"Yanagihara’s novel breaks with the decorum of much of contemporary American fiction, laying claim instead to the scope and grandeur that often characterize the greatest queer art. This book elicits strong reactions; however you feel about it, it will be a landmark in your reading life."

"My dear friend Joan Juliet Buck has had quite a life — epic adventures in Hollywood, Paris, London, NYC and Ireland! This is her life story about the drive and allure of glamour and appearances, all the way to being the first and only American editor-in-chief of French Vogue, to her complicated relationship with her father (who was producing partners with John Houston and Peter O'Toole)."

"This novel, a linked series of strange and acid and darkly comic vignettes on life in Naples at the end of World War II, gets at the material reality of a liberator (the American military) as occupier and at the contradictory and surreal world of Naples. In sum, no one is innocent, not even Malaparte."

"There’s a whole wave of Latin American fiction that I didn’t encounter until later in life. In high school one reads grand narratives like Don Quixote, and Garcia Marquez was the closest to contemporary we got. This felt like watching the movie Ghost World; there’s something very exciting and fun about the quotidian in it."

"Nonfiction that reads like Jackie Collins, “Air Guitar” is the contemporary classic in cultural criticism, and further to that, more of a celebration than a critique on the cringe-worthy. You might never love being American more than after you read this. The section "Unbreak My Heart, An Overture,” has loosely defined my practice and life."

"I was stunned when I read this book in the 1976, and not just because it was the first book I read by an Asian American woman. Hong Kingston wraps family history around myth and discovers the ghosts of woman who have traveled through time into her own life. I felt those ghosts and went looking for mine."