MixedThe Guardian (UK)The essays in Last Letter are neither literary criticism nor memoir. They ruminate instead on unexpected connections between books, ideas and the specific life experiences that informed his writing ... Though Last Letter is meant to be a final book, it is often more cantankerous than elegiac. Murnane, at various points, expresses his dislike of scholarly literary criticism, book reviewers, philosophy, neuroscience, cameras, publishers, the way we talk about characters as if they were actual people, and readers’ tendency to conflate their memories of reading a book with the book itself ... This book will similarly be most meaningful to dedicated readers who have already made their way through his other works. Last Letter to a Reader might best be seen as Murnane’s complex and often ironic attempt to have a say about the meaning of his books before other critics inevitably do.
