency in the realms of the unseen, the worlds slotted between worlds, or behind them, a fluttering geography of veils calling for mirrors, or perhaps for the abolition of mirrors.”
—John Biscello, Riot Material Magazine
“Virtuoso jumps through time involving three pairs of sapphic women, ranging from childhood friends, marriage, and scandal. The paths of these women sync and blend together like waves, written in an almost abstract form. These are loves intertwined with melancholy and mystery.”
—Andrew King, University Bookstore (Seattle)
“With incredible characters and sharp narration, Virtuoso illustrates the many ways in which women don’t follow the stereotypes created for them.”
—Jaylynn Korrell, Independent Book Review
“Moskovich’s novel spills-over with the nuances of existence (and by extension, co-existence), grounding readers in her dizzying and dreamlike story of love, friendship, and reconnection.”
—Kaitlyn Yates, The Arkansas International
“Moskovich writes with the eye of a film director and the lyricism of a poet.”
—Mallory Miller, Paperback Paris
“The author’s inimitable style is both elegant and poetic. By story’s end, our characters’ lives amazingly, but not unbelievably, intertwine, skillfully arranged by Moskovich.”
—Virginia Parobek, World Literature Today
“Virtuoso is a striking probe into feminine love and friendships, an examination of the dichotomy between the individual and the bleeding of self into other which occurs in relationships.”
—Beth Mowbray, Nerd Daily
“Moskovich’s dreamlike prose and fragmentation make the introduction of the surreal feel natural in the world she has painted for us.”
—Hayley Neiling, Heavy Feather Review
“Virtuoso is novel in the most original sense… In Moskovich’s inspired hands, language becomes a fragile and shifting musculature, a substance both firm and ephemeral, simultaneously the stuff of our lives and the stuff of dreams.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“Part Ferrante, part Despentes, Yelena Moskovich is a brutal but tender-hearted chronicler of women in love.”
—Barbara Browning, author of The Gift, I’m Trying to Reach You, The Correspondence Artist
Praise for Yelena Moskovich’s The Natashas
“Strange and carnal; a riddle of language, the body, and the artistic impulse.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Dreamy and impressionistic, Moskovich’s novel deftly illustrates the many ways women are commodified and objectified by society in both macro and micro ways.”
—Kristine Huntley, Booklist
“The text stacks its scenes like building blocks, creating a mosaic of surrealist serendipity in which everything you think you know dissolves, again and again… The Natashas presents a Murakami-esque pictogram of incomplete data that will mesmerize the reader long after the last page has been turned.”
—Samantha Kirby, The Arkansas Review
“The Natashas is beautiful, original and distinctive—a stunning new voice.”
—Jenni Fagan, author of The Panopticon
“From the surrealistic imagery written with inimitable flair, to the biting grit of the story’s exploration of sexual objectification and self, The Natashas is utterly captivating. Lyrical, brooding, and delightfully dreamlike, the novel is a strange and ruthless journey into the ailing heart of humanity — and a bizarre peek into the mind of a brilliant new novelist.”
—Michael A. Ferro, Michigan Quarterly Review
“Closest in tone and plot to a David Lynch film… confounding and beguiling in equal measure; prose that reads as heady yet ephemeral as smoke.”
—Lucy Scholes, The Independent
“Wonderfully original…
