“A sublime and deadpan debut that cocks an eyebrow and reminds us that it is never a light thing, this leaving home, though we all must try.” —Esquire

“Bathsheba Monk is a writer I'll be talking about when I talk about brilliant new writers. Now You See It . . . is the work of an imaginative, funny, and electrically gifted storyteller.” —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“The stories use deadpan humor to combat a sense of hopelessness and economic futility.” —The New Yorker

“A sassy, hard-boiled book of stories, some of which will break your heart . . . Monk's Cokesville stories convincingly span more than forty years of coal dust and hard living. . . . All of the stories are touching, some profoundly so.” —The Buffalo News

“Inventive, unsentimental, Monk is a grassroots artist who honed her craft at the school of hard knocks. Her sense of place resonates in tune with her feisty sense of self.” —The Boston Globe

“Monk is a terrific writer. . . . Like the soot in Cokesville, there is blackness to Monk's writing, but she is so funny that her fierceness sneaks up and smacks us from behind. . . . An important new voice in American fiction.” —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)