RaveThe San Francisco Book ReviewTo come to Little Weirds expecting a traditional memoir is to be disappointed, but it is also to find in Jenny Slate’s prose an elegant eccentricity using humor to mask, celebrate, amplify, excise, and heal a crippling emotional wound ... Slate has more than a touch of the literary about her, being a daughter of the contemporary literary poet Ron Slate, but her voice is so her own that her meditations on her thoughts and actions, insecurities and habits, move into a territory less whimsical and more ardently self-assured. It would be too easy to call Slate \'quirky\' and doing so gives us no insight into the resonance she packs into her wholly unique if not bizarre metaphors to convey self-doubt, deep appreciation for her family, crippling depression, and heartbreak. She goes over these topics aware of the melodrama she is making of her vivid and real pain, but also certain that her personal narrative matters not just for her but for readers, too ... The most moving and entertaining parts of Little Weirds are Slate’s ruminations on her family ... There are very few passages in Little Weirds that aren’t completely unlike anything you’ve ever read. Slate explores her own psyche in a fascinating way, making readers willing voyeurs. Yet however outlandish or far-fetched her metaphor, elliptic her logic, or seemingly ostentatious her lamentations may seem, Slate always brings us back to a deep sentiment that moves us. Little Weirds is a work of creative nonfiction designed to have readers laughing through their tears while looking deeper into themselves and how they relate to others.
Ben Marcus
MixedSeattle Book Review\"Diehard fans of the dystopian futurist series Black Mirror will undoubtedly love the stories in Ben Marcus’s collection Notes from the Fog ... However, when one sits and thinks about Marcus’s prose for a moment, the realization soon sets in that these stories are about insufferable people doing insufferable things, oblivious to their banality ... readers get chatty, easy-to-digest, precocious prose. It feels as though every story in Notes from the Fog has an unearned pride in its existence. It’s difficult to take this seriously or even chuckle about it.\
