RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The English Understand Wool is Helen DeWitt’s best and funniest book so far – quite a feat given the standards set by the rest of her work ... Its pages are rife with wicked pleasures. It incites and rewards re-reading ... The prime directive of DeWitt’s fiction has always been to unsettle our ideas about how the world can be.
Joy Williams
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)\"Williams’s prose in Harrow is animated by the tension between her virtuosic command of the language—from the bumper sticker to the Old Testament—and her recognition of language’s impotence in the face of ecological ruination. She has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch in a fallen world where, as one character says, \'the names which have been given to worldly things are the occasion of great error\' ... Harrow is not an overt comedy, but it still throws sparks on every page ... Among other things, Harrow is a vision of the curse she believes that we, like Gracchus, bring daily on ourselves. But Williams does not hector or harangue ... On the evidence of Harrow, Joy Williams writes them to wreak havoc on complacency of all kinds. Long may she vex us.
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Hermione Hoby
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Virtue tells the story of a backwater innocent seduced and disillusioned by a glamorous cosmopolitan couple. It is an old story, and a good one ... [A] skillful, sharp second novel ... Hoby’s gift is a sensitivity to the language of a given moment, and she generously cedes her own striking way with a phrase to the demotic of her characters ... Anyone wishing for a precise distillation of the manners and preoccupations of the early twenty-first-century moneyed American urbanite could do worse than read this book.
