“Leichter unveils a dazzling narrative about the limitations of time and the heartbreaking realities of grief.”

“Hilary Leichter’s bountiful Rubik’s cube of a novel...continuously shifts the reader’s prior expectations without ever feeling like a gotcha. . . .After spending the whole book reveling in Leichter’s precise language and extraordinary powers of control over the intricate narrative, it reduced me to pure emotion, tears running down my cheeks.”

“A capacious container for our space-related concerns…Part of the pleasure of reading Terrace Story is figuring out how its peculiar architecture works…There’s both something old-fashioned about these flicks of the magic-realist wand—a touch of Kafka, a dusting of García Márquez, even a spoonful of Mary Poppins—and something distinctly of our moment…Leichter is interested in the bewitched space of narrative itself. The fable, with tidy generic conventions but stretchy moral lessons, performs a kind of magic on the novel, giving a slim work legend-like scope.”

“A brisk, wildly imaginative first novel…Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror.”

“If a Salvador Dali painting were reimagined as a contemporary novel, it would be Leichter’s Temporary, a trippy commentary on workplace culture and the gig economy. . . . With beautiful prose and colorful imagery, it’s a poetic tour de force.”

“[A] delirious and deeply humane satire. . . . Temporary has the manic, goofing energy of a lounge act.”

“Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme . . . her cutting, hilarious critique of the American dream will appeal to fans of Italo Calvino.”