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W. Scott Olsen
Recent Reviews
Janet Malcolm
Rave On the Seawall Engrossing ... Each story is intriguing, revealing the seen and unseen currents of those days ... The real power of Still Lives doesn’t issue only from the short narratives that, over the course of the book, become a type of autobiography. The real power here is the curiosity, the wisdom and insight Malcolm brings to the anecdotes and vignettes ... Malcolm is a brilliant explorer of the reasons behind what we see and do. Her focus in this book is her own past and, from the vantage point of age, she regards her own history as a prompt for deep curiosity. As she tries to explain herself, we follow along, insight to insight, question to question.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mixed Star Tribune In many ways, Hazards of Time Travel is a too familiar book from page one. Its dystopian setup is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron ... The writing is wonderful, but the novel begins to fall apart—not because of the writing, but because of lingering questions that are not addressed. I found myself looking up from the pages and out the window ... There are many promising ideas that never really come to anything ... Or perhaps it’s simply a fine book wandering through territory that’s been explored by others who discovered more.
Kate Harris
Rave The Star Tribune Kate Harris’ Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road is a compelling, suspenseful, insightful and elegant travel memoir ... The book moves seamlessly between the Silk Road adventure and backstory that led up to it ... The book also moves easily between narrative and philosophy ... There are certainly adventures. Dangerous roads around the Black Sea, mistaken imprisonment in a tea house, visa problems, bad weather, bad roads, hunger, illness, lost bicycles, and the seemingly ever-present kindness of strangers keep the book moving along. And there are certainly digressions into discussions of Darwin, Sagan, Polo, ecology and regional history. Every one of them is a thread you can’t undo ... This is one that will have you dreaming.