PRAISE FOR THE BLINDFOLD BY SIRI HUSTVEDT: "[Hustvedt] has a knack for intimate detail, for suggesting, with some intensity, the compulsive psychological spiral of drowning souls, for creating powerful moods with just enough words."
–Jenifer Levin, The New York Times Book Review "The Blindfold moves clear-eyed, awake, and aware, through a landscape of terror and mystery. Cruelty, madness, and death surround its young heroine, who describes her often surreal adventures with the calm and clarity of an English diarist. The effect is unsettling and inherently contemporary–it's as though Lewis Carroll's Alice were to describe a journey into hell."
–Peter Straub "She's a writer of strong, sometimes astonishing gifts; there's a spare-ness and ominousness about her prose that at its best recalls Rilke."
–Emily White, Voice Literary Supplement "The novel succeeds magnificently as an elegant set of variations on the theme of identity, perfectly set in the surreality of New York, and delivered with calm, soul-sick cadences."
–Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe "This is a smart and marvelous book, an unforgettable narrator and a haunting telling of wonders in prose that can alter your brainwaves. Hustvedts stakes are high, and one reads her novel at serious risk to one's well-being–the only kind of reading that counts. What an extraordinary debut!"
–Russell Banks "Poet Siri Hustvedt has written a riveting first novel that transports the reader into Manhattan, an island city that teems with the unexpected, the inexplicable, the haunted, the beautiful, the poor, the rich."
–Islands "Hustvedt spins layers upon layers, casting both her characters and her readers into a world where objects take on lives of their own and nothing is as it seems to be. . . . Edgy and uncertain, even, at times, Kafkaesque, this is a fine first, effort, captivating and intriguing."
–Los Angeles Reader