RaveBookforumWry, knowing, and audacious ... Early pieces display her sardonic insights into the ways African Americans were portrayed in popular culture ... Kincaid’s interpretations of her own childhood offer keys to the structures that define her fiction and wider writing ... I hope that Kincaid will write more on [the] complicated pleasure [of gardening]: the intimate dominion of the gardener in her garden ... Uncanny power.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksCusk’s trilogy — Outline, Transit, and now Kudos — also features a narrator who is effaced, hidden, largely silent on the subject of herself, whom we nevertheless come to know in a profound manner through the stories she relays about others ... a refreshing new model of storytelling for Cusk ... Cusk seems to be saying something valuable about shutting up and listening. And also about attention. Attention, she suggests, can yield grace ... It’s difficult to catch Cusk, or Faye, in the act. How does she manage to paint such an abominable picture of this woman with a series of neutral, apparently reasonable, observations? ... In remaining largely unknown, Faye allows Cusk to explore universality, which is a sort of truth, perhaps a sort of grace.
