Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. For instance, I find it tempting to persuade myself it was a premonition I experienced that afternoon, that the unpleasant image which entered my thoughts that day was something altogether different -- something much more intense and vivid -- than the numerous day-dreams which drift through one's imagination during such long and empty hours.
In all possibility, it was nothing so remarkable. The tragedy of the little girl found hanging from a tree -- much more so than the earlier child murders -- had made a shocked impression on the neighbourhood, and I could not have been alone that summer in being disturbed by such images.
--from A Pale View of Hills
For British screenwriter, novelist, and short-story writer Kazuo Ishiguro, recognition came swiftly. At the age of 25, while he was still a student, Japanese born Ishiguro's first attempts at serious writing were included in a prominent volume devoted to short stories by promising young authors. Since that auspicious beginning 16 years ago, his understated, finely wrought works have continued to be published to unanimous acclaim. Ishiguro has been included in both of Granta's celebrated Best of Young British Novelists anthologies; received the Winifred Holtby Prize for his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills (1982); won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for An Artist of the Floating World (1986); and was presented with Britain's highest literary honor, the Booker Prize, for The Remains of the Day (1989), a "brilliant and quietly devastating novel" (Newsweek).
In 1989, commenting on the restraint shown in his first three successful novels, Ishiguro said, "I'd like to maybe write a messy, jagged, loud kind of book." The result, six years in the making, is The Unconsoled, which has already been compared to Dostoevsky's masterpieces. "It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novels to pose Big Questions...with a delicacy and humor that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath" (Salman Rushdie). Ishiguro's long-awaited visit to Seattle will correspond with the U.S. publication of The Unconsoled.
Richard Ford
Anna Deavere Smith is the ultimate impressionist: she does people's souls.
David Richards,The New York Times
No one writes better (than Tim O'Brien) about the fear and homesickness of a boy adrift amid what he cannot understand, be it combat or love.
Pico Iyer, Time
While most of us find little aesthetic pleasure in ants, whether as scurrying specks underfoot or magnified dragons on the page, Wilson makes real his own mysterious bliss, and expands our understanding of our own heterogeneous species.
John Updike, The New Yorker
John Fowles is a sorcerer. So enchanting are his characters, so exotic his settings and so mysterious the happenings he concocts, we hardly notice how many challenging ideas he has pulled out of his hat until we are caught up in them.
Detroit Free Press
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a good listener . . . . at once intelligent and sympathetic, and yet strong and independent enough to make her story credible
David Halberstam, New York Times Book Review
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