PositiveThe New York Review of Books\"... stylish and frequently revelatory ... As a writer Yang is often described as a master of empathy, and this new collection bears plentiful witness to his talent for imaginatively identifying with his subjects. Nothing is more characteristic of his essays, however, than this gesture of turning away, or refusal, in the name of his defiant inner self or \'soul\' ... Yang is not a political philosopher, and it is possible to interpret his (so far) fragmentary brief for such categories as a matter more of literary sensibility than political sense ... if Yang’s tenacious individuality marks some of his meditations as untimely, it is also what invests them with a unique necessity. Especially when there are persuasive reasons to get with a program, we need critics who are willing to keep speaking in a voice of their obdurate own.\
Dave Eggers
PanThe PointDave Eggers’s The Circle is so carelessly written, so predictably plotted, and so thinly conceived that it threatens to make a mockery of anyone who would attempt seriously to review it … His newest novel distinguishes itself for its clumsy prose, its one-dimensional characterization, and the utter absurdity of many of the situations it asks its reader to imagine … Whereas Eggers’s warning seems to be that we can go too far or too fast in the service of even the best of intentions, he has written a book that in fact says more about what the ‘best’ progressive intentions inevitably leave out.
Don DeLillo
MixedThe NationZero K is unlikely to survive as one of DeLillo’s significant literary achievements; its prose, much like its characters, could best be described as lifelike. Yet as I began reading it in January, with the presidential primary buzzing in the background, there seemed something oddly revealing about the novel’s tone and themes. It is not only in DeLillo’s recent fiction that one can discern the worry that America, incapable any longer of bearing the weight of its manifest destiny, is becoming a land of the living dead.
