RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... the style is stripped—few adjectives, little setting or atmosphere, but all emotion, with tension often instantly delivered on the first page, sometimes in the first line ... there is an old-world pathos to these stories; their public face is stoic, but one often sees them in private hours where they pull the rug out on their personality to give the reader the chance to clasp their essences tighter ... Because they are stripped down, the stories are almost parabolic, but the pungent dialogue and diabolic thoughts and feelings of the narrators often offer much more than commentary ... This might not have been a book to change my life (does one really know that a book has changed their life until months or years later?), but it did something as powerful: it made me remember fiction-making is about communication ... What takes some writers 7,000 words, Askildsen accomplishes in 1,000[.]
Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe frenetic pace of their letter writing is astounding, with sometimes two or three letters piling up in a few days before the answers to the originals were written. Some of the letters are long, some stark and confessional, yet all display good humor as well as a unique patois ... The volumes are filled with little gems of observation ... These letters are also an elegy for a world not dominated by technology, where one had to physically track things down ... these \'questioning minds\' were two of the most refined artistic sensibilities this continent has ever produced. Readers can be grateful that their complex friendship has been so beautifully enshrined in Burns’s scrupulous volumes.
