RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)If you want to construct a case against Stein, then Wade provides the evidence you need – it’s just that she layers much contrary and clashing evidence alongside it. An openness to such clashes is foundational to her project ... If, as Wade says, this book is a kind of detective story, it belongs to the noirish Californian sub-genre, full of proliferating evidence and thickening plot ... Wade has written a risk-taking biography whose scope extends far beyond even its gargantuan subject. Someone says yes to it.
Jack Parlett
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)An island history that’s deeply felt and keenly judged ... Parlett pays lively attention to...conflicts in all their local particularity, never letting the island become an ill-suited synecdoche for queer America more widely. Instead it emerges as a singular place, and an almost improbably influential one ... Fire Island is an intimate history, alive to the importance of dress, sex, bodily alteration, insobriety and dance. It’s aptly punctuated with scenes from the author’s own island visits during a period living in Manhattan.
