RaveThe New York Times Book Review...a pre-emptive, wryly compassionate renunciation of his subject that most writers would never have the nerve to make ... Despite the rhetoric, however, it soon becomes apparent that in regard to \'the great minor city of America\' — given the sardonic context thus far, I think this constitutes high praise — the writer has discovered a subject that energizes him the way a birch-bark canoe roused John McPhee ... Anderson may have a gimlet eye, but the nature of his civic scrutiny tends toward the affectionate ... And unlike navel-gazing yappers like Hunter S. Thompson, Anderson doesn’t splatter himself all over the story. He never drowns out anyone with his sly, entertaining voice. His sensibility, sophisticated though it may be, is generous enough to stand up and offer its seat to others ... brilliantly rendered.
Philipp Meyer
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book Review[The Son] allows the past its otherness and its characters the dignity of blundering through the world as it was. These are not heroic transplants from the present, disguised in buckskin and loincloths. They are unrepentant, greedy, often homicidal lost souls, blindly groping their way through the 19th and 20th centuries, from the ordeals of the frontier to the more recent absurdities of celebrity culture … Philipp Meyer has demonstrated that he can write a potboiler of the first rank, aswirl with pulpy pleasures: impossible love affairs, illicit sex, strife between fathers and sons, the unhappiness of the rich, the corruptions of power.
Jennifer Egan
RaveThe New York TimesAlthough shredded with loss, A Visit From the Goon Squad is often darkly, rippingly funny. Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.
Joshua Ferris
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion ... Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, self-consciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris’s characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication ... For some accomplished novelists — and Ferris is one of the best of our day — short stories are mere doodles, warm ups or warm downs, slight variations on themes better addressed at length. In culinary terms appropriate to the collection’s title, appetizers. Not so for Ferris. Dynamic with speed, yet rich with novelistic density, his stories make The Dinner Party a full-fledged feast, especially for readers with a particular taste for the many flavors of American crazy.
