RaveCentral Maine Newspapers... the best Stephen King novel in a while ... First, the plot, despite having basically two distinct halves, is pretty much seamless and has the irresistible forward motion that’s characteristic of just about every story Stephen King ever wrote ... The second reason this is one of Stephen King’s best books involves the fascinating complexity of the characters, mainly Billy of course ... I was blown away by this book. Maintaining a consistent voice across 500 pages is not within every writer’s range of capability, and Stephen King has been extremely good at it since the 1970s. But in Billy Summers, a variety of voices, sharply tuned to the personae of one character, are measured, developed and explored across a truly gripping adventure story ... one of Stephen King’s masterpieces.
Susan Minot
PositiveThe Working Waterfront\"In American short fiction of the past 50 or 60 years, there is to my ear a certain distinct prose style that a lot of creative writing types work hard to emulate ... They’re told in carefully contrived, subject-verb-object grammatical structures that repeat throughout the narrative. The effect of the sentences is that of flat objectivity, even emotionlessness ... A story that starkly unfolds...is \'The Language of Cats and Dogs\' ... It is an affecting, emotionally probing story, either in spite of or because of the spare style it’s told in ...\'Boston Common at Twilight\'...[is] for my money the other really memorable story here ... This, like most of the other nine stories in the collection, is given in flat, hyper-objective, skillfully revealing prose ... \'Café Mort,\' meanwhile, a more conventional narrative, is...my favorite story in the book. Another way of describing Why I Don’t Write is to say it is very urban, upscale fiction. If you have a taste for, or an ambition to, the New Yorker and its literary environs, you’ll probably like these stories.
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Lily King
RaveCentralmaine.comThe best thing about Writers & Lovers is that it’s very funny, almost from start to finish. Casey’s loneliness, while the main source of tension in the book, is also fertile soil for her and the narrator’s verbal and dramatic wit. The book makes you feel good pretty much throughout, especially at the end. And maybe overall, women are more likely to have an inherently better bead on Casey’s plights than are most men. Writers & Lovers appears to be an example of chick lit at just about its best, at least as Lucinda Rosenfeld describes it.
