My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays

"Steven Moore['s] criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy." — Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker

"Steven Moore attained literary stardom when he helped rescue William Gaddis' The Recognitions from obscurity. His fame was guaranteed in literary heaven when he helped David Foster Wallace edit Infinite Jest. Now, in My Back Pages (Zerogram Press), he has gathered his book reviews and essays that take us from the Beats and the Fifties to practically yesterday or even tomorrow." — Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, 89.9 FM, KCRW

"[Moore] may be our country's best claim to that old-fashioned creature, 'a man of letters,' as it is hard to imagine anyone, certainly not in the academy, who has read more widely or who could speak, if modestly, about fiction with more easy confidence, precision, and wit. . . . My Back Pages makes for joyful reading, . . . With its heft and encyclopedic range, the collection might be imagined on a scholar's shelf, and the essays will certainly be valuable to academics, but the reviews have the pleasure of love notes; they are steady reminders to us all of the necessary joy of good books." — Julian Anderson, Fiction Writers Review

"Zerogram Press deserves plaudits for bringing out a major work of criticism. . . . Steven Moore [has] read more fiction than anyone alive and writes about even the most demanding works with infectious zest." — Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"One of Moore's best qualities as an explicator is in communicating complex or complicated material in the clearest possible terms, and with humour when possible. . . . Steven Moore has been at the vanguard of criticism and publication of outliers and explorers whose artistic visions reinvigorate the capacious form of the novel and the short story, and we are in his debt." — Jeff Bursey, Numéro Cinq