RaveThe Independent (UK)...wonderful ... Disparate though these subjects are, Sullivan\'s voice draws them together in a set of essays that reflect and amplify each other ... it has sealed its 37-year-old author\'s reputation as the pre-eminent non-fiction writer of his generation. It deserves to make his name in the UK too ... Sullivan is blessed with an intimidating intelligence, but he casts himself as pulp-headed consumer, too: his intelligence is applied with an extraordinary, universal empathy that always takes its subjects on their own terms ... In a sense, this sort of generosity is the easy bit: plenty of warm-hearted, curious people are crummy writers. Happily, the prose here is impeccable. Sullivan is not a pyrotechnic stylist like his predecessor as golden boy of American essays, David Foster Wallace. Instead, although his voice is unmistakable – affable, sincere, stepping out of the moment to address the reader – Sullivan is always working to fit it to his subject, so that a piece written upon the death of Michael Jackson has, quite properly, a very different texture to one about Kentucky cave paintings ... Somehow, despite that heady range, it all hangs together ... Sullivan...takes authenticity where he finds it, never presumes to know best, and is generous enough to credit us with the same wisdom.
Sam Lipsyte
RaveThe IndependentThe Ask is not quite a story in joke form. But in its gravid, relentless wit, it finds an implausibly effervescent seriousness that suggests Lipsyte, whose fourth and best book this is, could be one of the novelists whose voice will define the next decade ... Thematically familiar, Lipsyte\'s vision of white-collar pallor is brought to life by his stunningly diverse language. If he is amazed by his culture\'s knack with the deadening name...his vaults and swoops from the romantic to the Anglo-Saxon, the sacred to profane, furnish him with a descriptive facility that can make accuracy so fresh as to sound obscene ... In a funny way, though, that singleminded pursuit of the punchline—which contains a kind of deathwish—also bestows Milo with greatness, the kind of awesomely cantankerous masculinity also found in Philip Roth\'s Zuckerman, or Saul Bellow\'s Herzog.
