"A master of the casually scathing observation . . . yet for every moment of sardonic humor in her work, Nelson shows one of vulnerability, and her writing is ultimately defined not by its cleverness but by its heart." The Atlantic Monthly
"I scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again. She's absolutely one of my favorites among story writers today, and I envy the reader who has yet to discover her work." Michael Chabon
"Any lover of realistic narrative fiction about actual and unglamorous people will be greatly rewarded by the work of Antonya Nelson. Her voice is sure, her wit is quick, her observations continually resonate and her honesty is unwavering." Dave Eggers
"Nelson's prose is precise and energetic, and her insights delight because they manage to be at once surprising and so right as to seem inevitable." The New York Times Book Review
"Nelson has a pitch-perfect ear for the rhythms and unspoken subtexts of domestic life, and especially for the ways a family balances old grudges with the need to practice forgiveness." Francine Prose
"Nelson subtly depicts the mysterious and lasting influence of human transgressions . . . without ever preaching to her readers or losing her compassionate, comic edge." San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"We see clearly what it is that the best young writers have to offer a kind of pizzazz, the love of undercurrent, of voyeuristic intensity, a bewildered fascination with ritual as it has been undermined in our time, yet sustained, too, in an oddly moving way. We also witness familial relationships from the bottom up." Raymond Carver
"I've been a Toni fan ever since I read a story of hers called 'The Salad' on my second or third day of graduate school. I read her newest collection so fast the pages are singed." David Foster Wallace
"Nelson's great gift is her ability to create characters so lovable even in the face of their many flaws that we will happily trail each one around for a while, scarcely caring if they are wrestling with a life-threatening crisis or taking the dog for a walk." The Village Voice
Where O'Connor created starkly comic, often caricatured "grotesques" for whom the reader is invited to feel bemused contempt, Nelson creates characters for whom the reader is likely to feel exasperated sympathy. Not the intransigent clarity of revealed Christian truths but the snarled, muddled, flawed and imperfect "truths" of workaday life would seem to be, for Nelson, the worthier subject. As the adulterous, unrepentant wife and mother of "Only a Thing" observes: "She was interested in what would happen next, but it wasn't a tragedy, just a glitch."
The New York Times
Adults consider but rarely do the right thing, while damaged children instinctively persevere in Nelson's skillful collection of seven stories and a novella, set in wide-open, arid Western states. Growing restless and resentful in her middle age, the mother in the poignant first story, "Dick," uproots her reluctant family from Los Angeles to Colorado, separating her 11-year-old son from his best friend, the title character, with tragic results. Nelson shapes several stories around hard-drinking, restless women, as in "Rear View," about a 33-year-old Colorado woman who tries to get pregnant by either her hospitalized, mentally ill husband, or another lover, hoping a baby will solve the "jittery limbo" of her life. In the bleak, episodic title novella, a mother's alcoholism corrodes her family, including 15-year-old Claire, shouldered with adult responsibilities, six-year-old taciturn Sam, four-year-old Beano, still in diapers, and the children's father, who abandons them all for a yoga teacher. Though Nelson captures Claire's sad co-dependency and truncated adolescence, she reaches for too many resonant metaphors in her closely observed details-vultures roosting in the family's El Paso, Tex., backyard, skin cancer marring the father's face. While not every story achieves perfect pitch, Nelson again (Female Trouble) shows empathy for psychologically complex, deeply flawed characters. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
In this collection, Nelson, an accomplished novelist and short story writer who appears on The New Yorker's "List of 20 Writers for the 21st Century," portrays the angst and edginess of contemporary family life. Particularly compelling are the stories "Dick," told from the perspective of a 12-year-old runaway's best friend's family, whose move from the neighborhood may have triggered the boy's disappearance, and "Eminent Domain," in which a teenage girl tries out life on the street as a tribute to her big sister. In both stories, as throughout the collection, Nelson turns conventional thinking on its head and carefully readjusts its perspective toward the unexpected. It is this clever shape-shifting that will have readers turning back to the very first page for a second go at Nelson's dense and complex work. While it is Nelson's narrative that compels, her carefully chosen words and thoughtfully constructed characters truly enrich these stories. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/05.]-Caroline M. Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
None of the lead characters in Nelson's collection have been dealt aces, but they play the lousy hands fate has dealt them with such dogged ingenuity that no one could call them losers. Nelson (Female Trouble, 2002, etc.) has a quick, deadpan style and characters who are stuck in the middle of America as if marooned on a desert island. In "Some Fun," a teenaged girl copes with her shrewd and charming-but also difficult and alcoholic-mother. In "Strike Anywhere," an eight-year-old boy with more fortitude than his weepy mom sits outside a bar waiting for his abusive dad to finish drinking inside. And in "Eminent Domain," a middle-aged actor falls hard for a wild young debutante living on the streets, "her flame of a head" with its wild corona of dyed purple hair "swaying on the thin stick of her body." Ruefully, he later realizes he never knew what mattered to her, and was completely peripheral to her struggle to survive. Although the characters go through a lot, for the most part they become not insightful but candidly unrepentant, like the drunk in "Rear View" who observes, "Beer has food value. . . . But food, you know, does not have beer value." Evan, the hero of "Flesh Tone," who is persistently haunted by the ghost of his beloved, glamorous dead mother, makes a mean, funny list of all the clunky things his new stepmother, a psychologist, does. She eats health food, keeps rabbits, wears Birkenstocks and leaves him volumes to help deal with what she assumes is his gay identity. While they invariably make staggering mistakes-and usually know they are mistakes at the time-they are always closer to the truth than the forces of conventionality poised to help or intercede. More entertainingthan profound, these stories convey a delight in human variousness and an aloof sense of independence-largely because they are about people who have absolutely no one to rely on.