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The
Complexities of Intimacy
Reviews
Syracuse New Times:
“Poignant and lyrical.”
BookForum:
“Disarmingly provocative, and funny as well. . . . Imagine Angela Carter's admixture of plot and theory, David Mamet's barbed dialogue, and Kafka's deadpan elegance, blended into a ringing voice all its own.”
American Book Review:
“A collection of beautiful and disturbing chamber pieces: complex, dazzling, at once dispassionate and feverish.”
Review of Contemporary Fiction:
“Darkly humorous, richly imagined . . . Language in this collection is a wondrous beast, both precise and mutable.”
Kirkus Reviews:
“Sustains [Caponegro's] reputation as a writer with a disturbing, complex vision.”
Bradford Morrow:
“The Complexities of Intimacy richly confirms Mary Caponegro's reputation as one of our most perceptive explorers of the mysterious, often perilous universe of family. With language as intricate as the terrains of love and fear, desire and dread these connected stories evoke, Caponegro continues to reinvent the Gothic as a personal narrative of the fragility of being flesh and blood.”
Gilbert Sorrentino:
“The signs and wonders of muted unhappiness, subtle cruelties, and obscure dementias, not to mention the absolutely fantastic, are herein revealed in a language that is curiously dispassionate and placed. This is an amazing book.”
Praise for Mary Caponegro
Robert Coover:
“Gifted and powerful.”
David Foster Wallace:
“Baroque, eerie, elegant, funny, good, and thoroughly upsetting.”
New York Times Book Review:
“[Caponegro's] little fables have a tone that echoes Italo Calvino.”
George Saunders:
“Mary Caponegro [is] one of our great national literary treasures, a daring writer who reminds us in every line that the true business of fiction is intelligence and presence and compassion.”
Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm:
“A complete original . . . each of [Caponegro's] stories is a triumph against nearly insuperable odds—but what a triumph!”
Washington Post Book World:
“The mastery with which Caponegro imposes one fuguelike meditation atop another is truly impressive.”
BookForum:
“Imagine Angela Carter's admixture of plot and theory, David Mamet's barbed dialogue, and Kafka's deadpan elegance, blended into a ringing voice all its own.”
San Francisco Chronicle:
“Caponegro's authority and range are so impressive that readers will await her next work with anticipation.”
Los Angeles Times:
“As with all of Caponegro's prose, we can never distinguish with absolute certainty between fantasy and reality, or between various versions of reality, but that is the author's intention; Caponegro ventures into a world of secret meaning and resonant metaphor.”
American Book Review:
“Caponegro give[s] us the means of looking at our world in new ways, of reconsidering what we think we know about what fiction can be, and of understanding, in at least a provisional way, what a complicated and difficult thing it is to be human.”
Review of Contemporary Fiction:
“Caponegro's writing is intelligent, exciting, moving, and always surprising; it combines a keen awareness of the postmodern challenges to narrative fiction with a profound sense of art's ability to speak to human conditions.”
Rain Taxi:
“Of the handful of writers currently producing great nonrealist stories, none has mapped worlds so consistently disturbing or funny as Mary Caponegro.”
Publishers Weekly:
“A gifted writer.”
Kirkus Reviews:
“A contemporary fabulist of wide range whose haunting voices often unsettle and amaze.”
William Gass:
“The music of Mary Caponegro's stories is to the mouth what wine is. Readers will find themselves lost among answers, intoxicated, knowing only that these are stories unlike any others before or since, which is, for this reader at least, a relief, a challenge, and a godsend.”
John Hawkes:
“Mary Caponegro's short fiction is lyrical, comic, above all, erotic.”
Robert Kelly:
“Mary Caponegro explores with compelling worldly alertness the mysterious gaps in the dense texture of our matter (language, society, relationships). . . . she is an utterly original artist.”
Rikki Ducornet:
“If she were a metal, she would be quicksilver.
Her constellation: Berenice's Hair.
Were she a flower, she would be lethal;
A scholar? Cryptographer. And creature?
The serpent of the gardens of Hesperides.
And if Mary Caponegro were a practice,
That practice would be alchemy.”
Also Available by this Author:
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