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Praise for Paula Fox and her novels:

“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her…Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.”

—Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

“Brilliant…Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.”

—The New Yorker

“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina…Fox’s prose hurts.”

—Walter Kirn, New York

Desperate Characters:

“A towering landmark of postwar realism…a sustained work of prose so lucid and fine that it seems less written than carved.”

—David Foster Wallace

“Absorbing, elegant…What gives this slice of life its timeless urgency is Fox’s spare yet penetrating prose, shifting imperceptibly from present to past, external to internal, revealing the hushed despair, absurdity, and latent violence that lie beneath the most humdrum words and routines.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Among the best things we have in contemporary literature—original, enduring, charged with intelligent, articulate life and with the tension of modern survival: brave, witty, alarming, and quite wonderful.”

—Shirley Hazzard

“A piercing portrait of a modern couple at bay…Relentlessly honest, brilliantly crafted, passionate.”

—John Gabree, New York Newsday

“A reserved and beautifully realized novel.”

—Lionel Trilling

“Desperate Characters takes its place in a major American tradition, the line of the short novel exemplified by Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day…Grueling and brilliant.”

—Irving Howe, The New Republic

“A brilliant performance, quite devastating in its mastery of the brutish New York scene.”

—Alfred Kazin

Poor George:

“The best first novel I’ve read in quite a long time…A merciless uncovering of the exurban wastelands of the spirit.”

—New York Review of Books

“Compared by critics then and now to Chekhov and Melville and Muriel Spark and Nathanael West and Batman and Robin, really, and rightly. She’s good, she’s good, she’s more than good.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“Like a sealed bottle of pure mid Sixties…Poor George feels fresher after a third of a century than do most novels written yesterday.”

—Jonathan Franzen

The Widow’s Children:

“Chekhovian…Every line of Fox’s story, every gesture of her characters, is alive and surprising.”

—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

“Demonstrates once again Fox’s original unsettling talent…Astounding in its portrayal of the textures of emotional life, moment by agonizing moment…Fox releases conflicts and passions of great intensity, and sets them simmering, combining, and exploding like volatile liquid elements.”

—Saturday Review

“Compelling…It has in it, especially apparent in the wit, a worldliness which it could not do without, and which is that of someone who has lived long enough to have learned a great deal…Remarkable.”