His first book since 2013, and it's more than worth the wait. The collection is Gurganus at his finest: funny, compassionate, and marked by the author's amazing ability to reflect the lightness-and darkness-in the souls of his fascinating characters.... This is a remarkable book, and it proves once again why Gurganus is one of the country's most talented and imaginative writers. Coming after a year where nothing went right, and the world was forced to realize that things might not work out in the end, it's a hopeful tonic. -- Michael Schaub - NPR
[A] rollicking collection... The author is by turns plaintive and picaresque. His narrators urgently want to say their piece, perhaps because they're underdogs, used to being misunderstood, dismissed or ignored. -- Vanessa Hua - New York Times Book Review
[Gurganus] is a master of voice, a born storyteller with a gift for balancing the darkness and the tenderness of the human heart in his fiction. -- Colette Bancroft - Tampa Bay Times
Grotesque and the miraculous alike... The payoffs do eventually arrive with wonderful revelatory flourishes that burnish the legend of Mr. Gurganus's everyman town. -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Gurganus's vital collection (after Local Souls) portrays small-town Americans, mostly oddballs and misfits, at moments of self-discovery as recounted in their own authentic voices. Several stories take place in fictional Falls, N.C., once called the Athens of This Far into Eastern North Carolina, according to the tour guide in The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC).... Among the greatest entries in this stellar work are My Heart Is a Snake Farm, featuring a spinster whose life in a crumbling Florida motel brightens when a slippery charmer opens a reptile tourist attraction, and He's at the Office, which details a son's efforts to help his 80-year-old father, a WWII veteran mentally stuck in the 1940s. Simultaneously funny and compassionate, literary and lowbrow, Gurganus's stories trawl the mysteries of the human heart and surface with wonderful results. -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
These nine stories provide a masterclass in How to Write a Story. I'm not sure how Mr. Gurganus can offer Comical, Tragic, Tender, Frightening, Soulful, Hopeful, and Despairing elements within every story, but it's true. Perfect protagonists and their enemies. What the heck took so long for these remarkable uncollected stories to discover a binding? This collection deserves to be on the same shelf as Carver, Cheever, and O'Connor. -- George Singleton, author of You Want More: Selected Stories
Gurganus, a storyteller in the grand tradition. . . can tell his stories as well as anyone alive in our time. -- George Garrett - New York Times Book Review
Allan Gurganus has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and shudder at the same time. -- T.C. Boyle
Blending trenchant satire with outrageous humor, Gurganus's stories recall both Mark Twain and Flannery O'Connor. -- Chicago Tribune
Allan Gurganus is our verbal magician. He turns factual rabbits into poetic doves. Every sentence contains a surprise, but the brilliant surface doesn't dazzle us from peering into the tender human depths. -- Edmund White
No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other. -- Wells Tower