RaveThe MillionsA form of hell is precisely what Grace Krilanovich writes to, and animates ... Krilanovich’s misfits join a vast list of literary protagonists and authors, like de Quincey, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Bourroughs, who sustain themselves on a cornucopia of drugs: uppers, white pills, Quaaludes, cough syrup, meth, alcohol, you name it ... Krilanovich’s narrator has encountered and embraced her own personal form of hell, which in its horror also contains a great beauty.
Lynne Tillman
RaveThe Millions\"The depths Tillman plumbs seem almost paradoxical to a novel so intensely focused on surfaces and photography. It’s as if Tillman is acknowledging that life is life, but the active life occurs in the interface with the mind ... Men and Apparitions is a loose and beautiful baggy monster of a novel that opens in on itself like a fun house hall of mirrors. What a tremendous experience it is to walk through, never quite sure who’s who or what you’re looking at.\
Belle Boggs
MixedThe MillionsThe first half of the book delivers, for the most part. Boggs offers an engaging and empathetic description of her inability to conceive, the way she felt personal failure ... in The Art of Waiting, these types of ethical considerations [the ethical imperitive of limiting reproduction] are largely superficial or left untouched ... The Art of Waiting for all of its intelligence and care and research isn’t invested in considering the broader cultural and ethical contexts of assisted reproduction, of whether or not this desire to have children should be fulfilled ... [it] lacks the interrogation and consideration of what it truly means to mother.