"I can’t forget the well-known facts surrounding Polanski’s flight from the U.S. in 1977, or excuse some of the things he’s said since about women, but somehow this man has made one of my favorite female-driven films. For me, its power lies in the meticulous way it unspools Rosemary’s inevitable undoing. It’s a near-perfect metaphor for the hell that is a woman’s life when she loses her rights over her own body. Rosemary fights as hard as she can to defeat the satanic forces stacked against her, and the tragic futility of that fight reflects a world that is as familiar as it is frightening."

"I don’t hesitate to state that no one becomes a great writer without drinking from the spring of fables. Sometimes their influence shows on the surface and at other times it remains hidden inside the story like bones in a body. In this magnificent collection of dark stories, Vollmann — who many consider having written the Great American Novel more than once — proves himself a master storyteller whose pitcher of that fabled water never runs dry. Drawing on sources from the North, The South, The East and the West he takes us on a journey through many last nights on earth and in the worlds beyond."