Winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

"Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting person writing in English today. Autobiography of Red is a wonderful, mongrel work, a strange and ambitious bridge between classical texts and contemporary autobiographical poetry. She is that rare talent . . . brilliant, passionate, and deeply moving."
—Michael Ondaatje

"[Carson's] work is full of moments of startling originality and beauty. The poems play with character and plot, myth and magic; they are rich with attitude and wit and the undertow of grief. If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognized as a genius."
—Colm Tóibín, Times Literary Supplement

"Anne Carson is a daring, learned, unsettling writer. Autobiography of Red, which perhaps comes closest to representing the range of her voice and gifts, is a spellbinding achievement."
—Susan Sontag

"Anne Carson is an inspiration to us all. She is that rarest of entities, a writer as fearless as she is gifted, and Autobiography of Red is that rarest of books, one that satisfies emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually."
—Michael Cunningham

"A profound love story . . . The images, connections and ideas—the whole well-stored mind pulsing behind this book—are as extravagant and sweet as Stesichorus, and push the lyric, as he did, beyond conventional bounds. . . . Carson writes in language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted."
—New York Times Book Review

"A love story, a meditation on translation, a portrait of the artist as a young monster, very strange, very smart, intermittently funny, and ridiculously beautiful."
—Vulture

"A novel in the shape of a poem, a classical story made contemporary—wry, poignant, beautiful, and occasionally erotic. Carson writes like an angel—her passions recall that incandescent chronicler of love Elisabeth Smart [and] Malcolm Lowry. A wonderful book of dense, glittering prose poetry that is both timely and timeless."
—TIME

"Wildly imaginative and inventive. The first dozen pages will convince anyone that Carson is an authentic and original talent."
—Ottawa Citizen

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."
—The Village Voice

"Wildly imaginative . . . [a] masterful, quirky prose poem . . . unsettling and strangely moving."
—The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Memorably passionate . . . bravely original . . . whimsical and delightedly peculiar."
—Boston Phoenix

"A modern reimagining of an ancient myth . . . full of small, deftly wrought delights."
—Los Angeles Times

"Carson's prayerful electricity is charged by the lustration of writing. . . . A brilliant book."
—The Nation

"Oddly affecting and technically brilliant . . . one of the most interesting novels of the year. . . . It is generous, sweet, and absolutely sui generis."
—Time Out

"A genre-bending, queer coming-of-age novel, half poetry, half prose, highbrow and postmodern and sly and sexy. It is a 'novel in verse' but also a novel in fragments, a novel in irreverent scholarship, a novel in invented interview, a novel in list, a novel in appendices. It is a tender and extravagant love story, a careful, poetic unspooling of what happens after you run into someone at a bus stop and have 'one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.' Carson's subjects are universal and timeless: identity, monstrosity, and 'the human custom of wrong love.' It is also, of course, beautiful, full of surprising, earth-moving lines and bright red emotional landscapes."
—Literary Hub