“Has any writer ever paraded his aesthetic
privacies so shamelessly? It doesn’t matter. These are the ravings of a
genius. Ignore them if you dare, literature-besotted unraveller.” —Peter
Craven, Australian Book Review
“The best book about Murnane’s books that
anyone is ever likely to write.” —Shannon Burns, The Monthly
“When looking over the endless paddocks of his fictions,
one is also looking out at the mysterious landscape of the soul.” —Dustin
Illingworth, New York Times Book Review
“Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.” —Teju Cole
“[For Murnane,] access to the other world—a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own—is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.” —J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
“Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.” —Ben Lerner, New Yorker
“An image in Murnane’s prose has the quality of an image in colored glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously.” —Benjamin H. Ogden, New York Times
“Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of [Australia’s] most original and distinctive writers.” —Paris Review
“Murnane’s fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences.” —Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books
“Murnane’s is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail.” —Jamie Fisher, Washington Post
“[The] Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine.” —Australian Book Review
