RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)The straitjackets of fixed literary genre have always eluded Levy, yet My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein proves particularly sly at slipping between categories. Though it volleys between erudite passages describing Stein’s career and life and the architecture of her sentences, it is not a work of biography nor a conventional work of criticism ... It is closer to the French understanding of the term \'novel\', where a literary roman can hold anything and everything germane to a writer’s interests ... Musing on charisma, aura and literary celebrity, it also asks what happens when we drift off-script and \'disobey\' our idols. Like the lost cat in its opening pages, it slinks out of grasp and does not ask anything as obvious as to be found.
Heather Havrilesky
PositiveThe MillionsShe updates the columnist’s stock Q&A format with a collection of more roving, labile essays. Not quite venturing \'advice\' per se, but brimming with the author’s warmly diagnostic and incisive voice, the pieces crystallize as potent blends of cultural critique, memoir, and anecdote, which take a scalpel to the inured surface of modern American life.
