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Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books ... brilliant ... Anything but distracted by biblical references to God’s body, Stavrakopoulou is aesthetically entranced by them and programmatically attentive to their iconographic and literary contexts ... Because the Bible is not organized this way, Stavrakopoulou’s program requires of her, first, that she control the Bible’s countless bodily references to God or to Christ well enough to reorder them — down to the individual verses — around her chosen corporeal headings. She does this amazingly well, clearly working from the original languages ... Boldly simple in concept, God: An Anatomy is stunning in its execution. It is a tour de force, a triumph, and I write this as one who disagrees with Stavrakopoulou on broad theoretical grounds and finds himself engaged with her in one narrow textual spat after another ... Stavrakopoulou is a rousing read, even, or especially, when I tangle with her over particulars ... Stavrakopoulou has nonetheless written a stunning book.
Steven J. Zipperstein
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books \"What was different was, first, the speed with which the Kishinev story came to be told and, second, the radical variety and the literary brilliance of how it came to be interpreted. Events do not mean: they are assigned meaning. Facts do not live on the ground: they live in the mind ... Zipperstein’s account of a third Kishinev interpreter that makes his book a minor historical masterpiece ... A remarkable claim, on either side, ending a quite remarkable book.\
John Banville
Rave The Los Angeles Times As Michael Cunningham's The Hours was to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so, roughly, is The Sea to [Henry James’] The Turn of the Screw. It is deconstruction and homage at once, an utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile … Max becomes a character in a story of his own making. No longer merely a narrator, he becomes a true author. He resumes control. He gets what he came for. The unsayable is said at last.
J. M. Coetzee
Positive The New York Times Book Review Coetzee [creates] a kind of fusion genre blending the energy of philosophical dialogue, the warmth and unprogrammed humor of father-son repartee, the emotional potency of a family romance and finally the uncanny suggestion of allegory (womb as ship, birth as disembarkation). The result is rich, dense, often amusing and, above all, full of inner tension and suspense ... The Schooldays of Jesus may stand as a riposte to the common charge that Coetzee’s approach to fiction is cerebral and his prose dry, since Dmitri is the passionless Simón’s antithesis: a supremely flamboyant vocal performer and, despite his Russian name, a classically melodramatic Latin lover.
Susan Jacoby
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books True to her calling as a heroine of free thought, [Jacoby] fights the good fight for irreligion as she goes, treating her reader to many a saucy aside, many a laugh-line for the baptismally decertified. No matter: Along the way she also seduces her readers out of the mistake that that religion is a boring and done-with subject and into the recognition that dealing with it is an open-ended intellectual engagement of compelling interest.