I loved how Antonya Nelson compressed time, and how, with a single phrase, I understood a moment for all of its awkwardness, anxiety, hope, and honesty.

It’s easy to read this book and be entranced by the protagonist, that lone man on a quest to find the wife who has been stolen from him and replaced by an impostor. But it’s the wife who finally broke my heart.

There's a lot of posturing about contemporary writing, but the truth is -- most of it isn't any good. That's where Robert Walser comes in, from the first quarter of the last century, riding the wagon from his Swiss sanatorium.

Victor LaValle's skills for drawing believable characters and capturing the essence of their conversations on the page drew me into one of the finest works of speculative fiction I have ever read.

Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood is a supreme literary stunt

They were all terribly mad.

I've gotten hours upon hours of pleasure returning to this beautifully illustrated, intelligently annotated volume.

The F-Word is a must for anyone interested in the most notorious of English obscenities. This book makes me proud to be a part of a civilization that could produce such a thing.

Leonard Michaels had a trenchant, elegantly forceful style that cut to the bone; what impresses me the most, as a fellow essayist, is that he always tried to get to the bottom of what he knew and understand.

Reading a Sarah Vowell book is like getting the coolest, smartest and funniest person in the world to take you on a tour of the kind of places you’d go to if you weren’t held down by a nagging wife, whiny kids, and demanding cats.

Elfriede Jelinek’s writing, even in English translation, is compressed, blunt. Her observations are frequently cruel.