RaveReading in TranslationAnyone who is interested in Kafka—which is to say pretty much everyone who is interested in literature—will be curious to read the \'lost writings\' of a man who famously, at the time of his death, wanted all of his unpublished work destroyed ... The concentrated energy of the language; the restless visual inventiveness (note the way \'he\' disappears after the first sentence, giving way to the things he encounters); the fascination with the physical almost indistinguishable from the metaphysical—it is all present and accounted for (and surely more present and accounted for than in the first translations, done by Willa and Edwin Muir). In Hofmann’s hands, Kafka has remained Kafka, and yet at the same time he has moved closer to us; he has fully entered the galaxy of English.
Kathryn Davis
PositiveThe Millions\"Davis’s new novel, The Silk Road, continues her exploration of the strange, but if anything, it’s even bolder than her earlier books. Rather than ease the reader into the extraordinary by way of the ordinary... The Silk Road dives right into the extraordinary from the first paragraph ... I have, so far, read The Silk Road three times and can already see that I am going to have to buy another copy—I’ve messed mine up with so many marginal scrawls.\
Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
RaveThe MillionsHardwick’s style is not for everyone. Her wit is subtle, her syntax sinuous, her learning deep, which is no doubt why her work is so seldom taught in the classroom. It is, in the best sense, un-teachable ... In the Collected Essays, one finds a wonderful absence of 'arguments' and a plenitude of splendid sentences, alive to nuance and allergic to jargon. Hardwick has a bit of a reputation as a doyenne of the take-down review, and it’s true that she is very good at disparagement, especially of conventional biographers and biographies. But Hardwick is equally good at formulating praise ... For a Hardwick fanatic such as myself, the absence of so many pieces seems to invite not so much another Collected Essays—one could hardly ask for a better one than Pinckney’s—but an Uncollected Essays, chosen to indicate the full range of Hardwick’s curiosity...But The Collected Essays is in no sense a provisional volume; it’s an assemblage of essentials...In Hardwick’s criticism, we discover nothing of the professor with her ax to grind or the peacock with her feathers to flaunt. We encounter an uncondescending intelligence, a humane sensibility, and a forthright independence of mind for which we, in our scatterbrained era, cannot be grateful enough.
