Beňova's novel riffs on stories old and new, and the means by which we tell and experience them, to bring the reader inside her protagonist's mind.
–Vol. 1 Brooklyn
An elegant, postmodern fairy tale.
–Jacob Hoefer, Bookseller, Labyrinth Books
Jana Beňová's Away! Away! provides laughs of a slightly more satirical, world-weary sort... No surprise–it's the journey, not the arrival, that matters, and Rosa's journey is filled with slings and arrows of outrageous Slovakian fortune.
–Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub
All our hand-me-down wants are ways of ignoring the fact that one day we'll die like dogs. Where will we all go, one day? Away. The gift of Beňová's novel is the omniscient lurch of her prose (a multi-party stream of consciousness). Away! Away! combines its characters' voices to form a a choral imploration to the reader: sit down and sympathize with these people who make mistakes because they are so afraid of death, the end of the book. People abandon each other because they're afraid of being pinned down in an identity: locatable, inanimate. Why begrudge them their selfishness on grounds of its absurdity when what they're up against is even more absurd than that? (Hint: it's death.)
–Michael Mungiello, Cleveland Review of Books
[Away! Away!] is an interesting tale.
–The Modern Novel blog
Short and yet packs a lot of punch... unique.
–Lolly K Dandeneau, Book Stalker Blog
...lineage of Lispector, Lefebvre, and Cixous...
–Katherine Beaman, Commonplace Review
PRAISE FOR SEEING PEOPLE OFF
Seeing People Off is at once gritty yet beautiful, intelligent yet unpretentious, with a strange humor reminiscent of Daniil Kharms but with more tenderness.
–Kenyon Review
Stunning... [Beňová] has created that unique and uniquely satisfying phenomenon of a page-turner that must yet be read slowly and precisely.
–Necessary Fiction
Beňová is at her best when she's funny, and her sense of humor tends toward the dry and the dark. Seeing People Off is a fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here.
–NPR
[Beňová] is in the first generation of post-Soviet writers for whom scarcity and censorship is a recent memory, and the political is always lurking just behind the breezy Aimee Bender-like prose.
–Publishers Weekly
The setting of Jana Beňová's first book in English, translated by Janet Livingstone and published by Two Dollar Radio, is mirrored in how the novel itself is built. The bursts of narration – as short as a few words and rarely longer than a page – are recurring contained units, and they provide a stabilizing uniformity to an otherwise eccentric set of characters and scenes.
–Electric Literature
Beňová's short, fast novels are a revolution against normality. Unlike so many others, her novels not only claim to be a revolution but actually achieve this feat through their minimalist narratives that go against all conventions; in fact, Beňová manages to subtly and intelligently poke fun at conventional categorizations.
–Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF
[Seeing People Off] must be read for a long time. It will be receiving awards, translated and made into a film, it will be put into anthologies. They will declare it as one of the most important works of new Slovak prose.
–SME
