"This goes up to the Chicago stuff. When all the Mississippi guys made it up to Chicagoland, the Chess Brothers started picking them up and made it possible for them to record some stunning material. “There’s so much good stuff here that I don’t even know where to begin. Louisiana Blues, Rollin’ And Tumblin’, Long Distance Call, I Can’t Be Satisfied – all of these recordings were turning points in that, once electricity entered the picture, bands with three and four people in them could do battle with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and 10-piece horn sections. “Muddy Waters had a very distinctive guitar tone. When he played a Gibson Les Paul goldtop, you could really identify the sound, and you knew who it was. Compared to BB or Freddy or Albert, his playing might not have been so fanciful, but his licks were stinging and ferocious. And he laid down a lot of Delta-based slide guitar, too. Just because he was in Chicago, he didn’t leave his humble beginnings behind."

"The first time I read this book it transported me back to my early Catholic days on the South Side of Chicago, when the nuns put forth a model of Christ as a kind of superhero, whose superpower was love, defined as his ability to look with affection at anyone and everyone, no exceptions. Morrison models that capability here in this great novel, and reminds us that the first move in any assessment of a person or notion should be sympathy, based on the reality of our grand mutual suffering."

"Full disclosure: Samantha Irby is my real life actual friend, but that’s only because I was so rabidly obsessed with her perfect, brilliant, peerlessly funny writing that I flew to Chicago and forced her to love me, so I think that hardly counts as a traditional conflict of interest. I was a fan FIRST. This book doesn’t come out until March, but I was lucky enough to read an early manuscript, and it’s exactly the collection of new Samantha Irby essays you’ve been yearning for, the perfect spring promise to keep you trucking through the winter."