Ruben Reyes Jr.’s ‘Archive of Unknown Universes’; Eloghosa Osunde’s ‘Necessary Fiction’

This month, we read about the complications of love-especially strange love-in hostile environments for them, from the Silvador that the war torn to the modern Lagos.

Unknown Aquony Archive: Novel

Robin Reyes Junior (Mariner Books, 288 p., $ 28, July 2025)

It is difficult to imagine a more sad story with political issues of our time than Aquony archive is unknown. In his first novel, American Salvadori author Robin Reyes Junior sends his characters on an adventure through semi-homogeneous complexes to explore alternative results for the Al Salvador Civil War 1972-1992-is a struggle that had traces on the entire Western hemisphere.

Aquony archive is unknown It begins in 2018. Its heroes are Anna and Louis, two American Taliban Silvadurian at Harvard University, they return to. Despite the troubles of their relationship, Louis travels with Anna to Havana, where archival research is scheduled to be conducted on the Silvadori Civil War. (The Cuban government helped the left -wing rebels in El Salvador.) Lewis “has a doubt that the trip was a recent attempt to save a relationship on the rocks.”

Although she is a diligent researcher, Ana is fascinated by a fantasy device known as Defractor, which allows users to make different versions of their lives. Defractor is an experimental technique, which is still present in university libraries for academic use, but the “US -Facultant Technology Sector” seeks to “make it a hot consumer product, free of regulations.” Discussions on Defractor have clear similarities with artificial intelligence. “The Internet passes without seeing an article on Defractor was impossible,” he wrote Reyes JR. Some people “saw technology a single solution to all their personal problems.”

Defractor gives the story an element of magic realism, a literary tradition with strong roots in Latin America. When Anna shines into one of the factors at the University of Havana, she deviates from her research questions to ask whether her relationship with Lewis has a future. In one of the reality created by the worker, she sees herself with another partner. Anna is convinced that “the mysterious man, her other boyfriend, keeps a kind of answer” to remaining questions about her family’s history. (Anna and Luis El Salvador mothers fled during the war.)

Defractor torn the novel plot in two parts. In the first universe – the well -known universe – President Ronald Reagan puts “millions of dollars in weapons, ammunition and military training in El Salvador”, and the left -wing rebels lose. In the second universe, the Salvadian Revolution succeeds because the United States does not interfere. El Salvador becomes a Cuba’s communist success.

Reyes Junior weave both universes together to reveal long -acting secrets. Anna and Louis’s tense association contrasts with a historical love story, which condemned “regardless of the way the war has turned.”

It is difficult to read Aquony archive is unknown Without thinking about the current president of El Salvador, Nayeb Bokil, who designed himself a global right -wing icon and a loud supporter of a collective prison. Reyes JR. Strategic in putting his novel before Bukele reached power in 2019. Bukele has transformed Al Salvador, whitening authoritarian violations with cheerful tourism campaigns and social media. His ascension could have been disrupted by the rhythm of the first universe of the novel.

But the imaginary Communist government of Salvadori and Boykil are involved in some major features. “Anna has read enough to know that aesthetic maintenance was the government shield against the world,” and it is reflected during her visit to the Communist San Salvador. “Capitol was beautiful, but beauty was not justice.” Some results remain the same in all universes.Alison Micheim

The necessary imagination: a novel

Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead Books, 320 PP., $ 28, July 2025)

“This is a kind of way we are going through in our lives: We tell ourselves stories so that what happens is something we can live with. The necessary imagination.” This quote written by Lidia Yuknavitch is an innovative novel – in the novel Nigerian author ELUGHOSA OSUNEDE, a feverish celebration of the exotic life in Lagos, “Quick City” where “shit continues to rotate.”

Like Osunde for the first time tramp!and The necessary imagination It is a novel in stories. (Chapter One, “Good Boy”, won Paris reviewThe PLIMPUNON Award for Imagination in 2021.) It was organized on a series of short articles from the characters fighting to sculpt the spaces for themselves in the ruthless extension in Lagos, and makes accounts of their lives that help them to obtain them, and until they flourish, on the sidelines of a society dare.

Sometimes, this is done with the global money language. He also notes one character in a relationship with another man, “The crazy whip is a great way to say, Do not have sex with meAnd here the streets need to hear this in Pidgin, Yoruba, IGBO and Hausa, as well as many other languages. … I and K wearing episodes, but people do not ask personal questions when they see what I got out of it. We bought this right to go without challenge. It was not cheap. “

Often, though, their identities are built through self -interrogation, and most importantly conversations with friends. Osunde characters love to shoot on shit, and The necessary imagination It is a love message to the hard -working novels about a person’s life throughout dinner, delirium, “truth circles” about the fires of the backyard, and watching PowerPuff Girls Restart friend apartment.

Despite the strong sense of the novel, the vocabulary of these hearts to the audience will be familiar to the Urbanists from 20 and 30 things everywhere. Osunde’s characters are terrified of their ability to continue their lives in the face of the brutality of the state (in its case, the suppression of 2020 #ndsars). They want to be fierce, but they remain “soft” and live a life that they feel “sustainable”. They are freely. They are dedicated; They have side questions. They speak – a lot – limits. “I think the more I live, the more I see that the borders can apply to everything. Even souls. Even God, I told another character.

In the hands of another writer, these weights may feel excessive. But it is difficult not to take care of these characters, which are serious and seriously serious, made human beings completely in the vast prose of Osundi. Many of them are burdened by the weight of their families, which are “behind them in the memory kit”. For them, friendship may be the deepest form of love, and they crawl together “through gaps in an unfair system, and building a safe world within a city that always wants blood.” –Chloe Hadafas

This article appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a retreat of our best book reviews, deep diving, and other readings that go back from DrumbEat of the News. Get the squad directly every Saturday.

July, in short

American writer born in Soviet Gary Stengart Vera, or faith The alien is tracked for a Russian -Jewish family that is trying to obtain it in modern America. In the South Korean author, Kyung Ran Joe FishTranslating by Chi Yong Kim, a successful sculptor restricts a suicide plan that includes deadly seafood dish. The latest movie “Previous Foreign Correspondence Dan Vespranman”, forsakenHe follows the efforts of celebrities in the United States, which has turned into a political spy on Eastern Europe dictator. A woman is trying to rebuild her youth in the Norwegian author Lynn Oman Girl, 1983Translated by Martin Aitkin. Two of the former lovers who reached the same era in a newly democratic Croatia Re -Communication in Lidiga Helgy’s novel for the first time, Tilted.

In Tehila Hakimi Twisty Hunting in AmericaIt was translated by Joanna Chen, an Israeli woman who takes into the woods after moving to the United States. Forest fires, Choreomania, and the love triangle in the Mexican author Daniel Saldania Paris are conducted Dancing and fireTranslated by Christina Maxoini. Indian American writer Nisant Pacha A bomb placed near the heart It depicts a marriage that caught the fire of revolutionary fermentation in the First World War. In Lisa Smith Jamaica RoadA friendship in a coherent British Jamaican community is revealed in the eighties of the last century. And an American Chinese woman treats the amazing collapse of her life in Katy Yi Maggie or, a man and a woman walking in a bar.the chapter