Scott Esposito on Patrick Modiano:
Part of the allure of an unsolvable mystery is the belief that we will somehow master it; “Suspended Sentences” hums with that impossibility. Modiano’s unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points.
Sophie Elmhirst on Kirsty Gunn's Infidelities:
As well as layering and linking, Gunn is pointing out the ultimate infidelity – that of writing itself. . .The effect is diverting. Gunn has announced her own presence as the author and so plays with the notion of writer as adulterer, whose life and relationships are simply there to be mined for art.
Barrett Hathcock on Charles D'Ambrosio's essay collection:
The consistent thread through all the essays is, of course, the authorial persona of D’Ambrosio himself, which comes across as brazenly genuine, a constructed artlessness. His essayistic persona seems exist as having no persona at all, to be completely open and unprotected by irony or schtick or any kind of rhetorical shielding. This makes him vastly different from other contemporary male essayists, be they David Sedaris or David Foster Wallace or John Jeremiah Sullivan, who each deploy various distancing techniques to wink at the reader or to place themselves as characters within their stories.
Comments