"Johnson is one of the last of the hard-core American realist writers, working—in his own way—along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O’Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime—all his novels have it in one form or an­other—in relation to the nature of grace (yes, grace) and the wider historical and cosmic order . . . Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If Tree of Smoke—intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq—was a huge piece of work, a Guernica of sorts, then Nobody Move is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed."—David Means, The New York Times Book Review

"In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so uncommon it doesn’t even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barré syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course . . . In her sharp, affecting new memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission . . . From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like 'heavenly bodies' that 'fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.' Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown . . . Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful."—Emily Mitchell, The New York Times Book Review

"No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically and forthrightly charged by religious investigation."—Brad Leithauser, The New Yorker