RaveGizmodoSleep Donation seems kind of trivial at first, almost lulling you into a sense of security that Russell then starts chipping away. The first few chapters are full of infodumps, long expository passages that lard information and bits of backstory onto the reader with the minimum of grace. This is partly the price that Russell pays for starting in media res, but it also feels like the work of someone who hasn\'t read enough genre fare to understand that worldbuilding can be teased out. But once Russell has formed a complete picture of her world, she starts to get more and more inventive with it. The bare details of how the donations work and why Baby A is the perfect donor give way to a frenzy of extrapolation, the kind that marks out the best science fiction. Russell comes up with enough second- and third-order effects of her web of insomniacs and donors to make the whole thing feel both real and ferociously bizarre. By the time she really starts spinning out her plot in earnest, the whole thing carries you away not unlike a frenzied dream ... Russell doesn\'t have the savagery of George Saunders here, and her organization isn\'t nearly as faceless or terrible as his often are. But what she has, instead, is a fantastical quality that makes the eventual knife-twist that much more brutal.
Mark Leyner
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGone With the Mind is a blindingly weird novel: a book-length stand-up routine in which a man free-associates about his life to a mostly empty room, mixing the philosophical and the scatological with abandon. At times, it seems to be an argument against autobiography, as well as a lament about the impossibility of actually communicating with an audience. But after Leyner gets done slicing the fictionalized version of his life into small and disconnected fragments, the slivers turn out to draw blood...truly absurd and absurdly true.
