PositiveThe Washington PostThe essays in The Language of Night have aged unevenly, in part because of their author’s own impact ... Le Guin, however, was a staunch critic as well as a defender of genre ... Le Guin’s most interesting subject was not the now-extinct snob or the still-thriving junk writers. It was herself, capable of greatness but falling short through her reluctance to confront certain subjects.
John Williams
PanThe Baffler\"How one ought to approach a book which has been rejected by its author is a delicate question. Certainly, Williams deserves credit for realizing that what he’d written was fairly awful. But while he might not have wanted the book to be republished, now that it has been, it’s worth asking the degree to which Nothing but the Night illuminates aspects of Williams’s mature work. Everything that makes his other books so terrible, it turns out, is here ... the novel is a long whine that begins with \'other people don’t really exist\' and ends with the unacknowledged demand to be loved. Behind this insistence lies an almost unimaginable amount of anger at the outside world, hatred of others, disgust at physicality; hurt cushioned and denied through the powers of money and alcohol; a passivity that builds into violence. It’s rich material for a novelist to make something out of. Too bad one didn’t.\
