A 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 Serre always packs a great deal into her slim books... Her beguiling books usually feel more like Mozart, but A Leopard-Skin Hat suggests Bach’s funeral cantatas: long after you’ve finished the book, it goes on pulling at your heart * TANK Magazine * 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 * 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 * The Baffler *