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Suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting. Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms.

Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical.

Keene opens up the spaces between words and their objects, to create room where fresh meanings can play.--Ben Ehrenreich

Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges...Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters' persecution and their groping toward freedom.--Sam Sacks

Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of--the very matter of--life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year's very best books.--Brad Johnson

Keene's collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He's a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year's U.S. fiction should start here.--Christian Lorentzen

Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary...An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian.--Max Nelson

We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene's remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas ... Keene is that rarest of things today, a writer whose radicalism connects the politics of history to the politics of fiction.--Kate Webb

Exquisite, and unlike anything I've ever read.--Eula Biss

Genius - brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.--Ishmael Reed