http://therumpus.net/2014/10/another-great-day-at-sea-by-geoff-dyer/

"The wunderkind Geoff Dyer occupies a distinct literary niche. Readers are drawn to his high diction and high-school-rebel carelessness. Many swooned over Out of Sheer Rage, a D.H. Lawrence book about not writing a D.H. Lawrence book that was really about Dyer’s mind. Dyer has helped pioneer the “slacker intellectual” writer personae. He is at once a cutting, erudite Gore Vidal, a humanitarian, globe-trotting Peter Matthiessen, and a drug-puffing, electric Lester Bangs—a motley persona epitomized in his opus..."

http://therumpus.net/2015/01/alice-freda-forever-by-alexis-coe/

"This Love-Gone-Wrong story about two lesbians, one whose throat was cut, was so scandalous in the late 19th century that befuddled attorneys and newspapermen invented phrases like “erotomania” to describe the relationship between the teenaged girls, who were set to elope to St. Louis."

http://msupress.org/journals/issue/?id=50-21D-5F4

"This year, three skilled essayists have been looking for ghosts. Phantoms, monsters, creatures sounding from the deep. The writers found shadows with long black tentacles that could slither around you and pull you under. They searched for a self in the throes of disaster and experienced the torture and escape of deafening sound. Two books include monsters that are real, the other signals something more frightening."

http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-dream-great-american-novel-lawrence-buell/

"It’s hard to encapsulate a far-reaching, ambitious doorstop like Lawrence Buell’s Dream of the Great American Novel. But there is something akin to John McPhee completing his twenty-year-plus opus on geology, Annals of the Former World,with fact-numbing and surprisingly page-turning precision. Like McPhee, Buell has shaped an almanac for those who are intrigued by the poetry and sublime nature of cataloguing all that has come before.