RaveThe New York Times Book Review... [a] compact surrealist memory box of a novel ... resists becoming something other than what its opening pages suggest it’s going to be. Yet its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static. It is a measure of the book’s success that as I reached the conclusion, I felt considerably more altered by the experience than I often am by novels that travel much further from their beginnings ... how often does a novel that seems poised to reward your immersive attention diminish in its power, conspicuously and all at once, as soon as it tries to engage your predictive attention? Everything begins so promisingly, but then the plot takes hold and the book becomes smaller, more desiccated, as you realize the predictive attention the writer is applying to the material is so much more meager than it could have been, or than your own was. The Butterfly Lampshade never makes that swerve. Instead it retraces the path it has already established, gradually filling in its textures, looking both back and deeper. In this way, it evades the stiffness of those stories that are able to move forward only by hardening into their possibilities.