"Jakuta Alikavazovic's sentences and charged silences bring individual and collective histories into unpredictable, illuminating relation. She writes with lyric precision while making the limits of language felt. We need all of her books in English." – Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School and Leaving the Atocha Station
"With this book, Jakuta confirms her immense and singular talent. She leads us in superb style through the Louvre, on the trail of her childhood. She examines identity, the place of memory, and that territory of the night that she has brilliantly made her own. A deeply moving book!" – Leïla Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny and Watch Us Dance
"Jakuta Alikavazovic charges her prose with tension and truth, offering the companionship of her generous, seeking mind while also daring to turn the lights off – to leave us for brief moments alone in the dark – for the purpose of drawing closer to the absences structuring this extraordinary portrait of the writer as a daughter, as a mother, as a second-generation emigrant, as a patient sifter of the most formative stories, her powers of transgression and self-preservation stashed in a shoulder bag. Like a Sky Inside is deeply compelling, secret, and surprising. I loved it." – Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form and This Little Art
"Jakuta Alikavazovic's sentences, beautifully translated by Daniel Levin Becker, are quicksilver prodigies, many-headed and many-tailed; one experiences them as disturbances and occasions, as corporeal shocks. She is one of the great writers of our time." – Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
"Like a Sky Inside is about a night spent at the Louvre, but really it is about art and enchantment, exile and longing. Above all, it is a devastatingly tender portrait of Alikavazovic's relationship with her father, written with unsurpassed brio, intelligence, and empathy." – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies and A Separation
"A perfect sculpture of pure thought, the kind of artwork that makes you want to steal it, a generous and joyful book that stitches memory and philosophy and narrative together so elegantly I was completely enthralled." – Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X and Pew
"Like a Sky Inside is that rare, crystalline short book that manages to be about a lot of different things – art, immigration and xenophobia, parenthood, daughterhood, self-invention – while seeming only to be about one (highly singular) evening in the writer's life. It is lucid, meditative, pointed, and so beautifully written that reading it provides precious moments of a kind of generative peace. A gift of a book." – Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State
