PositiveBookforumDyer is pleasurably observant of the smaller, stranger details lurking in Winogrand’s work ... It’s unfortunate that Dyer frequently seems as restlessly eager as Winogrand to move on to the next frame. While some of his wildest, oddest claims are his most revelatory, his more plausible assumptions can seem weirdly off base. Dyer’s once-charming, carefree style sometimes falls flat: It occasionally reads as tone-deaf or simply rushed ... If he’d waited a moment or two later, Dyer notes, all the figures in this photograph would have been gone: 'As will the light. Soon, there will be nothing left to see.'
Joan Didion
RaveVogueSouth and West’s evocative, elliptical narrative of rejected details and paths not taken shed light on the often impossible-to-articulate act of writing, and show us Didion the writer in pursuit of her story. It also contains sentences as precise and brilliantly rendered as those in her finished books ... It’s a rare and valuable gift to witness a writer of Didion’s talents at the height of her powers allowing herself to drift, however briefly—to acknowledge that she’s 'underwater,' overwhelmed by possibilities, not yet lodged in the clear comfort of having discovered the shape of a story, or having found her own place in it.
ed. Jesmyn Ward
RaveVogue...[a] wise and wide-ranging chorus of voices ... Perhaps what The Fire This Time does best is to affirm the power of literature and its capacity for reflection and imagination ... This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward.
