Review of SMALLTOWNNOVELLA in the Bridge Chicago

Excerpt from the review: „Readers interested in this first-ever translation of Ronald M. Schernikau’s SMALLTOWNNOVELLA should start with Ben Miller’s thoroughgoing afterword for the volume, published over at the Baffler. In it, he lays out much fascinating backstory to Schernikau’s personal life and the socio-political contexts in which he worked, contours crucial for understanding why this novella is more than another queer adolescent coming-of-age story (…) What makes SMALLTOWNNOVELLA endure is not only its historical position as an early queer text, but the way its language still vibrates with the risk and refusal that defined its early success. Schernikau does not aestheticize suffering; he lets it speak in its own unfinished grammar—the book’s emotional force lies in its refusal to resolve itself into moral lesson or narrative triumph. Instead, it offers something rarer: the texture of a life learning how to speak while being told not to. Read now, in Lucy Jones’s supple translation and as part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s “Lost History” series, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA feels less like a living document—one that reminds us how class and politics are pressures on the self, the voice of which may linger, quiet but persistent, and in that persistence continues to show how literature can make room for lives that history tried, and failed, to erase.“ Full review here.