PanThe Telegraph (UK)\"Lauren Elkin’s study of rule-breaking female artists is admirable in intention – but the execution is contradictory and confused ... The choices at times seem arbitrary and the approach narrow, especially on literature. Elkin proves a more informative guide to feminist trends in the visual arts, bringing many an ephemeral happening energetically back to life ... More damagingly, Elkin is much taken with the world of hurt, liking nothing better than a raped or murdered or diseased artist who had a suicidal mother and a daughter by Duncan Grant. It makes for spicy copy but amateurish art history.\
Anna Burns
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Anna Burns is either nuts - or quite something! In Little Constructions, her second novel, she tackles murder, rape, incest, child molestation, Kalashnikovs and something very like the IRA with indefatigable irony. She gets across her disgust for senseless, needless violence of the Bush/Blair/Northern Irish or merely familial kind, while being pretty damn funny about it at the same time ... Burns...dares to say anything. The writing is energetic, convoluted and courageous. It has a gutsy nervousness that matches the subject matter, as if there is no way to write about violence and violation other than with comedy, digression, wordplay and other peculiarities. Her logic, verging on the insane, pinpoints the complexity of being human ... Every word matters and the oddities are a joy.
Binnie Kirshenbaum
MixedThe New York TimesKirshenbaum doesn’t trivialize mental breakdown. She makes Bunny’s debilitation raw and worrying, and not without its insights. Despite unnecessary repetitions and overexplication, along with odd jumps in chronology, the story initially moves right along ... Humor leaks out through the gloom. Kirshenbaum’s best when she’s unpredictable. But the book gradually settles into a familiar genre, an update on what it’s like in the \'zoo\' — Jonathan Winters’s term for psychiatric institutions.
