"This book's unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power. Barthes's ironic intellect, apparent everywhere in his many books, is wrapped here around his sore and nakedly beating heart."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."—Jonathan Culler

"Highly original, extremely fertile and inventive, [Barthes] really does represent, in a peculiarly qualified way, a new kind of writing, and he continually discovers new ways or writing about writing . . . It is a remarkable book."—Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review

“The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“With its offbeat style, Berlinski's consummate fieldwork—fictional though it may be—produces an intricate whodunit, both disturbing and entertaining. Even as he confesses to feeling ‘like the baton in a relay race of faulty memories and distant recollections,’ Berlinski meticulously unearths Martiya's ‘good story,’ taking readers on an intoxicating journey filled with missing souls and vengeful spirits.”—Terry Hong, The Washington Post

"Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures—his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife . . . The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world."—William Logan, The New York Times

"I fought with this book. I shouted, 'Amen!' I cursed at it for being so wildly wrong and right. It's so smart, combative, surprising, and sometimes shocking that it kept me twisting and turning in my seat like I was on some kind of socio-political roller coaster ride. Eula Biss writes with equal parts beauty and terror. I love it."—Sherman Alexie

"Like many writers, I keep a few books on a shelf to unclog my brain for those times when the right combination of words refuses to muster for service. To that pantheon I add Alphabet Juice for its erudition, its grand fun and its contrary view on what constitutes good writing . . . Not that Blount counsels self-indulgence. Writing ‘needs to be quick, so it's readable at first glance and also worth lingering over.' This book is both, and danced in Blount's arms, English swings smartly. My admiration for Alphabet Juice only swelled when it proposed a conclusion for this review. Reviewers like to apply the word 'uneven' to books they’re fond of, but have a few reservations about. ‘Would you want to read a book that was even?' he asks. Yes, very much so. And I just did."—Jack Shafer, The New York Times Book Review

"Collins has done it again. This history—spanning the globe and 400 years in the life and fortunes of one of the most famous books in the English language—is not the dry province of historians, bibliophiles, and antiquarians . . . Witty, detailed, and highly entertaining, it will be appreciated by fans of Shakespeare, history, or human folly."—Library Journal

“This is the anthology to pick up every year if you want to read the best short fiction from the previous year and get overviews of the best fiction, non-fiction, films and video, anime, and music.”—Green Man Review

"From Daniel Abraham's cautionary tale of an honest money changer's encounters with the evil Lord Iron ('The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics') to Kij Johnson's powerful animal rights allegory ('The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change'), this collection of 40 stories and poems published in 2007 embodies the variety and dynamism of short fantasy and horror. Essays summarizing the progress of the genres, a glance at the year's fantastic media, the contributions of comics and graphic novels as well as music, along with an obituary section, provide a comprehensive introduction to the stories, while a lengthy list of 'Honorable Mentions' follows the selected stories. This classic volume should find a place in most libraries where horror and fantasy are popular."—Jackie Cassada, Library Journal

"Not just a modest remembrance but a full-length, meticulously documented study. All dead authors should be so lucky . . . Daugherty was Barthelme's student in the '80s. The last time Daugherty saw him, six months before he died, his former teacher gave him a new assignment: 'Write a story about a genius.' He did, and I'd give it an A."—Steven Moore, The Washington Post

"Davis . . . prized for her sly wit and inventiveness, presents a new array of piquant and elegant tales. A master of the extremely short story, some told in one sentence, Davis neatly castigates the vicious circle that is family, the insidious toxins of relationships, and the oddities of intellectual and creative pursuits. Literary and artistic erudition and fluency in loneliness, disappointment, and fretfulness shape these mordant yet pirouetting stories . . . Davis' attempts to quantify predicaments to eliminate emotion intensify it instead, which is but one of life's many ironies Davis so artfully reveals."—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“For a broad and eclectic overview of SF and its varieties, Dozois’s huge anthology remains essential.”—Gary K. Wolf, LOCUS Magazine