... slow rambles, long loiterings that fray the edges of certainty. For D'Ambrosio, doubt is a posture, an ideology, and a choice as much as an actual state. Whenever he gets too polished, he roughs it up a bit ... This careful dance of high and low, of timing, circumspection, and room for nuance — and the disarming honesty — make it clear that D'Ambrosio knows how to write a good essay, but what makes the collection great is his vast, almost painfully acute sense of compassion. The strength of his empathetic imagination, which he extends to the world around him — and, by extension (it feels like) you, is staggering ... Maybe it's odd to call a book kind, but kindness seems to be Loitering's animating principle ... it delivers that most primal pleasure of reading — the feeling of being understood, of not being alone.

For anyone who’s ever had a flash of doubt or a realization of ignorance and embraced it, Charles D’Ambrosio is your writer ... The pieces in Loitering range from D’Ambrosio’s career beginnings, in the 1970s, to the present, from his Seattle home to Brooklyn Heights, but like many great writers, D’Ambrosio seems to create outside the boundaries of time and location ... In every essay, D’Ambrosio keenly displays one vital skill a nonfiction writer can’t fake: observation. He moves so fluidly between his own thoughts and the details of his surroundings that only when dissecting his writing does it become apparent how carefully he has constructed every innocent descriptor ... He transforms everyday experiences, uncertainty and all, into perfect stories.

D’Ambrosio has...published two fine collections of short stories, but it is his essays, appearing in literary magazines and previously in an obscure small-press edition, that have been garnering a cult reputation. Now that they are gathered in such a generous collection, we can see he is one of the strongest, smartest and most literate essayists practicing today. This, one would hope, is his moment ... The presentation of himself as a damaged outsider, barely holding on, ups the dramatic ante, though it does seem at odds with the accomplished, balanced, commanding prose D’Ambrosio appears able to muster with every sentence — not to mention his prestigious awards and teaching stints. But he certainly has cause to feel damaged, as we learn from his family history ... Isolation is D’Ambrosio’s big subject ... He can be very witty: A sense of humor comes and goes in these essays, but loneliness and forlorn sorrow are never far away ... These are highly polished, finished, exemplary performances.

D’Ambrosio’s work...is popular with writers largely because as a group they tend to skew toward admiring work that is the ineffably sad ... That low-grade despair is evident in all of these essays ... D’Ambrosio is simply one of the best crafters of an English sentence alive today. His blackly beautiful observations, wrought with impressive intelligence, give the reader clues with which to simultaneously understand the cavernous interiors of his own mind and soul ... Silence is D’Ambrosio’s arch-enemy; the silence of an undocumented tragedy or an uncommunicated pain. To read the essays in Loitering is to yell down into the silent spaces of your life, roost the bats from the walls, and find a name for that which had gone unnamed.

Loitering is an ironic title for this masterful collection. There is nothing lax about D'Ambrosio's writing or thinking; both are muscular and sophisticated. The Oregon essayist and short-story writer is at once an intellectual and a down-to-earth man whose humble, almost shabby persona pervades his highly recognizable work, which has taken on almost a cult status in some circles ... He intertwines ruminations on such subjects as J.D. Salinger's work and the psychology of teenagers in a Russian orphanage with deeply poignant laments about such personal sorrows as his father's madness and his brother's suicide ... His work is not always easy to navigate — his intellect is profound but labyrinthine, and his subjects are usually painful — but it is well worth the odyssey.

D'Ambrosio won the Whiting Writers' award in 2006, the Lannan in 2008, and is probably well on his way to penning an acceptance speech for a MacArthur Genius grant—but don't let that intimidate you. His writing is all guts and heart ... In one essay he sets out to try to eat some gray whale with the Makah of Neah Bay, Washington. He doesn't end up scoring any whale, but he does prop open the hood of his truck, pull out the dipstick, burn the excess oil off in the fire, and skewer a salmon to cook ... This man is not the product of an East Coast prep school, in case you hadn't noticed ... If you look closely, you'll notice that most of these essays are about fathers, sons, brothers, uncles—about being a man—while on the surface, they might expound the solid good of a Coleman lantern. At one point in the collection, D'Ambrosio asks: What is real? What is trustworthy? The answer: these essays.

When you come across writing that is not just good but brilliant, you have to wonder about the writer, about what goes on in their mind, what made them different from the rest of humanity—something they ate? The way they sleep? The dreams they have? Most us who write for a living cannot describe the lion-sized joy we feel when a piece of writing we have just completed contains two or three good passages. We have done our very best. What more do you want than that? And then you read an essay by Charles D'Ambrosio and you realize how lame you are, how much more you could have done. It's not that he can write lots of great sentences, but that you honestly wonder if he is capable of writing a bad one.

Loitering ... is an exciting essay collection because it takes ideas and heady, essayistic topics — whales, hell houses, the overused, wheezing corpse of J.D. Salinger — and it manages to make something new out of them ... Every one is a pleasure, diamond-cut and sharp in its incisive observations on how to be a human ...D’Ambrosio is a fluid stylist, able to turn a sentence so it hits you in the heart...tossed off so casually that he makes writing this well look easy. But he’s also a strikingly emotional writer, willing to plumb the depths of male feeling and male relationships in his work ... A topic like the work of J.D. Salinger feels so tiring, overworked, already talked about to death — but the care and tenderness that the writer shows towards the sensitivity in Salinger’s work, and how that fits in with D’Ambrosio’s own troubles and difficulties, is moving. There’s a vulnerability and tenderness here that takes what could be just an essay about a writer that you could nearly write yourself into another level. It’s one of the highlights of Loitering, but it’s just one note in a murderer’s row of essays that, in their own way, manage to crack the world open, leaving you blinking in the light.

...thoughtful and provocative essays, revealing a hungry mind and a pervasive, constitutional sadness ... A couple of cavils: It would help curious readers to have publication dates on the pieces somewhere, and although the author chides one of his interview subjects for excessively inflated diction, D’Ambrosio, using words like 'emunctory,' 'gallionic' and 'prodromal,' will send many readers to the dictionary apps on their smart phones. Erudite essays that plumb the hearts of many contemporary darknesses.