PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMany of the pieces are about nutty or bizarre experiences, like volunteering at a hospital for the insane, but the funniest ones, and ultimately the saddest, have to do with the writer\'s family. His best character is his mother, a wicked comic with a genius for sarcasm ... I\'m not complaining; his humor would shrivel and die if he had to clean it up and make it nice. But the flip side of disgust with everybody else is disgust with yourself. When, occasionally, he turns his derision inward, the result isn\'t likely to make you laugh ... Mr. Sedaris is aiming for something more complicated here than he was in his brilliant first collection, Barrel Fever, though I\'m not exactly sure what, and I don\'t think that he is, either -- having found his voice early, he\'s still not entirely sure what to do with it.
Ian McEwan
MixedSalonMcEwan wants to despise Clive, but he devotes the novel\'s loveliest and most fascinating pages to the creation of that symphony ... But McEwan doesn\'t want to be Clive, whose selfishness appalls him. So he has skewed the book toward the malignant and even the nihilistic. He isn\'t content just to expose Clive and Vernon, he has to reduce them to beasts; and in its final, ugly and cynical pages, the novel goes haywire and ceases to be convincing ... a plotty book -- a tragedy with the heartless logic of a farce ... When his puppets came unexpectedly alive, more complicated and more sympathetic than he had planned for, he forced them into his machinery anyway, and they jammed it ... McEwan is an aesthete like Clive, seduced by the beauties of symmetry, and he\'s undone, in the end, by his own exquisite craftsmanship: Instead of betraying his structure, he betrays his book.
Daniyal Mueenuddin
RaveThe Houston ChronicleIn Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a debut collection by a Pakistani-American writer named Daniyal Mueenuddin, examines Pakistani society from the bottom to the top, and though the eight long stories are equally beautiful, the ones about the poverty-stricken are the most startling, because the lives they open a window onto are so far outside our ken … He has the gift of being both unflinching and gentle. He doesn’t shove the harshness at you. He doesn’t need to — it’s woven into the texture of these delicate, sad, profoundly pleasurable tales.
