"Certain books–few–assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This is one of those–a book of mysterious dark beauty."
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Los Angeles Times "A masterpiece. . . . [Bernhard's] world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature."
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The New Yorker "Something of a tour-de-force."
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The Washington Post "Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath, where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision."
–Sven Birkerts,
The New Republic