Leopard-Skin Hat

I love Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson, for the rippling unreality of her prose. Reading her is like watching a mirage flicker in and out of focus. — Merve Emre Readers will be moved by this probing story about the unknowability of others. — Publishers Weekly The story of Fanny and the Narrator is a story about our impulse to understand one another and about the way in which unknowability is what makes someone interesting; it is about, in fact, the relationship between unknowability and the desire to know, neither existing without the other, as a narrator does not exist without a story nor a story without a narrator… Exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional. — Meghan Racklin, The Brooklyn Rail In her ability to dip down, over and over, into her secret life, and emerge with a small, sparkling patch of that whole cloth, Serre strikes me as extraordinarily lucky… Serre’s primary subject, as always, is narration, and it’s thanks to this obsession that A Leopard-Skin Hat sidesteps memoir, not only by replacing siblings with friends and adopting a male Narrator but by plunging into the volatile spacetime of writing. — Sofia Samatar, The Baffler Serre’s work often rejects traditional conventions of the novel and demands more of its readers. In A Leopard Skin Hat, we follow a character known only as the Narrator, who Serre deftly separates from the narrator of the book, in a detached yet intimate portrayal of a lifelong friendship. — Liz Schroeder, New Letters