PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksTension between the absurd and the true is at the center of Doppelgänger, a novel about the impossibility of originality in literature when the systems built to support it become better at reproducing writers than writers are at distinguishing themselves ... Riviere’s themes are meaningful primarily to readers engaged in the business of writing and publishing. This book is not particularly interested in speaking to those outside of that world, and for the average reader, the looping digressions, page-long paragraphs, and esoteric theory may prove prohibitively arduous ... The horrible fear that Sam Riviere makes plausible in Doppelgänger is that, in a literary culture already organized around copying, the machines may prove better at being writers than we are.
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"By inserting herself into her own story, Fusselman allows herself the space to create confusion, to avoid explanation, and to operate as if she, too, is just trying to figure all this out. The fun of this novel—and so much of its pathos—lies in its unpredictability ... Cloud Six is Fusselman unleashed, a culmination of everything that’s come before and everything she’s thinking about now ... These high-wire tricks, which in a lesser work might cause the novel to collapse under the weight of its own shtick, are successful here because the absurdity has a purpose. Fusselman wants us as hopelessly disoriented as the new arrivals to Widdershins’s realm so she can remind us of what she told us at the book’s outset: she is here for us ... If heaven is an author who understands humanity, in all its flaws and its beauty, and still has mercy, then here, Fusselman has proven herself divine.\
