"Haunting, disturbing, often radiantly intense, these protean stories change shape as if they are made of fire. They are on the side of things lost, they are pushed by the emergency of our lives--yet in the dazzle of their language there is a wonderful stillness, and consolation." - Andrea Barrett
"Haunting, disturbing, often radiantly intense, these protean stories change shape as if they are made of fire." - Andrea Barrett
“A. M. Homes is certainly among the most important young writers working now.” - Robert Stone
"A savagely funny read, both unnerving and irresistible." - Richard Price
"A.M. Homes finds mystery without special effects or exotic underbellies. We get a tour through the action adventure of everyday fantasies. Many of Homes’s characters lead two lives, one on God’s most conventional little acre, one in some alternate universe." - Mirabella
“Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and at play.” - Amy Hempel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A.M. Homes never plays it safe and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything.” - Michael Cunningham
"Here Homes approaches the art of the great absurdists. Strangeness becomes a revealing back entrance into the human condition of our day." - New York Times Book Review
"A lavishly imagintive story collection... with high drama and killer comic dialogue....Twelve years after the release of THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS, Homes’ return to short fiction is a gift.” - Entertainment Weekly
"Perversely hilarious yet also poignant, this collection finds Homes at her creepiest, but most chilling is how much one begins to identify with her characters’ sense of alienation." - Vogue
As in her previous books (”Music for Torching,” “The Safety of Objects,”) Homes is interested in the ways families fail and the ways our expectations of some of life’s most ineluctable aspects - family, home - doom us to feelings of incompleteness. - San Francisco Chronicle
"In several of the stories Homes creates characters whose conflicts are believable and affecting, whose progress toward limited resolution engages our attention, whose emotions intensify as the story progresses, and who do not live in airless self-absorption but have some connection to the world.... These tales are realistic and psychologically astute." - Boston Globe
“A wondrous, terrifying book that draws out the confusion and violence under the surface of contemporary middle-class life. A. M. Homes is certainly among the most important young writers working now, and her new book is dazzling.” - Robert Stone