RaveAlta MagazineDark and disturbing ... The Shards is a compulsive exercise in escalating dread and paranoia broken by moments of shocking violence and explicit sex ... It is also very, very good ... The plot is filled with many twists, reversals, and surprising revelations, and I would be doing The Shards a disservice to reveal them here ... [The] flat, unaffected language, that numbness, becomes an incantation, a weirdly compelling mantra of Porsches and palm trees, cocaine and Coronas, lust and panic attacks. Ellis doesn’t get enough credit for his prose, but he is a great stylist whose sentences crackle with energy and off-kilter detail like those of Hemingway and Annie Ernaux ... The Shards is a fraught and emotional head trip of a book that will scare the shit out of you—but also a novel filled with loss and love and the wreckage caused by growing up too fast.
Andrew Sean Greer
RaveAlta... a looser, shaggier book than its predecessor, and all the more enjoyable for it ... Greer could have found easy humor mocking rednecks and the MAGA-minded, but he’s too openhearted. Instead, Less is asking deeper questions. What is America? What does it mean to be a middle-aged gay man in the heart of it? And how will this experience change Arthur Less? ... There’s something undeniably delicious about a writer on a heroic quest in a story written by a writer on a quest to understand the heroic.
Dana Spiotta
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesSpiotta is asking big, interesting, questions here. Without consciousness, without an inward operator, what are we connecting to? To art? To nature? To something divine?...It's difficult not to descend into hyperbole talking about Spiotta's work. She writes with a breezy precision and genuine wit that put her on a short list of brilliant North American novelists who deserve a much wider audience -— writers like Lisa Moore, Tom Drury and Paul Beatty. And it's rare to find a novel that is so much fun and, at the same time, seeks emotional truth with such intellectual rigor; it adds up to an original and strangely moving book.
