RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksI was beyond grumpy when I began reading Sloane Crosley’s third collection of essays, Look Alive Out There — which, it turns out, was exactly the right frame of mind in which to pick it up: within moments, Crosley had charmed me out of my bad humor ... Crosley’s jokes are simultaneously sharp and warm: the sharpness is directed at her surroundings, while the warmth is toward us, the reader. She invites us in ... The ways in which the collection might be called \'uneven\' manifest on both the macro and the micro level: incisive passages are sometimes followed by ones that are harder to follow, and zingy observations are occasionally undermined by jokes that don’t work quite as well ... Yet the hilarity with which Crosley describes her uniquely urban plight is undergirded by pathos ... All I know is that after I read the last line, I teared up. I needed that as much as I’d needed to laugh. Look Alive Out There let me do both
Tom Rachman
MixedChicago Review of Books\"Rachman not only details these relationships with relentless clarity and precision, he also explores deep questions about the nature of art, ambition, and value ... But there is something hollow—cerebral and mathematical—about all of this depiction and interrogation. I read, I understood, I pondered, but I didn’t feel ... There is also a tendency to deescalate moments of tension instead of leaning into them. Moments of great drama somehow feel anti-climactic ... Rachman writes with rich and abundant detail. It’s the feelings underpinning these details that get lost.\
Virginia Heffernan
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMagic and Loss is a slim book, but jam-packed. Heffernan is a brilliant thinker — though her language is clear and bracing, I found myself churning hard to keep up with the pace of her extremely intelligent mind ... At her best, Heffernan calls into question the snobbism and classism that have fueled some of the most derisive anti-internet strains ... Magic and Loss is part cultural criticism, part ethnography, and just as much personal essay. Heffernan’s dismissal of certain culture-wide laments often rests on incisive analysis — but, at other times, it has to be acknowledged that we all care about different things; we are all differently sad.
