Sigrid Nunez

In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time.

[A] wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion — to writing, to other people, and between humans and their pets. Like The Friend, Mitz captures the heartrending downside of love and connection — loss. But it also reminds us, beautifully, of the “great solace and distraction” of literature.

Nunez takes great risks with this novel. . . .  [A]t its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway.

Though it’s factually based on diaries, letters, and memoirs, Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury still offers a slice of pure whimsy.

The contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life form the heart of the novel…Nunez’s prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts—the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence. She addresses important ideas unpretentiously and offers wisdom for any aspiring writer who, as the narrator fears, may never know this dear, intelligent friend—or this world that is dying. But is it dying? Perhaps. But with The Friend, Nunez provides evidence that, for now, it survives.

Charming… the comedy here writes itself… the novel’s tone in general, however, is mournful and resonant… The snap of her sentences sometimes puts me in mind of Rachel Cusk.

In crystalline prose, Nunez creates an impressively controlled portrait of the ‘exhaustion of mourning.’

Everywhere in this novel it is impossible to separate love and companionship from loss…The Friend is one of those rare novels that, in the end, makes your heart beat slower.

A meditation on reading and writing, love and loss, The Friend is a work rich in literary allusions and anecdotes….With The Friend . . . [Nunez’s] found the perfect pitch….Nunez’s prose is illuminated by a wit, warmth and wisdom all of her own. The Friendis a true delight: I genuinely fear I won’t read a better novel this year.

A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today, and various forms of love and friendship… Nunez has a wry, withering wit.

The book is an intimate, beautiful thing, deceptively slight at around 200 pages, but humming with insight… [an] artfully discursive meditation on friendship, love, death, solitude, canine companionship and the life of an aging writer in New York. Far from being heavy going, this novel, written as a letter to the late friend, is peppered with wry observations, particularly those of a writer stuck teaching undergraduates.

In this slim but pitch-perfect novel, a writer loses her best friend and mentor suddenly without explanation…Wry and moving, The Friend is a love story, a mania story, and a recovery story.

A poignant reflection on loss and companionship.

A] sneaky gut punch of a novel…a consummate example of the human-animal tale…The Friend’s tone is dry, clear, direct—which is the surest way to carry off this sort of close-up study of anguish and attachment.

A wry riff on Rilke’s idea of love as two solitudes that ‘protect and border and greet each other.

With enormous heart and eloquence, Nunez explores cerebral responses to loss… The Friend exposes an extraordinary reserve of strength waiting to be found in storytelling and unexpected companionship.

Often as funny as it is thoughtful, The Friend is an elegant meditation on grief, friendship, healing, and the bonds between humans and dogs.

A serious book about a big sloppy dog, Nunez’s seventh novel… displays the intellectual heft of her late friend’s work, but also a distinctive sense of humor and narrative momentum.

Nunez’s writing is gorgeously spare, and she gets the life and the lingo of a teenage boy just right…. [A] gorgeously strange novel.

[A] wise and richly humane coming-of-age novel.

Given the recent H1N1 outbreak and the tragic escalation in the culture wars, Salvation City is not only timely and thought-provoking but also generous in its understanding of human nature. When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my lifeboat.

Atheists, a flu pandemic and a coming-of-age story collide in Nunez’s sixth—and perhaps best—novel.

The Last of Her Kind is full of incident and high drama … it is, above all, about the way women communicate and interpret their experience, bearing down on every nuance, irony, anguished interchange and heartbreaking loss…. [A]n unflinching examination of justice, race and political idealism that brings to mind Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and the tenacious intelligence of Nadine Gordimer.

[A] carefully written and discerning narrative with closely drawn portraits of two prototypical yet unique women trying to construct a friendship across an unbridgeable class divide…. [T]he historical events, both real and invented … give Nunez’s story tragic dimensions…. Nunez’s keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler.

In previous works, Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity. Here her ambitions are grander, and the result is a remarkable and disconcerting vision of a troubled time in American history, and of its repercussions for national and individual identity.

A passionate honesty grips the heart of The Last of Her Kind, [a] subtle and profoundly moving novel about friendship, romantic idealism, and shame.

[R]emarkable … we know immediately we are in the hands of a major talent able to open up a complex history for us…. [Nunez’s] gift is wild and large.

[S]uch questions as what it means to be American, whether hate and rage are useful tools and whether we can correct mistakes of previous generations engage us throughout.

A complex, well-told tale.”

Decades from now historians would do well to consult this book to get a true sense of how the upheavals of the late 1960s reverberated through the lives of young Americans, from one who experienced this social earthquake firsthand.

Nunez does a fine job of characterizing young people, then, now, and probably forever…. Since good fiction, to quote John Updike, furnishes ‘dramatized tensions, not settled conclusions,’ this vivid novel’s quest yields only the impassioned record of two complexly lived lives, which is satisfying enough.

[A]n honors-level survey course in the sexual, political, and cultural movements that shaped the thinking (and rocked the world) of so many boomer women. Nunez’s voice is unflinching and intimate, her novelistic structure as invitingly informal as jottings in a journal…

Nunez is adept at capturing subtle frictions in the interactions between class, race and gender… [She] writes with sophisticated insight.

[A] brilliant, dazzling, daring novel. Nunez has taken the old American Dream and stood it on its head…. This novel will make you rethink “Gatsby” and its reputation as the great masterpiece of American literature—no small feat.

A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent.

A fresh and touching book…[Nunez’s] genuine curiosity about her own experience—her memories of love lost, youth and youth lost—is the quality that gives this book an elegant, almost compulsive readability.

A loving memoir, full of arresting details and an occasionally spirited defense of her mentor…Sontag [once] remarked that all her work says ‘be serious, be passionate, wake up.’ Clearly someone was listening.

Susan Sontag roars to life…As magnetic and complicated as Sontag herself, Nunez’s homage is both critical and compassionate…[an] elegantly crafted chronicle of a young writer’s artistic education.

Nunez, an uncompromising talent in her own right, offers the most vibrant and multifaceted portrait of Sontag to date.

Nunez has constructed a eulogy that mythologizes and humanizes one of the most intimidating figures of contemporary culture.

Sempre Susan doesn’t just evoke Susan Sontag, the person, with hard-won sympathy, insight, and cool; it contains (in a very tiny space) material for an entire novel of idealism and disillusionment….this memoir captures the spirit of her times.

Sontag once wrote about feeling estranged from the ‘Susan Sontag’ who stood on the spine of the books she had written. In Nunez’s Sempre Susan, the gap between the writer and the person who wrote the books is made all the more vividly real—a reminder of the extraordinary transformative work that goes into writing in the first place.

Nunez, now a fine novelist, has written a clear-eyed tribute…With an eye for the telling detail, this intimate and occasionally raw portrait makes it plain that despite all Sontag’s public renown, much of her was entirely mysterious.

Beautifully written … mesmerizing … enthralling.

Those of us who aren’t firemen or nurses or doctors have been feeling a little lost since Sept. 11—what are we meant to do with ourselves? Nunez’s book tells us just what to do.

Nunez fashions the Vietnam novel we didn’t know we were missing.

A stellar addition to—and keen twist on—a genre that up until now has been dominated by men.

[A] terrific novel.

With her well-pitched prose and eye for telling contemporary details, Ms. Nunez transforms Naked Sleeper into a story that abounds in vivid moments and moods.

Fine….Nunez limns Nona’s search for self with some impressively elegant writing, which gives this book its true appeal.

An enlightening literary adventure.