False Papers

"Over and over in the course of these linked essays Aciman shows himself wanting to be elsewhere . . . You don't need to have lost an Alexandria to understand what he does with place and time and memory. After all, we are all exiles in a way—from our own childhoods, our own pasts, if nothing else. It is that remembered aspect of ourselves, that shadowy other life, that Andre Aciman's new book so piercingly addresses."—Wendy Lesser, The New York Times Book Review

"André Aciman is the prince of nostalgia."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The incomplete and unstable state of nostalgia is what Aciman tries to fix in this beautiful memoir. He lives in his mind. But sharing that mind is a rare privilege."—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe

"One feels that if Proust had not existed Mr. Aciman would have invented him."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

"Aciman is merely reminding us of what we already know deep down; Memory, in the end, is an act of imagination . . . Sometimes . . . the world meets our expectations, and sometimes—not often, but on a few special occasions—we receive more than we ever imagined."—Jon Tribble, Chicago Tribune

"Astute . . . lyrical . . . agile . . . Each piece here develops a facet of Aciman's paradoxical philosophy of home and exile, in which the art if remembering the lost homeland becomes 'the ultimate homecoming.'"—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"A carefully wrought collection of very personal with universal theme-home, place, deracination . . . This is writing (and thinking) at its finest. Aciman sees all, past and present, from a substantial distance. Being from neither here nor there has its advantages."—Michael J. Agovino, Time Out New York