MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksGarner’s writing is salutary; if you’re heartsick or world-weary, you’ll feel better after a few pages of it ... So it was surprising to drop into Stories and find myself confronted with a different Garner: coarser, colder, and dismayingly hemmed in by the short form ... Closer to outlines or character sketches than to fully fledged pieces of short fiction ... Those written in the first person are typically far more successful than those written in the third ... The \'I\' restores a thrilling specificity lost elsewhere in Stories. Our faith in her candor is renewed. Insight, wisdom, her sharp wit—all seem wrestled out of long experience, hard-won rather than engineered.
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksVegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), is better—funnier, sadder, more appealingly vile—than these other attempts by his contemporaries to pin Sin City to the page ... Dunne found his perfect subject in Las Vegas ... The book’s story is harder to isolate ... At first pass, it feels slightly pointless, a novel-length exercise in New Yorker–style profiles of three oddballs, Dunne indulgently giving free rein to his \'gift for voyeurism\' ... Vegas deepens and broadens in the chapters describing the young author’s education in a series of grubby-sounding boarding schools.
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksGurnah’s penchant for generous scene-setting results in many of Theft’s lovelier passages, but its limitations are noticeable ... Injected with some clunky historical context ... We’re left with Badar, Fauzia, and something rare in contemporary literature: a happy ending.
