"This collection of poetry and prose is a little like going for a long hike out into the redwoods and coming upon a beautiful library, well lit, and cozy and there’s no one but you and all these amazing books that you are welcome to read as long as you treat everything with the respect it deserves. Wouldn’t that be an amazing experience?"

"Davis is the ultimate prose stylist and this collection of short fiction proved addictive on many a late night. Her narrators are quirky, self-conscious, and sometimes humorously obsessive. Many of the stories are only a page or two long. But within those pages are observations that reveal the precise tics and nuances that make us indelibly who we are."

"As far as the modernists go, this is neck and neck with Beckett for number ten (that’s cheating, I know), but Woolf must win. Like Baldwin, Woolf has made many a top 10 list, but again, there’s a reason: I know of no more gut-wrenching, soaring prose about shared consciousness, mortality and water. Truly a book for the cradle to the grave."

"In the last ten years this magnum opus has eclipsed Ulysses as the most influential novel of the 20th century. Proust is wonderfully companionable, his analyses of passion and snobbism and the corroding effect of time are devastating, but despite his philosophical gloom his rich, intelligent prose is exhilarating. He and George Eliot are the most intelligent of all authors."

"“Grief and Reason” is the book I most often return to. It contemplates death as it has been presented in prose and poetry over the ages. The book continually asks the question of whether loss creates a sense of self or destroys it. It also poses the question of whether loss or mourning can bring forth a new artistic language."