PositiveBookforumRobinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist … Rolling between the title character’s present and her preceding decades of roaming, Lila parallels a coming into selfhood with an equally ambivalent coming into faith … Throughout Lila and its predecessors, Robinson elucidates the struggle to reconcile likeness and original; temporal and eternal; memory and reality; physical and ephemeral; flame and wick—a struggle as productive as it is without ultimate hope.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveBookforumLovely, frank, fascinating—personal and startling ... a record of creative and linguistic restlessness, the culmination of an encounter that Lahiri likens to love at first sight.
David Searcy
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...each of these essays is itself a kind of extended moment, within which Searcy pauses, turns ideas about, attempts to take it all in. Unstructured yet well fortified, Searcy’s long, hanging moments take on the contours of a rare, desperately private space. To join him there is to be astonished.
