PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneIt’s not just because Mike McCormack is a gifted Irish writer that James Joyce comes to mind when reading Solar Bones. The form of the novel is also Joycean: The narrative is one continuous, open-ended sentence. Don’t let that put you off this ambitious but fundamentally accessible book. Yes, the opening is disorienting, but necessarily so, as McCormack’s careful clues slowly reveal ... the novel itself is a nimble, reliable bridge; apart from some pacing problems in the late pages, it is structurally flawless ... Instead of confusing the eye, new paragraphs of McCormack’s rolling prose refresh the reader’s attention, as line breaks do in poetry ... some lost opportunities for line edits don’t put a serious dent in the overall impact of Solar Bones. It’s an impressive meditation, as Joyce would say, 'upon all the living and the dead.'
Graham Swift
RaveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneMothering Sunday could be also subtitled 'an origin story,' as it eloquently accounts for the beginning of a vocation, and the re-beginning of an individual. It can be read in a sitting or two, and could make your day.
George Cotkin
PanLos Angeles Review of Books...[Cotkin] does justice to the radical vision of the New Sensibility by presenting it with considerable craft. Instead of broad, brash strokes of cultural criticism, Cotkin creates 'vignettes,' each chapter dealing with a single year in which he focuses on a representative artist, profiling 'cultural creators' ranging from Marlon Brando to Amiri Baraka, Robert Rauschenberg to Erica Jong.
John Banville
PositiveThe Star Tribune“Readers new to Banville might like to start with an earlier novel, such as The Book of Evidence, with more of a narrative drive, but longtime admirers will appreciate here something close to a Banvillean ars poetica.”
