RaveThe Los Angeles Times\"Her new book The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them) shares Jones\' unlikely combination of realism and optimism ... To prevent disaster, we\'ll need to confront that reality. In The Big Ones, Jones presents the history of natural disasters as the history of ourselves; looking back as a way to look forward.\
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesNors’ writing is by turns witty, gut wrenching, stark and lyrical. Her characters seesaw between longing for human connection and the space in which to lick their wounds. That she achieves all this while experimenting with form is something of an impossible feat...Two riffs on a shared theme, these novellas do invite comparison to one another, but they bolster one another too. Paired as a single volume, Nors has created an exciting and artful literary diptych.
Padgett Powell
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksI have just come off of reading Cries for Help, Various, and I am changed. I am indoctrinated. I am a disciple. I am an earnest, resignedly bewildered, fan. In brilliant and bizarre sentences, Cries for Help unfolds as a series of insane sprints across the dark side of the imagination, written in a tone of barely controlled mania that retunes the tenor of your thoughts ... This would all be dismal, insufferable, probably, if weren’t for the simple fact that the guy is hilarious: absurdist humor does not get more absurd than the short stories here ... Cries for Help, Various is an excellent collection. I don’t always get it, but not entirely getting it is sort of the point.
