Issyvoo

The creative person in this process is the reader, by a long shot. The writer supplies three or four words, but the reader makes the picture.

[Karnezis] is a deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic—a style well-suited to the short story. And, like many of the masters of this genre—Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty—Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another.

Like the soaring voice that keeps echoing long after the last lines of Ulysses, Doyle’s Paula Spencer is at once ordinary and mythical, lyrical and gritty, down-to-earth and so much larger-than-life that her personality keeps spilling over the boundary between the spiritual and the carnal.

One puts down this novel with a feeling of having feasted at a table of great ideas.

The futile postcards keep rolling, some of them landing in dead letter offices, some addressed to people already dead, some never mailed at all. The sadness, the downside of America, is beautifully portrayed here.

…a tale every bit as involving and moving as any custodial struggle. Only in this case what’s at stake is a cat. Here, in other words, is that fictional rarity: an animal story with depth; an adult animal story.

Carey doesn’t set his envisioned “England” in competition with “Australia”; he merely takes a look and sets in motion an extraordinary dance that involves splendid, layered swirls of image and metaphor, and amazing feats of prose style.