"The life of every individual, sayeth the sage, runs along the line created by the intersection of two planes: personality and social setting. I can’t think of any American novelist who ever drew that line more brilliantly than James T. Farrell in this trilogy. If this be “plodding realism,” let every American novelist start plodding Studs-style, lest the American novel fall down in a heap and die, as it now seems wont to do."

"The only novel really to do anything true with the waves of revolt in Italy in the mid and late 1970s (until I wrote mine, heh). The voice here is transfixing. The end is so incredibly moving. You will need to adapt to Balestrini’s style of forgoing punctuation, but once you do, you’ll be riding a bike with no hands on the bars and you won’t even notice that you, too, are doing something new."

"This has been a cult novel in Sweden ever since it was published in 1980, and has to some degree been discovered in Norway, too. It steals from both the classics and pulp fiction and has this couldn’t-care-less-attitude combined with literary talent that reminds me of Jim Carrol's “Basketball Diaries.” Both have this special sense of time and place that makes you want to move to Stockholm or New York."