"Boris Leibov’s new book is a mosaic of standalone short stories, united, you might say, by the motif of fragility, or even the illusory nature of our notion of life and death, the living and the dead. One person might seem alive, but in fact, they are a dead man burning in hell, and another dead man is surely more vigorous than some of those alive; he is a politician more influential than certain deputies and senators, who, on their own two feet, show up to work.

In Khol, recruits defend the borders from the dead men, which they are none too happy about — rather, they are scared; children and adults are encouraged to fold birds from the paper of evidently dead books; left activists march to defend the rights of the dead to live, et cetera, et cetera. In a conceptualist manner, life itself and death itself are reduced to standalone images — images that perhaps never really meant anything at all. This may dismay some readers, but Khol will cheer them up with its sometimes optimistic and sometimes half-mad humor, without which the living have a hard time."