“This collection is destined to become a classic. Raeff illuminates without insisting, employing a delicate touch on the weightiest truths. Her characters, heartbreakingly real, navigate the aftermath of the terrible wrench of World War II, displacements of many sorts, and set out on quests for both place and a peace that arises all too rarely—displaying their humanity throughout. Elegant, compassionate, and blessedly wise, these stories are not only unforgettable, they are important for capturing lives we do not yet know.”
—Robin Black, author of Crash Course: Essays from Where Writing and Life Collide

Anne Raeff is a keen cartographer of human distances. The refugees in her finely measured stories—exiled from their homelands, from love affairs, from their own happiness—find compelling routes toward intimacy and purpose. This wise, thought-provoking collection left me feeling full of wonder.
—Michael Lowenthal, author of Charity Girl and The Paternity Test

With understated power, The Jungle around Us slips us deep into the lives of people displaced by circumstances, large and small, who are doing their earnest best in new territory. Observers at a remove (a student discovering a new way of seeing, a visitor suddenly alienated from her sister, a wandering lover, a researcher investigating the past in the Soviet Union), they peer through the scrim of everyday doings in a foreign land and foreign language to grapple with the mysteries we are to each other. The miracle of Raeff’s stories is how the measured grace of her stripped-down prose clears the way for the richness of her characters’ lived experience.
—Tracy Winn, author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody

The stories in The Jungle around Us do not try to make sense of the world—they are the world. A world of uncanny sharpness that is as bold as it is striking in its uncompromising, haunting depictions of longing and uncertainty and grief and bliss. The jungle Anne Raeff proposes that we enter is, in reality, not around us, in the intricated destinations of displacement where this book takes place—from Bolivia to Austria, from Leningrad to Albuquerque, from Harlem to El Tambor—but within ourselves. The protagonists in these stories are commanded by loss and desire and uprootedness and the scalding need for human connection, but unlike those from any other work of fiction that might be too self-conscious of its own ambitions, they struggle handling these emotions. Raeff's characters are too complex, too fully fleshed out, too human to know what step to take next, and this is, perhaps, the biggest feat of many she has achieved with this ravishing collection. Her talent is rare and transfixing, and this book marks the arrival of a marvelous new voice.
—Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs