RaveThe New YorkerA singular stylist ... Sort of like if Charles Portis listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell ... Her tendency to repeat herself, the compulsion that gives her work such a musical quality and that has so confounded reviewers (\'Why does she so persistently and jarringly use repetitions?\' a critic wrote in the L.A. Times in 1987), is both her greatest tool and her greatest theme. Perhaps, she suggests, repetition could be seen less as a compulsion than as a mark of inimitable style ... Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you. Like a breakdown, she lets you get carried away.
PanDefectorOlivia Nuzzi wants you to know that she was reading Dante. If the title of her book, American Canto, was too subtle a clue, she writes that she has spent a great deal of time \'analyzing different translations of The Divine Comedy,\' going so far as to hire an Italian tutor so that she could better \'understand the source material.\' ... American Canto is a failed attempt to write an autobiography in the key of an epic ... Chapterless and digressive ... Among Dante’s great inventions was constructing a vision of Hell where the punishment borne by sinners reflected something of their sin ... It’s fitting, I suppose, that for attempting to be a poet, Nuzzi is instead consigned to a lifetime of having her name on this book.
