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“A book that willfully and delightfully blurs the boundaries among novel, memoir, and meditation…A key pleasure of The Polish Boxer is that of revelation…The power of The Polish Boxer is that it is always rooted in the personal. It is deeply accessible, deeply moving.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“Funny and revelatory…As borders, physical and mental, are crossed and redrawn, the stories
Eduardo tells us and tells himself are revealed to be not just partial
but also fantastical, false. The Polish boxer? There may never have been
one. Yet this in no way diminishes the pleasure Halfon’s myriad stories
afford.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“Elegant.”
— Marie Claire
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“These are the stories of life…The fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible.”
— Publishers Weekly (boxed review)
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“Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery. The Polish Boxer is sublime and arresting and will linger with readers who will be sure to revisit it again and again.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“This first English translation of Halfon’s work is highly readable and engaging, partly owing to the careful work by a team of five translators; on an aesthetic note, its disruption of genre categories provides readers food for thought about the nature of literary creations.”
— Library Journal
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“Brilliant…Opens with one of the best classroom scenes I’ve ever read.”
— Shelf Awareness
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“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.”
— Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and others
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“Eduardo Halfon’s prose is delicate, precise, and as ineffable as precocious art—a lighthouse that illuminates everything.”
— Francisco Goldman, prizewinning author of Say Her Name
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“Eduardo Halfon belongs to a new generation of Latin American writers who, from the beginning, demonstrate an impeccable mastery of their craft, without any hesitation in the use of language.”
— Sergio Ramírez, former vice president of Nicaragua and author of Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
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“The Polish Boxer is an enchanting, unclassifiable book of encounters, impressions, and improvisations: a book for the ages, which can be read in one sitting, and then again, and again, and again.”
— Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and author of The Tree of the Doves
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“It is not often that one encounters such a mix of personal engagement and literary passion, or pain and tenderness.”
— Andrés Neuman, author of Traveler of the Century