PositiveThe Seattle Times\"... absorbing ... Though its volume is relatively slim at just over 200 pages, The Collected Schizophrenia is, in its achievements, a big book ... Wang situates her experience within a matrix of other histories, including that of Malcoum Tate, a schizophrenic man killed by his sister in 1988, and the two girls charged in the 2014 Slender Man stabbing. These parallels are harrowing, fascinating and handled with deep compassion. Less compelling are passages sticky with blank-faced acronyms and medical jargon. But they’re necessary, and demonstrate Wang’s commitment to explaining the facts, as annoyingly complex as they may be, surrounding what’s at stake when it comes to ... Wang’s accounts of the onslaught of psychosis are particularly vivid.\
Jesse Ball
Mixed4ColumnsCensus, his seventh, is more modest than his others, even occasionally a plod, yet it sustains a subtly glowing warmth ... Given its title’s bureaucratic tenor and Ball’s body of work, it’s not surprising that Census is partly funneled through Kafka—though it’s Kafka imported to the American road story ... Ball’s writing has an improvisational rhythm, likely due to his fast process, and the novel is pleasurably airy, if often slack in tension ... Yet combined with the abstractions of Ball’s world, which can diminish specificities of social difference, his census becomes strangely homogeneous. After a while, the parade of predictably odd, lightly absurd encounters grows somewhat tiresome ... If the stories interwoven here are sometimes less than compelling, what holds them together is this son, this brother, whose humble story resists shape, whose thereness thrums quietly throughout.
Myriam Gurba
Positive4ColumnsGurba’s particular meanness is confrontational, deliberate, and very, very funny. She goes for the throat, then bats the reader playfully on the head ... If Gurba’s sentences can be elegant, they rarely stay that way for long—they’re invariably uglified or camped with an abrupt tonal shift. In this way, Gurba’s mean streak unsettles not just social but aesthetic propriety. If the dominant mode of literary prose is realism characterized by quiet, meaningful details, Gurba goes for vulgarity and volume ... Henri Bergson famously described laughter as 'a momentary anesthesia of the heart,' a coldness that is pure intellect. Gurba’s comedy is sometimes that—deploying detachment as a kind of survival strategy. More often her punch lines are punches, and they land.
