"Phillips's way to perform [his] sleights of compositional magic is via style. It's a Phillips 'trademark'--this ouroboros way of writing . . . [His] aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us."
--Thomas Larson, The Rumpus
"A wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had."
--Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post
"[Phillips] is like a flashlight in that his illuminating beam heightens my awareness of the dark . . . [his] words [are] like a tonic."
--Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine "Phillips has rendered the term 'giving up' spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact . . . Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are . . . The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book."
--Sarah Moorhouse, Los Angeles Review of Books "One of the most arresting things about Adam Phillips's work is how it resists easy summary, dissolving into a trace memory the moment you try to describe it. . . . Phillips doesn't try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that's what we really believe, and how we can be sure."
--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (An Editors' Choice) "Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud--not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud's language . . . The connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants."
--Ron Slate, On the Seawall "If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips' late style, we have a lot to look forward to."
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Booklist "A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation."
--Kirkus Reviews
