RaveCalifornia Review of BooksIt might all sound a bit far-fetched, but Greenblatt is such a persuasive proponent for his conclusions that his speculations and intuitions feel almost like settled fact. Moreover, he is such a gifted writer that at times Dark Renaissance reads like a thoroughly researched historical novel with wonderfully over the top characters, albeit one without much dialogue ... I must admit I had not read Marlowe’s plays since I was an undergraduate. Did Dark Renaissance make me want to head to the nearest bookseller and buy his Complete Plays immediately? Indeed, it did.
RaveCalifornia Review of BooksGranted, there are already plenty of beautifully written memoirs about the loss of a spouse—Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Donald Hall’s The Best Day the Worst Day come immediately to mind—but this is a genre that, alas and of course, will always need updating, and we are lucky to have this well-wrought, moving and ultimately comforting entry by a very talented writer.
Percival Everett
RaveCalifornia Review of BooksThe final chapters feel rushed, with a great deal of action happening over the course of relatively few pages, but they do achieve their own kinetic energy. One of the most anguishing aspects of the novel is the power of slavery not only utterly to disempower the enslaved, but in some instances to convince them that their situation is not entirely miserable.
Lorrie Moore
PositiveCalifornia Review of BooksThe novel, for all its weirdnesses, or maybe because of them, is a worthy and highly readable effort from one of America’s greatest living authors.
Claire Dederer
MixedThe California Review of Books\"In the other camp of readers are those who are beguiled by her limpid prose and her willingness to dig deep into a question that necessarily involves a lot of waffling. I count myself among this second group, although I have some reservations about the book. I do like her idea of a sliding scale: a minor infraction by a great and much-loved artist shouldn’t cancel that person’s work, while a horrific act by someone you don’t think much of is certainly worth a cancellation. However, like many a book of nonfiction that begins with a great idea that could be adequately explored in fifty pages, Monsters veers off from its central point.\
Jenny Offill
RaveThe Santa Barbara IndependentIt’s difficult to read Jenny Offill’s very good new novel, Weather, without harkening back to her previous effort, Dept. of Speculation, which was outright spectacular ... oth novels are short and composed mostly of brief paragraphs packed with insight, wry humor and despair. And neither book is especially concerned with plot. One thing happens, and then another; cause and effect are intentionally blurred. However, since the novels mostly operate in discrete sections of one to six sentences, plot is far less important than the impact of the narrator’s latest moment of observation or intuition
Amy Hempel
PositiveThe Santa Barbara IndependentHempel is renowned for fiction that is often just a page or two in length, but it turns out she is equally adept in a much longer form such as the novella that takes up the second half of the book ... Cloudland is one of those pieces of writing that is so gripping when you are in the midst of it that you don’t realize until you’re finished that you’ve actually been reading a work of literature, something that will be around for a very long time.
