RaveThe Washington PostIn A Mistake, New Zealand author Carl Shuker conveys in gorgeous, heartbreaking detail the shock of catastrophe and the ways we try to make sense of disaster after the fact ... Shuker’s novel is the fascinating and infuriating story of the way various parties interpret and revise what they witnessed, limning events in telling ways. Shuker’s arresting prose renders the inconceivable breathtaking ... we remain transfixed as a cataclysmic mistake unfolds in real time. We are reminded of why we turn to narrative in the first place—our need to know what happened and our very human, if misguided, compulsion to fashion the messiness into a discernible, knowable story.
Lucia Berlin
RaveThe Washington Post\"The stories in Evening in Paradise have that familiar Berlin affect—the clipped prose, the startling details, the signal one-liners or repeated words that burrow into you. Berlin’s prose reads like poetry and feels like memory. Fraught moments are telescoped into spare, suggestive exchanges that directly appeal to the senses ... Berlin’s wry sense of humor renders her economical language bracing ... Berlin’s work asks us to reconsider the many ways a life can be thought of, remembered, reimagined, reseen.\
Ashleigh Young
RaveThe Washington Post...a stunning essay collection ... Her lyrical perspectives on quotidian moments had a universal quality that made me feel like I’d be right at home in the Antipodes ... wry, confessional, understated and often hilarious. Each piece lifts you up and deposits you in a place you never expected to find yourself. They startle with their immediacy and candor; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew ... Young is a sharp observer who revels in her sense of the absurd and uses precise language and striking images ... The story is quiet in ways that catch you off guard, communicating a series of simple, everyday moments that, as Young shows them to us, shimmer with unexpected light ... Young, like the best essayists, writes with humorous self-regard about her own lived small moments, which reveal as much about us as they do about her. The intimacy of her stories creates a connection, making even a foreign place feel like home.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
