Reviews

• “Encompassing kinky murder, cruel neglect, misery porn, human sacrifice, and miracles, the stories in Lina Wolff’s Many People Die Like You investigate the bondage of identity, the rage of tangled relationships, and the uncompromising cloisters of community. Wolff’s deaths — literal, spiritual, metaphorical, no two alike — suggest Jean Genet’s admiration for “the elegance […] of the manifold plays of attitudes.” Wolff explores voyeurism, surveillance, and compliance, how needs and desires entwine beneath powerful gazes, how characters’ sufferings beckon, repel, or even demand complicity. Whether one breaks faith, commits adultery, or saves a soul, the human heart is insatiable, and society cares little for love. /…/ beguiling, often hilarious /…/ A proper theater of cruelty, weirdness, taboos, manipulation, and malice, Wolff’s work bears comparison to other notable collections by female authors concerned with violence, oppression, and gender-power dynamics: Anaïs Nin’s Under a Glass Bell and Other Stories, Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories, and Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. Across Wolff’s stage, her characters enact what Nin’s Antonin Artaud stand-in Pierre dreams of: “Gestures, cries, music […] scenes like the ancient rituals, which will transport people with ecstasy and terror.” Wolff achieves such transport, in spades. /…/ Many People Die Like You sounds a declaration and a challenge, the title coiling, uncoiling … many people you like die … you die like many people … many people like you die … Wolff’s fictive, raffish finesse, extruded through Saskia Vogel’s ace translation, creates an urge to revisit these haunted pages, to see the ball of serpentine stories shed their skins and reveal brighter colors, heightened sensations of surveillance and venomous complicity, and the puckish enjoyment of human entanglement.”

• “Wolff creates a hypnotic pull around her characters, making the reader wish they could remain in the story, how crass and chewy the lives portrayed can seem. The main characters are as often men as they are women, and Wolff writes with equal ease from a female and a male perspective. Human as humans are: sad and comical, petty and grand.”

• “Many People Die Like You is full of life in motion. Depicted with such certainty that even the narrator’s voice must at times give way to the swelling language. And so, Lina Wolff has arrived as one of the important voices in Swedish literature. Not least because of the freedom the texts create for themselves. A freedom full of pleasure and humor alongside ever-present earnestness.”

• “An immediate success for Lina Wolff /…/ Many People Die Like You is a more than promising debut. Lina Wolff is a skilled stylist and a good storyteller.”

• “Wolff’s brilliant language, twisted intrigue and black humor makes this debut the best I’ve read this year.”

• “Many People Die Like You is a fantastic short story collection. It’s quiet, thoughtful and, in spite of all the suffering, very funny”