RaveBookforumDisorientation is a pleasure. You might wonder, at first, if you’re being duped by these characters or invited to share in their confusion. We’ll get to the reasons for that confusion, which is to say the plot, but plot is less the point than form and a nebulous atmosphere. Short chapters, shifting perspectives, and doctored photographs give the novel the air of an enigma to solve ... Torres excels at the art of cutting tragedy with tone ... An earnest project that does not seek to distill settled conclusions from the queer past.
Leah Price
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhat We Talk About is a trade book—an academic’s gamble to curtail the jargon, abridge the methods, and efficiently translate the discoveries for a broad readership. In those respects, Price’s work is a stunning success. Its line of argument is so clean and its prose so seamlessly driven by its embodied \'I\' that we forget the ghost of the archives hiding in the footnotes ... What We Talk About may open with a scene on Amtrak, but it’s replete with sourced data and illustrative passages on railroad reading. It may gently state the difference between a \'book\' and a \'text,\' but it still includes the moment I like to call the \'scholarly drop\'— when a writer maps the academic terrain, summarizing the half-dozen books that promote the myths to be challenged. In doing so, What We Talk About makes an implicit, and important, bid for one value an English academic brings to the public sphere: to tell the history of literature ... It reminds us that when a sterling English professor talks about books, she may offer something different from judgment: truth.
Kristen Roupenian
MixedLos Angeles Review of Books\"... the results will confound many readers ... for all its eccentricities, You Know You Want This remains tethered to recognizable lands, to text messages and New Year’s champagne and westward moves to San Francisco. It opens a space for readers to sympathize with the \'scarred\' as well as the scarrer, the bitten as well as the \'biter\' ... at points You Know You Want This seems crafted to repeat the effect. By eschewing explicit references to race, class, and even sometimes sexuality, the stories seem aimed to encourage as much reader-recognition as possible. It’s a technique that can backfire ... So, while the collection’s title may be tonally appropriate — flippant and flirting with danger — many readers may find themselves wanting something else ... Roupenian is undoubtedly capable of tackling intersectional issues head-on.\
