Girl, World had me gripped from the very first page, and
many of its voices will stay with me for a very long time;
all of them are deserving of a novel of their own, in fact!
This fascinating, edgy, and accomplished collection often
draws on the author’s own experiences in some of the most
troubled parts of the world and even when she throws her
characters into the most awful situations, she has a talent for
finding humour, energy and, sometimes, rays of hope. Girl,
World illuminates the experience of young women today in
ways that are by turns surprising, funny, and devastating.
Poppe is a writer to watch.”
Zoe Strachan, author of Negative Space,
winner of the Betty Trask award
“Alex Poppe, trained as an actress, gave up her career and
in a courageous move few Western women would dare to
make, went alone to Iraq to become a teacher, fulfilled a
dream and became a writer. Her story is inspiring and her
talent is clear and her writing is bold and vivid. Her work
is about women and what it is like to be a woman, but only
partially, for her work is much more about the vast, nervous,
unsettled world from the Balkans to Kurdistan to New York.
She is a writer with the eye of a journalist whose prose is
bold, unique, unsparing, and vivid. Her stories can be hard
to read, but the reader knows they are true and that is why
they are good. She is a writer on her way and one to watch.”
Jere Van Dyk, Journalist,
CBS News, author of Captive and The Trade: My Journey into the Labyrinth of Political Kidnapping
“Since the dawn of the Digital Revolution, facts have fallen
into disrepute. They’re too contradictory, too refutable, too
malleable. Histories too have fallen into disfavor, a mere
thesis feeling unequal to the complex ambiguities of our
times. It is the fiction writers who have been filling this
vacuum, wanting to capture the essence, often the essential
horror, of a time and place. Above all, perhaps, is Land of
Green Plums, what history could depict Müller’s portrait
of Ceausescu’s Romania. But more recently we have seen
Englander’s Argentina and Marra’s Chechnya. Now here
comes Alex Poppe’s debut collection, Girl, World, with its
similar ambitions. A panoramic view of women’s lives from
the sex-trafficking gulags to Kurdistan, from the rape victims
to social media Islam, this is a searing collection of up-tothe-second stories. Unsentimental, driven by sparking kinetic
language, Poppe swaps backgrounds while never losing
sight of the essence of what it means to be a woman in the
second decade of our new century. She is generous to the
reader, there is nothing polemical here, just searing honest
snapshots of courage against horrendous odds.”
Joel Hinman, Editor-at-Large,
Epiphany Magazine
“Alex Poppe’s characters bristle with dark humor and pathos, as they navigate situations that range from disconcerting to tragic. With a rare talent for dialogue and an unerring sense of plot, Poppe draws readers irresistibly into her sharply drawn worlds, at once familiar and utterly strange.” —Jim Hicks, The Massachusetts Review