RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"The short-story writer \'can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought,\' Flannery O\'Connor wrote. \'When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.\' By this metric, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day, a collection of one novella and two short stories all exploring misogyny through the eyes of women who react to it and men who blister with it, is nothing short of a masterpiece. Through narratives of a canceled wedding, a writer’s interrupted residency and a woman’s dangerous infidelity with a stranger, Keegan’s delicate hand directs the reader away from obvious moralizing to the banality of bigotry.\
Yiyun Li
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAnother triumphant, if more oblique, excavation of aging ... Though a virtuoso in more traditional, omniscient third-person narration, Li is at her finest in the modern, first-person register of the final story ... This fascinating discontinuity between inner and outer lives reminds the reader that the best short fiction, even when it comments on the world at large, operates most powerfully on the level of the individual characters — complicating their visions of themselves and clarifying our understanding of the behavior that great pain makes possible.
Alexandra Chang
PanThe New York Times Book Review\"...evinces little in the way of memorable character, emotion or conflict. Though the stories’ thematic concerns with the slipperiness of class in America, particularly as experienced by immigrant communities, are necessary and compelling—characters painfully move up and down the rungs of housing security, education, employment and documentation—the collection mostly fails to convincingly situate these themes within the emotional particulars of each protagonist’s life. Feelings are baldly stated, rather than tendered through illustrative action ... In a book about the bonds between individuals who are trying to balance their own survival with the debts they owe to one another, an excess of dialogue is to be expected; but Chang’s relies too heavily on wooden exclamations ... Though Chang occasionally follows a formal curiosity to interesting effect...conclusions can read as faint and anodyne\
