RaveZyzzyva\"Lingering in the worlds and heads of his protagonists, Brinkley’s stories elongate these moments into chasms of psyche and memory. They remind us that whatever we see in the window, observation alone is superficial. To witness is a full-body experience, affecting the mind as much as the eye ... As it confronts the specters of lost neighborhoods, traditions, and people, Witness becomes a book of haunting ... Brinkley complicates what we think we know and reveals that what we see is never only one thing. Witness reveals racism in the medical system through a story of siblings; gentrification through an eight-year-old’s eyes; the strain of each day on a young woman four years after her brother is killed by a police officer. In every story, Brinkley pulls off an illusion: to show what we cannot encounter simply by looking.\
Kathleen Alcott
RaveZYZZYVAPermeated by a sense of disaster ... [A] striking title story ... Alcott’s sentences are tightly constructed and indelible ... As the best fiction does, Emergency refuses to offer simple diagnoses for today’s social and personal conditions ... This is a book you must wade into, slowly immersing yourself in its murky and unsettling world.
Brandon Taylor
RaveZyzzyva\"To read The Late Americans is an intensely intimate experience. It’s not just the sex. (So often in fiction, characters are clumsily harnessed to their bodies; it seems authors would prefer humans were floating vessels of thought and dialogue. Taylor’s late Americans are delightfully burdened by their bodies and desires.) Sex abounds, mostly between men, at times transactional, threatening, make-up, or mundane. Rather, it’s the little cruelties that the characters zip at each other, the fears they can hardly admit to themselves, the palpable loneliness among so many of them ... Despite how abject some of its characters are, how bad they accidentally hurt each other and how purposefully they sometimes do it, The Late Americans is an oddly comforting novel. If its characters are straining to be seen, Taylor sees them ... Some are about to fail, some are about to become very rich. Some are never going to see each other again. But for now they are together, burning and brilliant.\
