RaveBookforum\"Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel asks for a kind of immersion at odds with the practices of contemporary attention-deficit culture. A Little Life is epic in scope, riveting on every page, and frequently stomach-churning in its explorations of pain and loss ... The novel is narrated mostly in a highly functional third-person past-tense mode that borders at times on melodrama but that is capable of great beauty and horror, nowhere more than in Yanagihara’s deliberately repetitive descriptions of Jude’s attempts to control his pain through self-cutting ... A Little Life brought me to tears more than once; it is a book that asks the reader to feel as fully as Jude does, with a deep aesthetic and ethical purpose of observing and witnessing the pain of others.\
