"Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty . . . We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives. Mr. Wilson makes a strong case . . . to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings."—Colin McGinn, The Wall Street Journal

"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

"Think of subtext in fiction as water; its characters, swimmers on the surface. Like water, subtext is everywhere, ubiquitous and buoyant, darker in its depths, the stuff of immersion. The beauty of Baxter's inaugural entry in Graywolf's . . . 'Art of' series, which draws on examples in literature to instruct on the writing craft, is that it doesn't assume to try and capture the whole of subtext . . . Instead, it focuses on very specific qualities composing it: the art of staging in a story, the importance of inflection in dialog, the ambiguity of motivation. To make the often translucent substance more visible, Baxter highlights excerpts from a wide range of fiction, from the contemporaneous and familiar to the foreign and esoteric . . . Baxter's book will help readers read more creatively and writers to float their stories . . . Highly recommended for all academic libraries."—Maria Kochis, Library Journal

"At the Same Time, a posthumous collection of [Sontag's] speeches and essays, shows how her feeling for a vanished Europe deepened even as she grew more distrustful of an America she saw in the grip of a 'dangerous, lobotomizing notion of endless war.' Mostly written during the Bush administration, [the essays] reveal a darkening vision of America as well as the rest of the contemporary world . . . The amplified note of despair and loss in At the Same Time makes Sontag resemble one of the European 'last' intellectuals she often wrote about."—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review